The one song Dave Grohl never wanted to talk about: “Hell no”
There’s no rule that says Dave Grohl needed to talk about Nirvana when he formed Foo Fighters.
He never set out to have a solo career in the first place when he made that first record, and even if he became one of the biggest frontmen that the world had ever seen, he was far more comfortable making the kind of records that could make people want to jump up and down in a stadium than getting more introspective all the time. But after a few years of being one of the biggest rising stars in rock, there came a point where he needed to tone things down a little bit.
Because when you look at the journey the Foos had been on, it wasn’t the easiest of rides for everyone in the band. Getting a band together after the record blew up was already a strange way to kick off a career, but when members started quitting left and right after The Colour and the Shape, they were barely holding things together by the time they started working on There Is Nothing Left to Lose.
But with Chris Shiflett in the band, everyone should have been on track, right? Wrong. The band were about to undergo one of the biggest shakeups of their career during the making of One By One, but for all of the fighting that went on between Grohl and Taylor Hawkins at the helm, everything came to a halt when he found out that his bandmate had overdosed halfway through one of their tours.
Hawkins had been struggling with how to be a rock and roll star from the moment that he began working with Alanis Morissette, but seeing one of your best friends hooked up to machines was bound to be a reality check for Grohl. He had already lost one of his best friends when Nirvana ended, and even though things looked grim for the longest time, Grohl wasn’t going to leave Hawkins’s side until he woke up.
Any songwriter would have seen that kind of situation as prime fodder for a song, but Grohl was never going to stoop that low. His music was all about making people feel like they could take on the world, and hearing a tune about Hawkins going through recovery would have been much too close to the bone at that point. When it came time to make an acoustic record, though, Grohl dusted off the song ‘On the Mend’ to talk about his issues watching his musical brother slowly coming back to life.
It was better for him to find an outlet for that kind of pain, but Grohl said the last thing that he wanted to do was talk to Hawkins about the song, saying, “I never told him that it’s about him. Hell no. It’s my love song to a dying best friend and I put it on the record thinking ‘he probably thinks this is about him.’ But we have never ever ever gotten close to even having that conversation. I don’t want to talk to him about that. I want to talk with him about other shit.”
But the most beautiful part of the song has almost nothing to do with any of Grohl’s lyrics. All of the imagery that he paints is beautiful for what it is, but those harmonised guitars at the end of the song tells you everything you need to know. He doesn’t have to say what the song’s about, but hearing those guitars weave around each other is like listening to two musical souls trying to communicate with each other again the same way that he and his favourite drummer were.
This may have been a song about recovery, but there’s probably a good reason why the song didn’t end up getting played at the Concert for Taylor after Hawkins’s tragic passing. All those wounds had been opened up all over again, but the band will always have this song to come back as a reminder of what made Hawkins so important to them when they were all still playing together.
