This is a Call (11 page)

‘Led Zeppelin, and John Bonham’s drumming especially, opened up my ears,’ he told
MOJO
magazine in 2005. ‘I was into hardcore punk rock; reckless, powerful drumming, a beat that sounded like a shotgun firing in a cement cellar.
Houses of the Holy
changed everything.

‘As a 17-year-old kid raised playing punk-rock drums, I just fell in love with John Bonham’s playing – his recklessness, his precision. There were times when he sounded to me like a punk-rock drummer. [Led Zeppelin] were so out of control. They were more out of control than a Dead Kennedys record.

‘Bonham played directly from the heart. His drumming was by no means perfect, but when he hit a groove it was so deep it was like a heartbeat. He had this manic sense of cacophony, but he also had the ultimate feel. He could swing, he could get on top, or he could pull back … I learned to play by ear. I wasn’t trained and I can’t read music. What I play comes straight from the soul – and that’s what I hear in John Bonham’s drumming.’

Given his new-found obsession with Zeppelin, it was natural that Jimmy Page’s band would provide a foundation for Grohl’s next musical project. Former Minor Threat man Brian Baker had offered Grohl the chance to play with his new band Dag Nasty, but the drummer was now looking to play something more challenging than four-to-the-floor punk rock: (‘He turned me down,’ recalls Baker, ‘but you have to remember that we were children then, so it wasn’t like he turned me down flat, it was more like, “Oh, that sounds like fun, but I have to practise with these guys and … oh, hold on, Mom, I’m coming …”’) He also wanted to continue playing with bassist Dave Smith, with whom he had developed an almost telepathic understanding. The biggest problem for the pair initially was finding a guitarist who operated on the same wavelength, and could boast the musicianship to match. Both Larry Hinkle and Sohrab Habibion jammed with the pair – by now known to friends by the nicknames Grave (Grohl) and Smave (Smith) – but both guitarists readily concede now that their chops weren’t up to scratch at the time. It was Dave Smith who suggested that the duo might try hooking up with his friend Reuben Radding, as Age of Consent had just recently broken up.

The Georgetown-born son of two classical musicians – his father was a violinist in the National Symphony Orchestra, his mother an opera singer – at 18 Radding had already been a touring musician for three years. Now a well-respected jazz musician based in Brooklyn, New York, Radding – like Grohl – was a childhood Beatles fan and originally a guitarist but had switched to bass when an opportunity arose to join the Gang of Four/PiL/The Jam-influenced Age of Consent. On a personal level, Radding didn’t know Grohl particularly well – ‘To me he was this very goofy but charismatic guy who was at once both shy and extroverted,’ he recalls – but he was well aware of the teenager’s prowess as a drummer.

‘Dave’s reputation as a drummer began spreading from the first time he got behind the drums at a Mission Impossible rehearsal, well before any live gigs,’ he recalls. ‘Dave Smith had been one of my best friends for years, he lived with his parents right up the hill from me on the same tree-lined street, and one day I got a phone call, saying, “Dude, you have got to come up here and check out Dave Grohl playing drums. You won’t believe it. He’s better than Jeff Nelson!” Jeff Nelson was pretty much considered by everybody to be the best hardcore drummer around, so if Dave said that Grohl was better it was something I had to check out … it had to at least be worth a walk up the hill.

‘What I saw was exactly what had been described, and more. Grohl was flat out ridiculous. It was like watching a young Keith Moon, but he was sort of simultaneously being it and being outside it with a surprised look on his face, almost like he was watching it too and didn’t know what was making his hands and feet do these energetic and musical things. He was fun to watch right from the start. Whatever he lacked in metronomic solidity he made up for in raw excitement.

‘Mission Impossible and my band were scene friends. We loved supporting them and they were frequent followers of our shows and tapes. Stylistically we were worlds apart – I loved hardcore but I looked like a flower child or New Waver, more likely to wear paisley shirts and hand-painted sneakers than torn T-shirts and Doc Martens or Vans – but good musicians are into good music, and we shared that nonconformist, open-minded mindset of early punk rock.

‘When Mission Impossible dissolved I didn’t think that Dave and Dave’s next move would possibly involve me,’ Radding admits. ‘Even more than my lack of hardcore cred, I’d become a bass player and whatever reputation I had – not much beyond our Arlington circle, believe me – was as a bass player, an innovative one: switching back to guitar was not something I foresaw myself doing. I still owned one, though, and when Dave Smith asked if I would come do a jam session on guitar I jumped at the chance, not because I thought it was going to be a band, but because those guys were so great I wanted to experience playing with them. I dusted off my long-ignored electric guitar and got in Smave’s van for the ride down to Springfield.’

When I spoke to Radding in 2010, his memories of his first jam session with Grohl some 25 years previously were still remarkably vivid.

‘The Grohl residence was small,’ he recalled. ‘I remember Dave setting the drums up in the living room, and with Smave and I and our amps in front of them the front door to the house was only a couple feet away from my ass. They showed me the first of their “songs” – it was just a riff, really, a little guitar figure, and then the drums and bass came in in a call-and-response pattern: I don’t think I’ll ever forget what it felt like. It was not like playing music with anyone else. Listening to Dave Grohl play the drums had always been a gas, but playing with him was instantly addictive and a total rush. It was like having your ass lifted in the air as if by magic.’

Grohl’s own memories of the session were rather more prosaic: ‘We smoked a whole bunch of pot,’ he recalled, ‘wrote four songs and Dain Bramage was born.’

Led Zeppelin may have provided the common link in Radding, Smith and Grohl’s musical tastes, but their new band incorporated myriad diverse influences: Hüsker Dü, Moving Targets, Television, Mission of Burma, Black Sabbath, Neil Young and Metallica were just a handful of the bands who shaped the Dain Bramage sound. In Foo Fighters’ first press biography, released to the world’s media in 1995, Dave Grohl remembered Dain Bramage as being ‘extremely experimental, usually experimenting with classic rock clichés in a noisy, punk kind of way’. When I interviewed him for a career retrospective cover story for UK music magazine
MOJO
in 2009, he summed up his experiences in the band in just one sentence, stating, ‘Nobody fucking liked us, because we sounded like Foo Fighters.’

Here Grohl was being somewhat disingenuous. Ian MacKaye remembers Dain Bramage being ‘a little less euphoric than Mission Impossible, and not quite so out of control, but cool’, while some of Grohl’s closest friends, Larry Hinkle and Jimmy Swanson among them, actually rated the three piece as superior to his previous band. The band’s biggest problem was simply that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time: Dain Bramage’s Led Zeppelin-referencing, hard rock-meets-art punk sound would have made perfect sense in Washington
state
circa 1985 or 1986, but in the capitol of punk, the group stood out like a drum solo at a Ramones concert. Which, to a large extent, was exactly what Radding, Smith and Grohl had intended.

‘We felt like there wasn’t really a model for what we were doing,’ says Radding, ‘and it was both frustrating and a source of pride. I mean, for us it was the fulfilment of a dream to be able to present something we felt was truly our own but it could be pretty lonely at times.’

Mindful of the distance they had placed between their new band and Mission Impossible’s propulsive posi-punk, the trio approached their début gig at the Lake Braddock Community Center on 20 December 1985 with some trepidation.

‘I remember feeling really excited to share what we were working on and I knew our group was special and something different for the hardcore scene,’ says Radding, ‘but I was worried about being accepted since I’d never really been part of that scene. Everyone else seemed to know who everyone was and I had kids coming up to me asking, “Who are you?” I had long hair and was wearing a sweater over a button-down shirt and in that environment I was somewhat of an enigma.’

Dain Bramage opened up their début gig with a song called ‘In the Dark’, a reflective, mid-tempo minor key number. As he sang into a battered SM-58 mic just inches from a sea of curious faces, Radding was convinced that Burke’s young punks hated his band, but as the final notes rang out the assembled crowd broke into cheers and loud applause: ‘I was never so happy or relieved to hear a reaction like that in my life,’ he laughs.

Twenty-five years on, Radding has one other indelible memory of that first Dain Bramage performance.

‘It was the first time as a front man that I ever experienced seeing an entire audience looking over my left shoulder through the whole gig,’ he laughs. ‘I had to get used to that pretty quickly, playing with Dave. I could play all the good guitar I wanted, and sing like a motherfucker, but all eyes were gonna be on Dave all the time. At first I resented it. Then I embraced it. We should have set up like a jazz band with him on the side facing in, then at least I could have watched too. Dave’s charisma was ever-present, both in performance and off stage.

‘He was always kind of hyperactive and he bears the distinction of being the only guy I ever knew who would smoke pot and become
more
hyper,’ he continues. ‘When he would get stoned he would act truly deranged and go into these episodes of extroverted performance, doing skits and voices, hilarious stuff. I can still remember us laughing till we were in serious pain at some of the stuff he would do when he got stoned. It was kind of like watching Robin Williams at his best – that energy and creative spontaneity – but better than a performance because it was real.

‘At one point he earned a new nickname from Dave Smith. We were at some house partying and Grave had been totally going off. Next thing you know he’s passed out under a pile of clothes in the corner and someone said something like, “Well, he’s finally had it.” And Smave just shook his head. “No,” he cautioned, “he’s just
energizing.
” Sure enough, Dave was back up at full energy in about twenty minutes and just totally going nuts. So for a little while Dave was known as The Energizer.’

Shortly after their baptism of fire at Lake Braddock, Dain Bramage cut two demos with Barrett Jones. The first featured five tracks – ‘In the Dark’, ‘Cheyenne’, ‘Watching It Bake’, ‘Space Car’ and ‘Bend’ – while the second included a cover of Grand Funk Railroad’s 1973
Billboard
chart-topping blue-collar anthem ‘We’re an American Band’, alongside originals such as ‘Home Sweet Nowhere’ and ‘Flannery’. Given Mission Impossible’s previous connection with Dischord it might have made sense for Grohl to approach Ian MacKaye about putting out a record, but the trio were (understandably) concerned that their artful post-hardcore might sound out of step with much of the didactic, righteous rage showcased on the nation’s premier punk rock imprint.

‘Looking back, we had a bunch of incorrect ideas in our heads by that time,’ Radding admits. ‘We were in a period of being down on Ian back then. We made fun of him behind his back. It’s one of the bigger sources of guilt in my recollections of that time, because the main reason we were snotty about him was just that so many people admired him so we felt like we had to tear him down. How fucking childish. I have the utmost respect for Ian and Dischord even though I like relatively little of their music. What he has built over the years is nothing short of extraordinary, and if we’d been a little less young and stupid we might have done more to join forces with Dischord or somebody else who would have carried more weight. What were we thinking?’

Unusually for a DC area band, Dain Bramage ended up signing with a Californian record label, the inelegantly named Fartblossom Records, a new venture for punk rock promoter Bob Durkee (later ‘immortalised’ in scathing, scabrous verse in the song ‘Bob Turkee’ on NOFX’s 1986 EP
So What If We’re on Mystic!
). Asked what Fartblossom offered that other labels could not, Radding is disarmingly honest: ‘Frankly the appeal was that he asked us,’ he concedes.

In June 1986 the band booked a four-day recording session at RK-1 Recording Studios in Crofton, Maryland with engineers E.L. Copeland and Dan Kozak (formerly the guitarist in Radding’s band Age of Consent) to record their début album. The trio had suffered a falling out with Barrett Jones – ‘They were rehearsing in our house using my PA, and there was some tension about them taking over the house and my equipment without ever really asking,’ Jones recalls – and Radding convinced his bandmates that they needed to use a ‘real’ studio in order to get a bigger and better sound for their début album. Visiting RK-1 for a reconnaissance mission, Radding was somewhat alarmed to discover that this ‘real’ studio was little more than a soundproofed suburban garage, but he swallowed his instincts and said nothing. It was a decision he would come to regret.