The one drummer Dave Grohl said was out of his league: “I’m not capable”
There aren’t many facets of rock and roll that Dave Grohl hasn’t at least tried once or twice.
The fact that he could manage to become one of the biggest frontmen in the world out of the ashes of Nirvana and yet somehow still find the time to make everything from acoustic rock to working with Queens of the Stone Age to putting out an EP entirely of dance-themed Bee Gees covers makes you think that he could somehow make an accordion record and have it sound absolutely great. But before we get to hear what the Dave Grohl Polka Extravaganza would sound like, he would always gravitate towards the drums first.
Given how talkative he is during every single interview, it’s strange to think of Grohl as the quiet member of Nirvana, but you wouldn’t mistake him for anyone else when he got behind the kit. He was willing to do anything to make the drums sound massive, and even if the songs didn’t always have the hardest sections, Grohl was going to play as if his life depended on it every single time.
He had grown up listening to people like John Bonham, and he wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life trying to play subtly. Everything that he played needed to hit you like a smack in the face, but there are certain areas that he couldn’t actually get into whenever he started working with Foo Fighters.
He already had the distinction of working with the former members of Led Zeppelin live, but he wasn’t exactly the stripe to make a Van Halen song or anything. There were always going to be limits on where he could go as a guitarist, but when you start listening to him behind the kit, it wouldn’t have been out of the question to hear him performing with Rush once Neil Peart passed away.
Grohl loved the Canadian icons since he first heard 2112, and by the time that he had inducted them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he was honoured to think of Peart as a peer. He was already blessed with the greatest energy that a drummer could possibly have, but when Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson started to get convinced that they should start performing together again, Grohl was the first person to take his name out of the equation.
He was overjoyed to see them back together, but he was never going to bother trying to be the next version of a drumming god, saying, “I would say, ‘I’m not physically or musically capable, but thanks for the offer.’ Neil Peart, that’s a whole other animal, another species of drummer. I know the arrangements, but I’m like Meg White to Neil Peart. And she’s one of my favourite drummers!”
And a lot of that comes from the sense of feel that Grohl puts into every single song that he plays. He always wanted to have the kind of songs that everyone could lay down a steady pulse, but when anyone is trying to learn a Rush song, they have to seriously do their homework, especially with Peart’s parts, which sound somewhere between Bonzo’s power and the absolute perfection of Buddy Rich.
Everything that he ever played needed to be thought about before it was ready for primetime, and while Grohl could certainly appreciate Peart from afar, that’s not how his brain worked. He needed something that had a bit less complications to it, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t still respect the band as one of the greatest prog rock outfits that had ever been.
