This is a Call (50 page)

Too often, though, the work contained on
One by One
is anonymous and unengaging, not least because its creators seemed themselves to be unengaged with the music. It may be that the tales of struggle that surrounded the Foo Fighters’ camp in 2001 and 2002 have bestowed upon this album a sense that the music itself is mired in difficulties, but either way much of the album is informed by a sense of joylessness and frustration; ironically a leaked clip of a much more energised early version of the listless ‘Lonely As You’ suggested that perhaps the original ‘Million Dollar Demos’ may not have been quite the disaster Grohl believed it to be in spring 2002. Whatever, at a time when the group as a unit lacked cohesion, it seems unsurprising that the album to which they put their name would be similarly lacking in direction.

But if
One by One
carried with it an air of compromise, and the sense that, at least in part, these were songs fashioned for a job of work rather than a labour of love, elsewhere Dave Grohl was able to stretch his limbs in the pursuit of making music purely for the joy of doing so. As well as recording the bold and brilliant
Songs for the Deaf
with Queens of the Stone Age, 2002 also saw Grohl play guitar on the David Bowie song ‘I’ve Been Waiting for You’, from the Thin White Duke’s
Heathen
set. The following year he provided backing vocals for The Bangles’ comeback album
Doll Revolution
, played drums on the Garbage track ‘Bad Boyfriend’ from their album
Bleed Like Me
(produced by Butch Vig, also Garbage’s drummer) and, perhaps most memorably, fulfilled drum duties on Killing Joke’s largely terrifying twelfth album, which, like that band’s fabulously toxic 1980 début, was a self-titled set.

‘I’m biased,’ said Grohl, ‘but I think it’s one of the best Killing Joke records they’ve ever made. I listen to those songs and think, “Wow, you know, I bet you that someone who likes [nu-metal superstars] Linkin Park would like this record.” After a minute I thought, Oh my God, if every kid who likes Linkin Park bought a Killing Joke record the world would be a fucking scary place.’

In February of that year Foo Fighters frontman joined Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello and Steven Van Zandt onstage at the Grammys at Madison Square Garden for a breathless run through The Clash’s ‘London Calling’, a tribute to the late, great Joe Strummer who had died two months earlier. But if his night out at the music industry’s foremost awards ceremony primarily concerned itself with eulogising a punk rock hero – and there was also the small matter of picking up another Grammy, for Best Hard Rock Performance for ‘All My Life’, quite possibly the only song with a chorus about eating ‘pussy’ ever to receive a golden gramophone trophy – the greater part of Dave Grohl’s 2003 was devoted to the pursuit of another love: that of heavy metal.

The gestation period of the project that would eventually become the
Probot
album was even longer than that for
One by One
. Back at 606 in Alexandria, in 2000 Dave Grohl had placed a call to Adam Kasper with an idea for a project: he would write and record a number of instrumental pieces that would be sent out to various vocalists from the world of underground metal, and these men would unleash Hell atop the backing tracks. The idea was not dissimilar to Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi’s 2000 solo album,
Iommi
, which featured contributions from artists including Ozzy Osbourne, Smashing Pumpkins’ mainman Billy Corgan, System of a Down’s Serj Tankian, Mr Brian May and Dave Grohl himself. But Grohl’s vision for
Probot
would feature the presence not of metal’s most famous voices, but its unsung heroes, men who had inspired Dave Grohl prior to his arrival in the mainstream with Nirvana. Work began on the album in the most relaxed of surroundings, with Grohl simply writing and playing riffs through a Peavey practice amp while elsewhere in the room the television relayed its images to no one in particular.

The first decade of the twenty-first century was notable for the manner in which modern metal manoeuvred its way into the mainstream of popular culture. Dave Grohl himself played a vital role in this transition, both with Nirvana opening doors for ‘heavy’ bands to seep onto radio playlists, and also in his willingness to associate himself with acts who a generation earlier had belonged in a ghetto that was derided and even despised by most other musical subgenres. Foo Fighters frontman may have headlined festivals in the ‘noughties’ dressed in a Venom T-shirt, or spoken of the carnage that he witnessed at Slayer’s 4 December 1986 show at Washington’s ornate Warner Theatre on that band’s Reign in Pain tour (where the group’s fans gleefully destroyed the venue’s beautiful velvet-cushioned seats), but with few exceptions – the critical acclaim afforded to Metallica being the most notable – the 1980s were a period when the world of metal did not share house room with any other type of music. Instead, it lived in the doghouse. Even as a teenager Grohl instinctively understood that the music made by Voivod had much in common with that produced by Bad Brains – indeed, he would later speak of going to see both of these bands on consecutive weekends in the DC area – but for the public at large those that populated the community of underground and thrash metal lived in a neighbourhood that existed on the wrong, for which read ‘stupid’, side of the tracks. What’s more, in hitting the jackpot with Nirvana Dave Grohl was seen, by magazines with an anti-metal agenda of their own to push, as being a member of a group that not only had nothing in common with metal, but actually provided an antidote to this barely housetrained school of music. Speaking to
Kerrang!
magazine in 2003, Grohl gave such a notion the short shrift he felt it deserved, noting, ‘Nirvana were not just a punk band in the same way that Motörhead were not just a metal band.’

But if metal itself in the 1980s was separated from the rest of the musical universe, there were also divisions in its own ranks, between those who simply wished to play as fast and as loudly as they possibly could, seemingly with no eye for commercial gain, and those who longed to exploit metal’s broad fanbase with what amounted to little more than bubblegum pop songs with manicured distortion. The damage Nirvana inflicted on metal and hard rock’s terrain occurred in the latter camp rather than the former.

‘Those bands were something neither me nor my friends had anything to do with,’ Grohl explained to
Kerrang!
in 2003. ‘For one thing they weren’t any good. I never listened to the radio when I was young because I never liked the music that was played on it, even rock radio – especially rock radio. And I’d never watch MTV because you never saw anything on there that was any good. It was Metallica that opened doors for me, to bands like Possessed and Exodus. And it was a very grassroots thing, it was tape trading and digging and searching around for music in the underground. It was about community, about not having it handed to you on a plate. I didn’t want it and I didn’t want it comfortable. I didn’t see the point in liking music you were supposed to like and that it was safe to like.

‘In Nirvana we never made it our mission to be the poster boys of the alternative revolution or to make it our priority to destroy heavy metal. That was never something we were really concerned with. And I think the music that died when Nirvana became popular did prove itself to be unimportant, whereas bands like Slayer and Voivod continued to exist, because they came from a scene not unlike the underground punk scene, which is why it survived, just as the punk scene survived. It was built from something that mattered. But when you’re talking about bands like Winger and Warrant, well, that just wasn’t part of our world. It was too ridiculous to consider a reality, which is why it died. And I’m glad that it died. It stopped meaning something to people. But I think that’s why people looked to Nirvana, because they thought we were human beings, that we were real people. And it was time for that.’

In this spirit,
Probot
was an album that was teeming with contributions from ‘real people’. Following the tour in support of Foo Fighters’
One by One
album, Dave Grohl found the time to properly record the tracks he planned to send out to various leading lights from the metal underground of the 1980s. With the help of Zwan guitarist Matt Sweeney, a man who was able to act as the bridge between
Probot
’s creator and the artists he wished to enlist to provide vocals for the pieces he had created, Grohl contacted such figures as Lemmy from Motörhead (the one contributor whose profile was known to the mainstream music fan), Max Cavalera from Soulfly, Venom’s Cronos, D.R.I.’s Kurt Brecht, Trouble frontman Eric Wagner, Cathedral mainman Lee Dorrian, Corrosion of Conformity’s Mike Dean, Snake from Voivod and Maryland music legend Wino, then of Spirit Caravan, to name just a few.

The recording sessions for the self-titled album were also unusual. With the exception of Lemmy’s track, ‘Shake Your Blood’, which was recorded in Los Angeles with Grohl present (with the party later decamping to a nearby strip club) the music for each of
Probot
’s eleven listed tracks reached each individual vocalist via the Federal Express courier service. In receipt of these tracks each performer would then record their own vocal, as they saw fit, before returning the completed song, or songs, to Dave Grohl. It has been reported that most of the album’s costs came in the form of payments to Federal Express.

‘When I started recording this stuff, and it was four years ago, remember, I didn’t think for a moment that it would become a record,’ Grohl said in November 2003. ‘I just wanted to record something for fun. But then it started to turn into something, and I decided to speak to people to take it further. But I was so nervous about contacting some of these guys. Wino is a god to me, as is Eric Wagner … And here I was calling up Eric Wagner in Chicago and saying, “Hi, I’m Dave from Foo Fighters – would you like to sing on a metal song that I’ve written?” What the fuck was he likely to say to that? But it turns out that he was excited by it, it turns out that everyone was excited by it. I can’t tell you how much it means to me to have the luxury of this opportunity. Not only
Probot
, but all the opportunities that success allows me. It’s important to extend yourself to other types of music. It’s good for your fucking soul, for your fucking heart.’

If Dave Grohl was honoured that the musical heroes of his noisy youth consented to involve themselves with his
Probot
enterprise, so too were the invitees honoured to have been asked.

‘I think it’s fucking amazing the way it turned out,’ is the opinion of Cronos, the bassist and vocalist with vastly influential Geordie black metallers Venom, who contributed vocals to the song ‘Centuries of Sin’. ‘I mean, I was sent just the raw music for pretty much all of the songs and it was kinda a bit of a nail-biter on which one was mine, because there was quite a lot of them where I was like, “I don’t know what to do with this,” because it was so not like what I’d done before. So when Dave actually said, “Track three is yours,” I was so relieved because that was the one I wanted. I was buzzing because that was my favourite one on the album anyway. I actually wrote three sets of lyrics: one was like a sleazy, red-light area, “going out for a whore” kinda song, another one was about young guys going out for a fight and drinking on the town, and then I also wrote the “Centuries of Sin” track, which was the Venomous one. But he went, “I just want you to do your thing on it. Don’t think about Dave Grohl, don’t think about Foo Fighters and Nirvana, think as if you were doing a Venom song.” And I was like “Brilliant!”

‘I could see where he was coming from. This stuff was not Foo Fighters, this stuff was not Nirvana, this was Dave taking a chance: either he was going to alienate every single Foo Fighters fan in the world and absolutely destroy his career or people are going to understand it and put it in perspective, which is absolutely how it ended up.’

‘To me Dave Grohl is no different from a lot of guys I knew back in the 1980s,’ says Cathedral frontman Lee Dorrian, who sang on
Probot
’s ‘Ice Cold Man’. ‘He’s still got the same mentality, but obviously he’s a lot more famous now. Most kids who grew up in that punk scene, that was their education. Someone like John Peel was the teacher you never had at school, and the scene was your family. I think the punk scene was a really good grounding for anyone who’s young and getting into music and culture and is trying to figure the world out.’

Probot
finally saw the light of day in February 2004. The album was released through the underground record label Southern Lord, owned by Greg Anderson, the same Greg Anderson Grohl had met outside the International Motor Sports Garage back in 1990. Earlier in the process Grohl had meetings with various major labels, and at each meeting he would ask those present if they knew who Cronos was, or who King Diamond (another of the album’s personnel) was. When the answers came back negative, as invariably they did, the musician explained to the record company executives present that they were wasting one another’s time. Even a meeting with the metal record label Roadrunner – home to Slipknot and Machine Head, among many others – did not provide
Probot
’s creator with the impression that his labour of love would be going to the right home. And so it was, having exhausted the more obvious avenues of release, that
Probot
met its waiting public on the reassuringly obscure Southern Lord label.