This is a Call (40 page)

The following month, Sunny Day Real Estate themselves gave up the ghost. At the end of a month-long tour with Dischord prog-punks Shudder to Think and New Yorkers Soul Coughing, the quartet bowed out with a show at the Black Cat in Washington DC on 16 December 1994. At the climax of the band’s set, Enigk turned his back on the audience and, to his bandmates’ visible disgust, started quietly praying.

‘This was exactly the big, huge rift that made everybody feel so uncomfortable,’ Soul Coughing frontman Michael Doughty later told
Magnet
magazine. ‘Nate just threw his hands up, put his bass down and left the stage. Dan [Hoerner, SDRE guitarist] just started drowning everything in feedback. The club got so hot they’d opened a door behind the stage, and Willie, who had worked so hard during the show – as the cold air poured in, steam is pouring off his body. He was so pissed off, just venting this incredible rage, staring at Jeremy, the steam exploding off him.’

As chance would have it, Dave Grohl had caught the quartet’s final hometown show just weeks previously. It was then that he realised that he might not need to cast too far from his own home for a rhythm section for his new band.

‘Around that time my friend Tracey said, “Have you heard of Sunny Day Real Estate?”’ Grohl told me. ‘And I’d heard of them but not
heard
them yet. When I mentioned them to Barrett he said, “Yeah, they sound like they’re from DC.” So then Tracey said, “They’re playing their last show tomorrow night,” so I went down to see them. And I watched Will and thought, “Shit, if that guy’s not gonna be in a band tomorrow, he’s gonna be in
my
band tomorrow.”’

On 16 December, Grohl left a message for Goldsmith at the Black Cat, a club he actually co-owned, asking the drummer to call him.

‘I called him back,’ Goldsmith remembered four years later, ‘and he said, “So your band’s in the shitter, huh?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Well, do you and Nate want to do a band with me and Pat [Smear]?” And I said, “Sure, I guess.”’

Since Kurt Cobain’s death, Pat Smear had been living the life of a virtual recluse, sitting at home in Los Angeles smoking cigarettes and channel surfing through whatever television programmes happened to be airing that day. ‘After you’ve been in the coolest band ever, what do you do?’ he later pondered, not unreasonably. While in Los Angeles on posthumous Nirvana business, Grohl dropped his demo tape off at Smear’s house, hoping that the guitarist would like it. As it turned out, Smear’s enthusiasm for what he heard stretched further than mere approval.

‘I listened to the tape while he was gone and I was just blown away,’ Smear told me in 2009. ‘I thought, “Oh shit, this is so great, I want to do this.” And so about an hour after listening to the tape I walked down to the club where Dave was hanging out and said, “I love it, I wanna be in your band.”’

‘I knew that the band would need two guitars, but didn’t think that Pat would want to commit to anything,’ Grohl admitted in 1995. ‘To my surprise, not only did he like the tape, he expressed interest in joining up.’

Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters were now officially a band.

From the moment that Eddie Vedder premiered Foo Fighters on ‘Self Pollution Radio’, major label A&R men began calling Grohl at home. Grohl had dealt with the corporate record industry before with Nirvana, of course, but now he was no longer ‘just the drummer’, happy to sit on the sidelines while deals were struck: with Foo Fighters, even after the recruitment of Smear, Mendel and Goldsmith, he was effectively ‘The Band’. Two years previously, in a brilliant, if typically controversial, essay titled ‘The Problem with Music’, Steve Albini had laid bare the machinations of the major label world, exposing the myriad ways in which seemingly lucrative record contracts could come back to haunt artists; his article calmly concluded, ‘Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.’ It was an essay that resonated throughout the underground rock community, and one Grohl could not have failed to notice. Somewhat spooked by the deluge of messages cluttering up his answering machine, in the opening days of 1995 Grohl turned to John Silva for advice. The wily music business veteran suggested that the drummer speak with his lawyer Jill Berliner before contacting anyone else. And Berliner gave Grohl the same advice that Phil Spector had passed on to Andrew Loog Oldham when the Londoner was shopping around Rolling Stones demos to major record labels in 1963.

‘I got on the phone with Jill Berliner, who’s a fucking amazing woman,’ Grohl told me, ‘and she said, “Here’s what you do: you start your own record company – you own the record, you put it out and you just distribute it through a record company.”’

Before one could say ‘Fuck the Man!’, and before the advent of his 26th birthday, the young musician who created Foo Fighters had also formed his own record company on which to release his music. The company was named Roswell Records, after the secret location in New Mexico that housed the supposed wreckage of alien spacecraft discovered by the United States government. And in true independent, even socialistic, style, with one fell swoop, and for the first time in his professional life, Dave Grohl claimed ownership of the means of production, and became master of his own destiny.

‘Every single thing that Foo Fighters have ever done, I own – the entire catalogue,’ he said, explaining the mechanics of the situation to me in 2009. ‘I license it to the record company and say, “You can have it for six years; after six years you have to give it back. And if you want to keep it some more, then you have to fucking pay.” So ultimately, every two years, another one of the albums is up for renegotiation; so the idea is to have your catalogue behind you every two years. I only sign for one- or two-album deals – I’m not locked into ten-album deals – so every time it’s time to sign a new deal …

‘The best part is that no one ever tells us what to do,’ he said with a smile. ‘No one has ever told us who to record with, where to record, how to make a video, what video to do, when to go on tour. Because I am the President of Roswell Records, at the end of the day I’m in charge.’

Grohl was now starting a whole new game, and at square one. Soon enough it was time to unveil his new band. Foo Fighters’ first live appearance was at a Seattle keg party: ‘It wasn’t too bad. But it kind of was,’ Grohl later recalled. The band’s first show in a regular club – at the Jambalaya Club in Arcata, California, on 23 February 1995 – came as a support act for the Unseen, a group of sharp-dressed and musically astute teenagers. Prior to this show Grohl bought second-hand T-shirts from a local thrift store and, with the aid of a homemade stencil, spray-painted onto them the name of his band, a move which turned out to be almost as big a hit with the audience as the set itself. The following month Foo Fighters graduated to the status of headliners, with an appearance at the Satyricon Club in Portland, Oregon, the first major city one reaches when travelling south from Seattle. In the audience on the evening of 3 March was one Jerry A, the frontman with celebrated local hardcore punks Poison Idea. Writing of what he witnessed in the pages of
Kerrang!
, Jerry said that Grohl possessed ‘a well-developed singing voice which he put to good use with pleasant, heart-felt harmonies in a similar style to his former band, minus the hard edges’.

‘But compared to Kurt,’ he wrote, ‘Grohl has neither the charisma nor the entertaining stage presence.’

The following day Foo Fighters headed north to Seattle to make their first headline appearance in their hometown. Appearing at the Velvet Elvis club, the group performed a nine-song set to an audience containing rather too many familiar faces, ensuring that the blue touchpaper remained unlit. Still, their display was convincing enough to draw a positive review from
Kerrang!
journalist Kevan Roberts. ‘It turns out that Dave Grohl’s been the best-kept secret in rock,’ he wrote.

Really, though, this brief spate of appearances was merely the exhibition game that prepared the ground for the regular season to come. Following the release of
Ball-Hog or Tugboat?
, in the spring of 1995 Mike Watt was to embark on a solo tour of the United States. His original idea for his solo tour was to invite along Dave Grohl and Eddie Vedder to be a part of his group – a proposal to which the pair gave their consent so long as each man could also perform in a supporting capacity prior to Watt’s own headline turn. Eddie Vedder would appear as a member of Hovercraft, the art-rock project he founded with his wife, Beth, while Grohl would take his Foo Fighters out on their first national excursion. And so it was that the most intriguing alternative tour of the year came to fruition.

‘I was shitting a pecan log about that tour, man,’ Mike Watt later told me. ‘With the Minutemen, D Boon [the group’s singer, now deceased] was like Kurt in that he pushed up the other two guys, so I was never really a background guy, but I was never the front guy either. So that was really scary for me. And I could see how it might be scary for Dave too. But it was cool. It was a tour like the old days. And I don’t think the guys wanted the hype, but it kinda got strange because with the hype there was so much attention on them.’

Foo Fighters embarked on the tour in a manner in which the headliner would surely approve. They travelled not in a tour bus, but in a van; Nate Mendel read the American political journal
Harpers
while the band listened to Queen and the soundtrack album to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
Jesus Christ Superstar
. From time to time William Goldsmith would employ his frontman’s camera in order to take pictures of his own genitalia. These were happy, uncomplicated times.

‘Dave had an amazing amount of enthusiasm, and a great attitude about what this band could be,’ said Mendel. ‘We approached everything with the idea that we’d make every show and everything we do an exciting adventure. And that’s what we concentrated on. There was no sitting down and making a ten-year plan. I wasn’t surprised that there was attention from the start. But the main challenge for us was to establish our own identity and not use Dave’s past as a crutch.’

From the start the tour was a success, playing to packed rooms of between 400 and 800 people each night. Onstage each evening Dave Grohl looked out from his new vantage point at the front of the stage and saw before him an assortment of Nirvana shirts, a sight about which he was philosophical and even sanguine: by definition those gathered were familiar with the traditions of underground music the tour was seeking to uphold, and were both curious about and supportive of Dave Grohl’s latest venture. And while the frontman himself may have downplayed and in some cases even dismissed his abilities as a performer able to command attention from the centre of the stage, footage from this period shows a man the world viewed as being a drummer to be possessed of enough charm and charisma to project himself and his music to the back of the small rooms in which he found himself.

‘When I first started singing for Foo Fighters, never in my life had I ever considered becoming the front man of a band,’ Grohl would tell me some fifteen years later. ‘I was perfectly comfortable being the drummer and I didn’t ever aspire to being the person out front in the spotlight. But when Foo Fighters started I realised I’d been thrown into that position and it was incredibly uncomfortable for me: I might be something of a jackass in real life, and love to be the life of the party, but the responsibility of being someone larger than life seemed too much for me.

‘To me what makes a good front man is that the person I’m watching perform is entirely themselves, and not a character, not an act. I’ve always gravitated towards music and musicians that are real: I can appreciate a Bowie and a Marilyn Manson or a Gene Simmons or an Alice Cooper but there’s something about a Neil Young or a Paul McCartney or an Ian MacKaye that I relate to the most. I like the guys that become the show and become the entertainer and ringleader without having to put on a costume. That, to me, is pretty bad-ass. That’s like John Wayne shit right there.’

Every journey begins with one step, and Foo Fighters’ tour with Mike Watt represented their own faltering baby steps on a journey that would eventually deliver them to the arenas of their home country and the stadia of England. But at some point at the end of each evening from 12 April to 20 May Grohl was able to return to his more familiar position behind the drumkit, keeping the beat for the tour’s headliner. He did so with his customary flair – Watt himself told me, ‘Dave was something else to play with. His sense of timing, his musicality was amazing’ – secure each night in the knowledge that his own band was gelling better than he could ever have hoped, and playing better than he could ever have dreamed.

‘All four of us in the band came from bands that had stopped prematurely so that first tour and everything that came along with it was almost like comfort food in a way for us,’ he told me fifteen years on. ‘We got a van and built a platform in the van and we went on tour with bands we liked and it wasn’t like a contrived grab at bringing back the good old days, it was just where we felt most comfortable. And it was nice that way, because we functioned like a band and we played like a band, and it was fucking great. But I didn’t do it to forget about everything that had happened before: I did it because I wasn’t finished. There was more to do.’