“They’re amazing”: The one band Dave Grohl said outdid Sex Pistols
If the punk genre hadn’t changed the world overnight, we would have had a slightly different Dave Grohl.
There’s a good chance that he would have still been in love with music, but the idea of a bunch of kids putting together a few songs in their garage and doing whatever felt right for one of their songs is the reason why he got inspired to make music when he was still in Virginia. But way before the age of Scream, Grohl was still a sucker for a good melody, and that could last far longer than any punk rock slamfest ever could when he picked up the right record from his friends.
But when you look at Grohl’s upbringing, it practically feels like a laundry list of some of the greatest songwriters of all time. He wasn’t going to match Neil Peart right out of the gate, trying to play his fills on his pillows, but he could at least hash out the chords to any Beatles song he could think of and try his best to listen to how the harmonies worked. It was a bit too pretty for the hardcore scene, but that didn’t really matter to him as long as he could find something catchy in it.
When punk officially broke on the other side of the pond, the genre was about much more than a style of music. It was an aesthetic and a lifestyle whenever kids got together to perform, and while the Ramones technically got things started in the US, there isn’t a single person who encapsulated the genre more perfectly than the Sex Pistols. John Lydon was the epitome of a punk transplant, but there was a lot heavier stuff going on everywhere else in the world.
Punk had all the attitude that anyone needed, but Grohl had grown up with a much heavier musical diet. The biggest names in his record collection were Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith, and there was no reason to think that Steve Jones was going to displace Jimmy Page on his musical Mount Rushmore. But given that his cousin showed him the great strains of punk coming out of Chicago, there was also a firm love of Cheap Trick instilled in him well before punk came around.
The power-pop masters are still ground zero for anyone trying to write a catchy hard rock song, and while they aren’t exactly heavy on everything they make, they could hang with the best of them when they wanted to throw down. You have to go through a song like ‘Hot Love’ to appreciate ‘I Want You to Want Me’, and hearing ‘Stiff Competition’ changed something in Grohl’s brain chemistry when he heard it for the first time.
The biggest stars in his world may have been punk bands, but he felt that Robin Zander and the gang could smoke Lydon’s crew with this song alone, saying, “People know a lot of the hits. And a lot of people think of Cheap Trick as this really sort of anthemic, melodic rock and roll band. ‘Stiff Competition’ is the best song that The Sex Pistols never wrote. And I love it. They’re amazing.”
And for all of the screaming that Zander does up and down the track, it’s really the backing track that’s doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Rick Nielsen is forever going to be in hard rock heaven for the riffs he played on this song, and Tom Petersson’s bass track is still one of the most metallic performances from a band that actually could have managed to be on the charts every now and again.
So despite Cheap Trick getting the rap as a power-pop outfit, that first word should really be in all caps whenever they’re described as such. They were out there to blow out everyone’s eardrums, and even if they have that same garage band mentality, there’s no one on this Earth who could possibly manage to hold a candle next to them.
