“I pulled a muscle”: The song Dave Grohl thought was too hard to play
Most rock and roll songs aren’t that hard for Dave Grohl to get under his fingers. Throughout his career, Grohl has never been a musical snob about what he likes, and it’s not that uncommon to see him shouting the praises of everyone from Slayer to The Beatles to Nine Inch Nails within the span of a single sitting. There are a few songs that managed to defeat him, though, but Grohl was shocked that a pop song that seemed this simple took him down the first time he tried to play it live.
Then again, Grohl was never up there with the most dynamic lead guitar players or anything. Throughout his time in Foo Fighters, he has always been the one playing the rhythm straight up the middle while Chris Shiflett and Pat Smear do a lot of the heavy lifting, so it’s not like he’s being forced to play Eddie Van Halen-style leads or anything.
When listening to Grohl’s favourite musicians, though, they all offered a little bit of a challenge to the musicians in their audiences. He knew that he had a benchmark once he started listening to Neil Peart of Rush, and even if it took him years to master the fills of John Bonham, Grohl practised day and night until he found the right groove that worked for him in Nirvana.
In a group like The Police, though, they could go through many different grooves within the span of a single song. Even though Sting was responsible for writing the brilliant pop melodies that they became known for, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers brought a level of taste to everything, whether that was using strange jazz chords in the mix or turning the beat around so that it sounded like a completely different song.
Compared to everything else, though, ‘Message in a Bottle’ feels like a walk in the park. The whole tune relies on that relentless energy that came from punk rock, but when Grohl expected the same power chords he expected out of other new wave acts, he knew that he had his work cut out for him when trying to figure out what the hell Andy Summers was playing on the verses.
When discussing covering other people’s material, Grohl remembered completely butchering the iconic guitar line when he started incorporating it into the band’s live set, saying, “I remember once trying to play ‘Message in a Bottle’ and I pulled a muscle in my hand. I’m like, ‘How do the Police do this without hurting themselves?’ You get to learn the person better with instruments because everyone does it differently.”
And for any budding guitar player, it’s best to take time with that kind of riff. There are still places that are a bit easier in the tune, but anyone with smaller fingers is going to have to bend over backwards trying to figure out how to play the tune, which involves the kind of insane stretches you’d find in some bonkers jazz exercise.
But that’s the key to why The Police’s music worked so well. It might have been nothing but mindless pop to many people, but the minute that you dig underneath the surface, the more you start to pick up on the stuff that your brain latches onto before you do.
