This is a Call (43 page)

In
Back and Forth
Dave Grohl is asked to re-examine his treatment of William Goldsmith in the weeks which saw
The Colour and the Shape
put to bed. It’s an awkward moment for the Foo’s frontman, who visibly squirms as he searches for the right words. ‘It was a really weird time and I was young … What the fuck …’ he finally mumbles, then his voice tails off, his head droops and his eyes lower to the floor. James Moll’s camera remains trained on him for a few seconds longer, but Grohl has nothing more to say.

While the original Foo Fighters line-up was slowly disintegrating behind closed doors in Hollywood, two new albums bearing Dave Grohl’s name emerged with little fanfare.

Released on Barrett Jones’s own Laundry Room Records imprint,
Harlingtox Angel Divine
is the sole fruit of a one-off 1990 studio project involving Grohl, Jones, Scream’s Dutch booking agent Tos Nieuwenhuizen (also the guitarist/vocalist in heavyweight Dutch punk/ metal trio God) and Bruce Merkle, frontman of Washington DC’s wired post-punk troupe 9353.

‘How did this occur?’ read the liner notes to the album. ‘The Harlingtox story was hatched in Washington, DC in the spring and summer of 1990. It’s very 1990-like. It reeks of Bush/Quayle annoyances and growing pains in general. Harlingtox was never a band, there has never been a Harlingtox show. It was musically arranged by Dave and Tos, probably first conceptualised in Europe during a Scream/God tour the previous year.’

Existing midway between the unhinged death rattle of Unsane, the thudding claustrophobia of Barkmarket and the low-slung, stream-of-consciousness psychosis of early Clutch,
Harlingtox Angel Divine
is splendidly queasy listening, but not for the faint-hearted. With Merkle gabbling and babbling in tongues, adopting a variety of deranged voices from ‘oleaginous game show host’ to ‘faeces-caked serial killer choking upon wok-fried human entrails’, the quartet lurch and lunge around the fringes of punk, metal and industrial noise, offering a nightmarish vision of a society teetering on the brink of collapse. Opening with the unnerving ‘Treason Daddy Brother in Crime Real Patriots Type Stuff ’, a two-minute public service announcement from the messed-up and marginalised (‘
We’re all gonna score. Fuck your drug war!
’), the five-track album never deviates from the wrong side of the tracks, slamming through bleak art-metal (‘Orbiting Prisons in Space’), creepy, churning sludge-rock (‘Recycled Children Never to Be Grown’) and stuttering post-hardcore (‘Obtaining a Bachelors Degree’, wherein Merkle gleefully drools ‘
I have always been a stupid fucker.
’) before concluding in the marginally more accessible, though still relentlessly unpleasant, ‘Open Straightedge Arms’. For the sake of the sanity of all involved, it is perhaps best that
Harlingtox Angel Divine
was strictly a one-shot deal.

By comparison, Grohl’s original soundtrack for
Touch
– a quirky, pitch-black comedy/thriller starring Christopher Walken, Skeet Ulrich and Bridget Fonda and adapted by Paul Schrader (
Taxi Driver / American Gigolo
) from an Elmore Leonard novel – is a likeable, laid-back and rather charming affair. Recorded at Robert Lang Studios in the summer of 1996, just days after Foo Fighters closed out their inaugural world tour at the Phoenix Festival in the picturesque English village of Stratford-upon-Avon, the thirteen-track collection afforded Grohl the opportunity to stretch and experiment. Only one song, the fizzing, perky ‘How Do You Do’, resembles Foo Fighters; elsewhere Grohl marries Californian surf music with DC hardcore dynamics (on the staccato Dick Dale-meets-Fugazi instrumental ‘Bill Hill Theme’) indulges in lazy back-porch country blues (‘Making Popcorn’, ‘Remission My Ass’) and throws down some slinky, white-boy funk on the
noir
grooves of ‘Outrage’. John Doe, the frontman of seminal LA punks X, provides vocals on the down-home country ’n’ western shimmer of ‘This Loving Thing (Lynn’s Song)’, but his guest spot is rather eclipsed by Veruca Salt vocalist Louise Post’s sensuous, smoky turn on the gorgeous, drifting ‘Saints in Love’ and the dreamy duet ‘Touch’, a sweet, mesmerising ballad given an extra frisson by rumours that Grohl and Post were conducting an illicit affair at the time. Asked about his reported relationship with Post in the summer of 1997, Grohl simply said, ‘That’s a big no-no. Next question’: that September, during Veruca Salt’s first Australian tour, Post announced from the stage of St Kilda’s Prince of Wales hotel that Grohl had just broken up with her and had started dating actress Winona Ryder.

Kerrang!
was one of the very few magazines to review
Music from the Motion Picture Touch
. Writer James Sherry noted, ‘Not only is
Touch
a great album, it’s also a major personal achievement for Dave Grohl and a valuable insight into what he may turn his musical hand to once he’s tired of touring in a rock ’n’ roll band. The future should be interesting.’

Grohl’s own assessment of his first foray into the soundtrack world was typically modest: ‘I had no idea what I was doing and I faked it and it worked,’ he said. ‘It’s important to break out from behind the dunce throne they call the drum set and do things that are challenging.’

With William Goldsmith’s exit from Foo Fighters, Grohl now faced the task of finding someone to occupy the ‘dunce throne’ in his own band. Enter Taylor Hawkins.

An engaging mix of Californian pothead and lithesome all-American surfer dude, Oliver Taylor Hawkins was born in Fort Worth, Texas on 17 February 1972. Growing up in Laguna Beach, California, Hawkins was given his early musical education by his older brother Jason, who introduced him to FM radio staples such as Boston, The Eagles and Aerosmith, but it was two idiosyncratic English bands, Queen and The Police, who first truly captured his imagination. Like Dave Grohl, Hawkins started out playing guitar, but inspired by the flailing energy of Queen’s drummer Roger Taylor and The Police’s Stewart Copeland, soon enough he switched his affections to drums. At the age of 10, in his next-door neighbour Kent Kleater’s Laguna Beach garage, Hawkins sat behind a drum kit for the first time; within weeks he was able to play along to Queen’s
News of the World
album. ‘And then,’ he admitted in 2005, ‘my life became drums, drums, drums.’

Hawkins’s first ‘serious’ band was Sylvia, an experimental, psychedelic rock group featuring vocalist/guitarist Riz Story, guitarist Sean Murphy and bassist Jauno. The drummer later remembered the band as ‘awful’; Story and Murphy would go on to enjoy moderate success in the rock band Anyone. In the summer of 1994 Hawkins turned to session work, landing a gig with the British-born, Montreal-raised singer Sass Jordan; the following year he jumped ship to another Canadian singer/songwriter, 21-year-old Alanis Morissette, who had just released her third studio album
Jagged Little Pill
. By October 1995 Hawkins’s new boss was the world’s most talked-about new artist, with a
Billboard
Number 1 album:
Jagged Little Pill
would go on to sell a staggering 33 million copies worldwide.

Grohl and Hawkins met for the first time on 17 December 1995 at a KROQ Almost Acoustic show at Los Angeles’ Universal Amphitheater, where Foo Fighters shared a billing with Morissette, Sonic Youth, Radiohead and Butch Vig’s Garbage. A fan of both Nirvana and Foo Fighters, Hawkins relished the opportunity to bro down with Grohl, a drummer whose style, power and touch he greatly admired. For Grohl, meeting the easy-going, live-wire Hawkins for the first time was like staring into a mirror. ‘We got along like brothers from the second we met,’ he recalls. ‘We were best friends from that instant.’

‘I was just this little dork playing in Alanis’s back-up band and the first thing that struck me was that Dave was really nice, and really fun to hang out with,’ Hawkins told me in 2009. ‘I’d met some other people from big bands, musicians that I’d looked up to, and when I met them the vibe was, “Oh, you’re not important,” but I walked away from Dave thinking he was a cool guy. I had so much respect for him mainly because of that first record, which I really loved and still do. And it was just an instant rapport, like, “Oh my God, you’re so much like me!”’

In summer 1996 Foo Fighters and Alanis Morissette had occasion to play several European festivals together, giving Grohl and Hawkins the opportunity to bond further over hard liquor and hard rock. In spring 1997, when Grohl phoned to ask if Hawkins knew of any good drummers looking for a new gig, Hawkins’s response was immediate.

‘He said, “Fuck yeah! I’ll do it,”’ Grohl recalls. ‘I reminded him that we weren’t selling out stadiums like Alanis and he said, “I don’t care, man, I just want to be in a fucking rock band.”’

Hawkins made his début with Foo Fighters on 19 April 1997 at a secret club gig at the Alligator Lounge in Santa Monica, California. The show passed smoothly enough, but the preceding week had not been without its stresses: on the first day Hawkins showed up to rehearsals, guitarist Pat Smear announced his intention to quit the band.

‘We had a European tour booked,’ recalls Grohl, ‘and on the first day of rehearsals Pat said, “Hey guys, can I talk to you?” And he very calmly and politely says, “You know what? I’m gonna leave the band.You guys should be a three piece.” And we were like, “Pat! What the fuck, dude? We leave in ten days! What do you mean?” and he said, “I’m sick of touring. I don’t want to go on tour any more.”’

‘I just remember I was just sick of it,’ Smear told me. ‘From the minute we started it was just non-stop and I think I’m just lazier than the rest of them! It was crazy the amount of things we did in a year. I just got burnt: we came on so strong for so long and I just wanted it to stop.’

‘The most touring Pat had ever done before Nirvana was I think maybe … none,’ says Grohl. ‘So that first record really freaked him out a lot. And then there were some … personal things. But honestly I was on my knees fucking crying, begging him to stay, I really was. But he just said, “No, I don’t want to, I don’t want to.”

‘Everyone was kinda mixed up and crazy at the time. I was sleeping in Pete Stahl’s back room and because my life was fucking going down the toilet I would sit at night in my sleeping bag in the back room of Pete’s house and I had a journal for when I was writing lyrics and just keeping a journal, and I would list out all of my problems, like – “1. Homeless. 2. Divorced. 3. No access to a bank account. 4. I’m sleeping in a sleeping bag! 5. Pat quit the band. 6. William quit the band …” Because if I thought of all those things at once I surely would have had a complete nervous breakdown. So I would list them and think, “Okay, well, let me try to figure out each one of these things by going down the list.” Like, “Homeless … I really need to find somewhere,” you know what I mean. It was not a good time. My ex-wife was mixed up in it and she was not being cool at all. I was just trying to stay the fuck out of everybody’s way, just to finish what I’d started.’

The stresses involved in the breakdown of Grohl’s marriage led the singer to see a therapist for the second time in his life. Unlike the sessions he had endured as a wayward teenager, as an adult Grohl found the experience positive and rewarding: ‘Everyone could do with a little therapy now and again,’ he later told me.

‘The best thing about therapy is reassurance,’ he said, ‘having someone talk back and give you a response that makes you feel like you’re not alone, and that what you’re going through is understandable. Therapists may have a better understanding of human nature than your best friend who deals pot and works in a gas station.

‘But I had a bad experience with a therapist once where he basically told me that because I tour and live in hotel rooms and don’t have a “normal” job my life is just not reality. And I thought it was time to get the fuck off the couch, because this
is
my reality.

‘I’m not opposed to having therapy again,’ Grohl added at the time (indeed he would later revisit therapy on several occasions when life seemed ‘overwhelming’), ‘but that time it was like, “If you don’t understand my world that’s fine, but don’t tell me it doesn’t exist.”’