The two legendary bands Dave Grohl would never want to be like: “I’d go insane”
Whatever you think of arena fillers Foo Fighters, they’re undeniably one of rock’s most impressive success stories. Formed in the ashes of Nirvana, drummer Dave Grohl rejected offers by Danzig and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers to join their bands, opting instead to head to Seattle’s Robert Lang studio for six days to cut 1994’s Foo Fighters and, save The Afghan Wings’ Greg Dulli’s guitar part on ‘X-Static’, wrote, produced, and played every instrument on the debut album, with little concern for any future legs for his new project.
Grohl had been writing songs before Nirvana’s demise following frontman Kurt Cobain’s death. On the cusp of Nevermind‘s surprise global conquer in ’91, Grohl recorded four tracks for the Pocketwatch cassette album under the Late! pseudonym at WGNS Studios, tacking on prior recordings from Upland Studios and dropping the first tease of Grohl’s songwriting chops. Notably, ‘Color Pictures of a Marigold’ would be re-worked during the In Utero sessions, appearing as the B-side to ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ and holding the distinction of being the only song in both Nirvana and Foo Fighters’ recording history due to its later feature on the Skin and Bones live album.
While Foo Fighters’ early run of albums yielded some infectiously hooky chart-pleasers such as ‘Breakout’ and ‘Learn to Fly’, Grohl and co are not known for adventurous deviations from their stadium rock formula, with the odd acoustic number for a little spice. Allegedly, band management insists on pushing the ‘punk rock’ label for marketing, but they’re not kidding anybody. Classic rock has been embraced even if no one at Foo Fighters HQ openly admits it, the band that counts former Scream drummer as a frontman and Germs guitarist Pat Smear crowned ‘band of the year’ at the Classic Rock awards in 2008.
The albums start to blur with little discernable difference around the time of ’05’s In Your Honor. Having scored a Billboard winner with One by One, Grohl felt the need to stake some new artistic territory and release a double album with one half featuring rock and the other softer, acoustic numbers. One listen to In Your Honor reveals the plagued sameness that mushes their output to this day, just that one’s loud and the other’s not, both sides outstaying their welcome with little change of pace.
It was exciting times at camp Foo Fighters though, Grohl and drummer Taylor Hawkins dropping into BBC Radio 1’s Colin and Edith show that year to highlight their supposedly restless creative energy: “You just get to the point where you can only do the same thing for so long. I mean, God bless AC/DC and the Ramones and bands like that, but I could never do that. I’d go insane.”
While eyebrows may be raised at Grohl’s assured sense of his intrepid artistic explorations, there’s truth to his two examples of creatively staying put. AC/DC had one mode: cloddish hard rock stomp with a smattering of cartoon machismo and stoneage sexual politics, and they did it well, even as late as 1990, scoring one of their biggest hits with The Razors Edge‘s ‘Thunderstruck’. No one would seriously argue, however, that the Aussie proto-metallers knew how to craft any other type of song, and their fans didn’t care anyway.
Ramones’ creative detours are unfairly glossed over. Following their archetypal short blasts of New York punk with sharp hooks as burned on ’76’s self-titled debut, Joey Ramone’s love for ’60s pop drew the band to the services of Wall of Sound architect Phil Spector, cutting ’80’s End of the Century and releasing a straight cover of The Ronettes’ ‘Baby, I Love You’, much loathed by the punks but nowhere near as bad as the critical maligning it received.
Throughout Ramones’ 14 studio albums are jumps into metal, lighter pop-friendly garage, and the additions of Richie and CJ Ramone’s songwriting effort offering fresh ideas toward their latter output. It takes a committed trawl through their work, but flashes of eclectism do appear with greater clarity than any of Foo Fighters’ last twenty years of “punk”.
