The genre Dave Grohl called “a drummer’s sport”
When Dave Grohl first started his musical career, it was about trying to play a million notes per second every single time you went onstage.
The whole point behind Nirvana was to get away from the long sweeping solos that every other hair metal guitarist was playing, and when you listen to Nevermind, it wasn’t like Grohl was trying to play anything too flashy. He had learned to serve the song a long time ago, but no one gets called one of the greatest drummers of their generation strictly by keeping time, either.
Grohl was already one of the best musicians in his hometown before he had even heard of Kurt Cobain, and his taste was a lot more eclectic than everyone else’s in the band when he moved up to Seattle. Cobain was the one who had the sweet tooth for tunes like ‘Seasons in the Sun’, but no one would have ever guessed that Grohl lifted a song like ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ from the Gap Band or Cameo when he first started playing.
Then again, a lot of those Nirvana records were inherently groovy. Grohl had said numerous times that it was almost like writing drum parts for children’s songs every time they cut one of their records, but it’s not like he wanted to play that kind of music forever. And when he got his feet off the ground with Foo Fighters, you could tell that he had a lot more room to flex his drumming muscles.
He was still serving the song at every opportunity, but ‘Everlong’ is the kind of song that demands the strength of John Bonham to be pulled off correctly. William Goldsmith might not have been up to Grohl’s standards when they started working on The Colour and the Shape, but when the idea for the song in your head requires someone with Neil Peart’s energy, it was always going to be difficult for anyone to match up to it.
That’s how Grohl learned his trade, but the energy came from being steeped in hardcore punk. The glory days of punk may have had drummers who could play a mile a minute, but when Grohl started to learn Bad Brains and Minor Threat songs, he was practically a rhythmic tornado every single time that he got behind the kit.
And even years after forming Foo Fighters, Grohl still felt that hardcore punk is the perfect place for any drummer to truly show their stuff, saying, “I learned from listening to my favorite albums. I would put on Rush’s 2112 and try to play with Neil Peart. But then, as I listened to hardcore and metal, I realized it was a drummer’s sport. I was really into Earl Hudson [Bad Brains], John Wright [No Means No], Jeff Nelson [Minor Threat], and Dave Lombardo [Slayer]. I would learn all of their licks verbatim. And I didn’t even have a drumset!”
But Grohl figured that he chose his battles every single time he made heavier tunes with Foo Fighters. ‘Wattershed’ from the first record was a good proof of concept, and tunes like ‘Stacked Actors’ or even ‘White Limo’ from Wasting Light were musical firecrackers as well, but it was always better to leave some of the truly heavy drumming for when he was working in other outfits like his Probot project.
It was never going to be easy to get the same crowd that loved ‘Learn to Fly’ into tunes like ‘Stacked Actors’, but Grohl wasn’t going to hide that side of himself from the world for the rest of his life. Because when you have that much musical energy in your hand, you have to be able to let it out at some point.
