Dave Grohl on his time with Them Crooked Vultures: “The most musical band I’ve ever been in”
There aren’t too many pieces of rock history that Dave Grohl hasn’t checked off his bucket list.
He has already been in two of the greatest bands of the modern age, tried his hand at making some of the greatest side projects anyone has ever undertaken, and even managed to score a hit with Paul McCartney right by his side when working with the remaining members of Nirvana for ‘Cut Me Some Slack’. Anyone else would have been able to die happy knowing that they’ve made that many classics, but Grohl felt that the greatest band that he ever joined had a bit more edge to it.
Then again, you’d have to narrow down which era of Grohl’s career that he was talking about whenever he talked about his favourite bands. Chances are, he would have been in Nirvana until the end of time had Kurt Cobain not taken his own life, and even if he did have songs that he was working on, he would have probably ended up putting out Foo Fighters material as a bit of a fun Easter Egg while Cobain was writing all of the great songs in front of him.
After all, the age-old joke is a drummer suggesting a song is usually the last thing that he says before he’s fired, but what Grohl did with the drums was songwriting on its own. None of those Nirvana hits would have had nearly the same impact without Grohl pummelling away, and whether he was delivering the greatest drum fill in rock on ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ or the dry thud of ‘Heart Shaped Box’, his drumming usually informed what the song would end up sounding like.
He was practically the John Bonham of the 1990s, but even after becoming one of the biggest frontmen of the time, he had more than enough time to add his magic to Queens of the Stone Age as well. The fact that he left the band behind during the recording of Songs for the Deaf may not have sat well with his bandmates, but you can tell that he’s having the first of his life playing on tunes like ‘No One Knows’ and ‘The Sky is Fallin’.
So when he finally was in a better place with his old band, the idea of him getting back together with Josh Homme was a no-brainer. They were musical brothers in their own strange way, but if Homme was already the one writing all the lyrics and the riffs, the idea of getting an album together with John Paul Jones on bass felt a little too good to be true. And yet when Them Crooked Vultures came out, it felt like the band had been playing together for years.
They were all seasoned veterans of rock and roll at this point, but Grohl felt that his time with the Vultures was among the greatest musical experiences of his life, saying, “[It’s] the most musical band I’ve ever been in. It’s a good example of all the lessons I’ve learned. I know what it’s like to be a drummer and what it’s like to be a lead singer, what it is to sit down and shut up and what it is to make 80,000 people stand up and sing.” But Grohl wasn’t going to stand in the back and lay down a groove every time he played.
If you’re playing with the same bassist who had been used to Bonzo, you’re going to need to bring the thunder a little bit, and on songs like ‘Scumbag Blues’ and especially ‘Gunman’, Grohl was proving to everyone the kind of monster that he had kept under wraps for so many years while Taylor Hawkins was playing the drums. The album didn’t exactly sound current, but it did feel like a great rock and roll band that time forgot when it first came out.
While the door is always open for The Vultures to make new music, Grohl doesn’t really need to stand next to Jonesy to show his chops all that often. All that he needs is the right time for him to let loose behind the kit, and for everyone that knows him as the greatest frontman of the past 30 years, getting together with his buddies is always his excuse to show everyone the monster that he has inside of him.
