The one singer Dave Grohl said deserved everything they got
There was never any hierarchy in rock and roll as far as Dave Grohl was concerned.
Plenty of artists have cut their teeth in the industry trying to be the biggest and the best compared to every other rock and roll star, but Grohl seemed to be just as happy performing with anyone and everyone once he hit the big time. The whole goal was about spreading the love of music at the end of the day, but there are a few artists that deserved to be up there in the musical heavens a bit more than others.
Then again, there’s no need to go over some of the heavy hitters in Grohl’s record collections. For all of the great music they have made over the years, bands like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin have been overexplained to a certain degree. Most people could tell you at least one anecdote about those iconic bands and how they affected their lives in high school, but some of Grohl’s all-time favourite acts are the ones that slipped through the cracks of rock and roll history.
After all, he was a punk at heart, and the biggest names in his world were people like Ian McKaye and JR from Bad Brains. They weren’t going to get showered with praise at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that the true icons of the corporate world were, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t some overlap between the punks and those that were willing to cheat the system when they eventually got signed.
Nirvana were already leaving a wave of destruction in their wake whenever they performed, and when listening to the greatest rock artists of all time, it was about them playing by their own rules. Zeppelin never had the best relationship with the press during their prime, but even compared to the true originators like Little Richard and Chuck Berry, Tina Turner wasn’t going to take shit from anybody once she struck out on her own.
Sure, she had the status of being one of the greatest rock and roll singers that ever lived even back when singing ‘River Deep Mountain High’, but when she made her comeback in the 1980s, it was like she was reborn to a certain degree. She had no one holding her back anymore, and when she stormed back out there with ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’, she stuck it to all of her naysayers with the same kind of confidence that the best punk bands had in the glory days of CBGBS.
And while it took Turner a while to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist, Grohl felt that her accomplishments meant a whole lot more than one simple trophy, saying, “The list of artists inducted this year is very important, and encouraging. Tina Turner, obviously, deserves everything that she’s been awarded with. To see so many women inducted this year is impressive and encouraging.”
Foo Fighters might have earned their place as performers when they were inducted the same year Turner did, but they may have been glad that she wasn’t actually performing anymore. Because if you look at what she could do on any stage, there’s no other performer who could ever hope to touch what she could do, especially when she started working on her high-energy numbers like ‘Proud Mary’ or the later classics like ‘Steel Claw’.
So the fact that Grohl knew what he was getting himself into being inducted with Turner should really tell you the kind of rock and roll fan that he was always meant to be. He could make any stadium feel like a sweaty club, but there were bound to be limits to how far he was able to go when he had a living legend standing next to him.
