The one tragedy that made Dave Grohl want to quit music: “I didn’t want to do it”
Dave Grohl wasn’t one to question his music for a second.
He knew that playing with his friends was one of the greatest gifts on Earth, and he wasn’t going to waste any time whenever it came to performing with some of his best friends or rubbing elbows with a few legends along the way. But even after reaching the greatest heights that anyone has ever reached in the music industry, there are always those few setbacks that would make anyone question why they even decided to pursue a career in music.
And it’s not like Grohl was safe from any of the turmoil that came with being in a rock and roll band. Anyone would have thought that being in Nirvana would have been enough for anyone to be set for life, but after Kurt Cobain passed away, you wouldn’t have blamed Grohl if he got physically nauseous at the sight of a drum set. Any music that he ever made would have felt too soon, but Foo Fighters was his cathartic way of working through his grief.
He didn’t have to talk about Cobain in every single song or anything, but you could feel that he genuinely wanted to find a way forward through music. All he needed was a band behind him, but if Nirvana was combustible from one gig to the next, Foo Fighters seemed to be finalising their lineup in real time whenever they made their new records. The Colour and the Shape did result in a great album, but considering that they lost two band members in the process, it’s not like the band was ready for primetime yet.
But even when they were reduced to a trio on There is Nothing Left to Lose, Grohl knew Taylor Hawkins and Nate Mandel were always going to be his foundation. Mendel has been with the band the longest at this point and knows his job inside and out, but Hawkins was like a brother to Grohl every single time he played. So when he ended up overdosing in the early 2000s, Grohl started to seriously wonder if there was a curse on the band.
Here was one of his new best friends that he made after Nirvana, and the thought of him being hooked up to machines made Grohl feel totally helpless, saying, “It was the first time in my life that I ever considered quitting music, because I was wondering if music just equalled death. Because I didn’t want to do it if everyone is just gonna die all the time.”
Adding, “I would walk from that hospital back to my hotel every night and talk to God, out loud, as I was walking. I’m not a religious person, but I was out of my mind, I was so frightened, and heart-broken and confused. And I said to everyone, I don’t even wanna hear the word ‘Foo Fighters’ until I’m ready to say it again.”
While Hawkins did survive that trauma, the band weren’t out of the woods yet. The making of One by One was one of the hardest jobs that they ever had to face, and since they came dangerously close to breaking up during the project, Grohl had to do some soul-searching to make sure that he was ready to carry on or if he wanted to call it a day and move on to different things.
Hawkins’s ordeal may have helped put things in perspective for Grohl, but when he did see his musical brother pass away, he wasn’t going to spend his time moping for the rest of his life… He knew that music could help him through the worst of times, and But Here We Are is the kind of massive tribute that Hawkins deserved after being the heartbeat of the band for decades on end.
It would have been easy for Grohl to hang everything up and become a session musician or play with Queens of the Stone Age, but there was never any point in him trying to abandon what he loved because of tragedy – he may have thought that death was following him around in those days, but that only reaffirmed that he needed to play as much as he could while he still had time left with his friends.
