“I love you as a person”: the song that cemented Dave Grohl’s bond with Taylor Hawkins
Being in a band like Foo Fighters isn’t necessarily fair to every musician not named Dave Grohl.
As much as Grohl is happy to be playing music with his friends every single time he performs, there are more than a few times when he can be a dictator of sorts, to the point where the band is basically a solo project that he made with all of his friends playing behind him. But even if he was very particular about what he wanted whenever he made a record, no one was going to feel more pressure than the drummer.
Because, really, Grohl had every single drum part worked out in his head well before anyone actually played on it. He knew the drums were supposed to sound a certain way before he even presented his songs to the other members, but that was never exactly fair when someone like William Goldsmith was trying to leave his stamp on the record. He wanted to express himself, too, but Grohl wasn’t about to let an amateur wreck some of his songs when working on The Colour and the Shape.
This was bound to be their breakthrough record, but it’s not like Grohl’s drum parts made it easy for Goldsmith to match. ‘My Hero’ had a decent enough start when they began working on it, but telling someone that they need to play ‘Everlong’ that fast just isn’t fair. This was the equivalent of a disco drum part if the drummer had drunk eight cups of coffee before going to the studio, and Goldsmith wasn’t going to stand by and watch as Grohl overdubbed himself over all of his drum parts.
That kind of backstabbing was bound to hurt, but Grohl felt that he had the perfect replacement in Taylor Hawkins. Compared to Hawkins’s gig playing with Alanis Morissette, Grohl felt that he was an alternative rock god masquerading as a pop drummer half the time, and despite him playing massive festivals around the world, Grohl felt that there was a good chance that Hawkins would click with the band if he managed to jam with them a few times.
After all, they had the same influences from Rush to Queen to Jane’s Addiction, but it was all going to depend on how he worked with the rest of the band. But as soon as Hawkins worked on the drum part to ‘Monkey Wrench’, Grohl knew that he had found his musical soulmate when he came in with the chiming guitar lick.
A song like that needs a lot of muscle behind it to work just right, and Hawkins seemed to nail it from the moment that he came in on the first verse, with Grohl recalling, “I sent Taylor a tape of one of the new songs. I think it was ‘Monkey Wrench.’ I went over to his little house in Topanga Canyon, he sat down and played for three seconds, and the first time he hit a snare drum, I knew it. I swear to God. I was like, ‘That’s all I need to *** hear. I love you as a person. You’ve just given me hearing damage for the rest of my life in three seconds. You have to be in the band.’”
Which is probably why Grohl had such a hard time finding a replacement for Hawkins once he passed away. He was practically his musical brother in a lot of ways, and even if they didn’t see eye-to-eye on everything, having someone that was that musically connected whenever they performed with him had to be as painful as losing Kurt Cobain in 1994. But Grohl wasn’t about to move on and leave Hawkins in the past.
Every single time Foo Fighters take the stage to this day, it always feels like they are paying tribute to the person that brought that little bit of insanity to every one of their songs. No one else could have filled that role any more perfectly, and while Josh Freese and Ilan Rubin have done a great job at serving those songs, Grohl understood that there was always going to be something missing whenever he looked to the back of the stage.
