This is a Call (52 page)

With Dave Grohl moving to California it made sense that Studio 606 should follow. But rather than install a studio within the grounds of Grohl’s family home – or at least not yet, anyway – in 2004 the band invested $750,000 of its own money to set up their own studio on neutral ground. Buying a large, anonymous-looking commercial property somewhere amid the sprawling nothingness of the suburban San Fernando Valley, an area infamous as the epicentre of the American pornographic film industry, the quartet went about equipping the facility to their exact requirements. The group’s members even dirtied their hands themselves with a touch of heavy lifting.

On the ground floor of the 606 complex is the recording studio, modelled upon Stockholm’s Polar Studios, the Abba-owned facility where Led Zeppelin committed their
In Through the Out Door
album to tape in the winter of 1978. Todd MacFarlane Metallica figures sit atop a workbench. There is ephemera celebrating Motörhead and Mötley Crüe. On the wall hangs a black and white print of Dave Grohl with Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen and ‘Little Steven’ Van Zandt, each man deep in concentration as they practised The Clash’s ‘London Calling’ backstage at Madison Square Garden. There are framed posters advertising Black Flag’s
Nervous Breakdown
EP, as well as the American punk record label Slash. There are cushions fashioned from Grohl’s old concert T-shirts, lovingly handmade by Virginia Grohl. And in the hallway hang scores of gold and platinum discs for albums featuring Grohl in some capacity or other – from drummer in Nirvana, and for Queens of the Stone Age and Tenacious D, to bandleader with Foo Fighters. At the time Foo Fighters began work on
Echoes
… the discs represented CD sales of somewhere in the region of 50 million, and suggested that in whatever guise he made music Dave Grohl did so with something of a Midas touch.

Despite the bespoke nature of their new studio, initial reports emanating from the latest 606 were not unduly encouraging. Speaking to
Kerrang!
in 2005 Dave Grohl admitted that for a time the notion of a fifth Foo Fighters album was just that, a notion.

‘There was a moment when I thought, “Well, that was fun and we’ve had a good run at the thing,”’ he said. ‘I’ve always thought that bands shouldn’t last forever, there’s always an expiration date. So, yeah, for a moment I thought that we should call it quits and end it on a high note.’

Speaking to the
NME
in the spring of 2005, the frontman admitted that he never imagined that his group’s success would reach such a point, and revealed, ‘When it happened it got me thinking.’

‘About what?’ he was asked.

‘About what it meant for us,’ he responded. ‘We’d reached a certain level and it meant something. It was just a question of what. Did it mean it was time for us to split up? Did it mean it was time for us to take one of those four-year breaks? Or time to try something different?’

When pressed on the viability of splitting up as being a realistic option, Grohl answered, ‘Well, yeah, that was one of the things I wondered about. I did think about going out at the top.’

But after considering the three options of breaking up, of embarking on a four-year hiatus, or else simply trying something different, Foo Fighters opted for the last. Stretching their creative limbs, as well as flexing a little corporate muscle, the quartet decided that their fifth album would in fact be a double album, with one CD dedicated to the
Sturm und Drang
of the group in full-blown rock mode, and the second disc comprised of more reflective, acoustic-based numbers.

‘It didn’t make a lot of sense not to try and challenge ourselves this time out,’ explained Grohl just prior to the album’s release. ‘It wouldn’t have made any sense at all just to go in and make another record. That would have been boring for us. So we decided to do something that would challenge the band. I’ve always known that we were capable of producing an album like the acoustic record, but it never made sense to try and incorporate that into a rock setting. So this time we attempted to eliminate a lot of the middle ground. So we made a rock album that rocks as hard as possible and we tried to go completely the opposite way with the acoustic record.

‘When I listen to some bands who have been around for ten or fifteen years like, God bless ’em, the Ramones or Green Day or AC/DC – those bands have made a career out of making music that wrestles with one dynamic. But fuck that, I don’t want to be that band. I want to be a band that can do fucking anything, because we can do fucking anything. There’s a song on the record that [jazz chanteuse] Norah Jones sings on: how nuts is that? But fuck it, why not? We should do whatever the fuck it is we want to do. Because when we do follow our instincts, when we do follow our hearts, it ends up sounding really good. My ambition is for people to ask us what kind of music we play and for us to answer, “Just music.” Not, “Oh, rock music,” but “Just music.” I think with this album we’ve taken a step toward that happening.’

With sessions taking place at 606, work on the acoustic half of the album came together like a dream. The group originally had a list of dozens of artists they hoped would contribute to the songs; as things turned out, sessions came together so quickly that the authors hardly had the time to recruit many of the names on their wishlist. Even so, alongside Norah Jones (on ‘Virginia Moon’), the quieter half of
InYour Honor
features appearances from, among others, Josh Homme (who plays additional guitar on ‘Razor’), as well as songs starring The Wallflowers keyboardist Rami Jaffee, double-bass contributions from co-producer Nick Raskulinecz, that and the sound of mandolin and piano – on the songs ‘Another Round’ and ‘Miracle’ respectively – played by the hand of erstwhile Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones.

‘I ran around the room screaming,’ said Dave Grohl of receiving a call from Jones saying that he was willing to play on the album. ‘“Guess who I fucking got a call from?”’ When the Englishman arrived at 606 to record his parts, Foo Fighters’ frontman reported, ‘I tried to be cool, but I’m sure I looked like a total fucking idiot. I was shitting my pants. Full diaper.’

On his motivation for recording an album’s worth of acoustic material, Grohl told me, ‘I’d originally been thinking about making an album on my own. I’ve always thought about making an album on my own, because I enjoy recording by myself, and it might be something that you wouldn’t expect. So I’d written a lot of really beautiful acoustic music and I thought, “Maybe what I could do is find a film that needs a score and make an album on my own, and sorta disguise it as a film score so it doesn’t seem like a pretentious solo effort.” Like with Tom Petty’s
She’s the One
, like an album of songs that are yours entirely but not meant to prove that you can do it on your own, if that makes any sense. And then I had a revelation at some point, thinking, “Wait a minute, this should be the next Foo Fighters album. Fuck rock music, let’s really take a hard left on everyone and change up the game a little. Wouldn’t that be nice?” So I considered it, but then I thought, “Wait a minute, I can’t not make a rock album, so let’s do a double.”

‘Meanwhile I was moving the studio out of Virginia and looking for a studio in Los Angeles, and that whole process was fucking long and crazy; I’m glad we did it, but holy shit – to write and record a double album in a studio that you built from scratch? We’d start with the contractor and the construction team at the warehouse and then go back down to rehearsal and writing and demoing and then at night come back to the studio to fucking staple insulation to the ceiling. And that was every day for six months. We were still building the studio as we recorded …’

Recorded from January to March 2005,
In Your Honor
was given its worldwide release that June. The double album entered both the US and UK album charts at number 2 (kept from the top spot in both countries by the release of Coldplay’s third album,
X & Y
), selling 311,000 copies in the United States, and almost 160,000 copies in Great Britain, a jump of nearly 70,000 first-week sales from predecessor
One by One
. Foo Fighters’ fifth album also débuted in the top five of album charts in thirteen other countries, and attained Top 40 status in six more. Reviews were also kind, although sometimes in a way that suggested damnation by faint praise.
Spin
wrote that ‘both these records chronicle the mental and physical graffiti of figuring how to emerge from some very large shadows, including his own, with nerve and power’. The
New York Times
was of the opinion that ‘the rock CD overpowers the acoustic one.Yet among the quieter songs, there are enough supple melodies and hypnotic guitar patterns to suggest fine prospects for a follow-through album that would dare to mix plugged-in and unplugged.’ Others, though, were less charitable.
MOJO
claimed that
In Your Honor
’s rock disc was merely ‘grunge-punk-metal boiled down to mere energy – and calories don’t rock’. Across the Atlantic,
Blender
put it even more baldly when it wrote, ‘Let’s face it: Foo Fighters are dull.’

But it was perhaps the website Cokemachineglow that came closest to summing up a fan’s eye view on Foo Fighters’ fifth album. ‘Lurking somewhere in its spotty 80+ minutes there lies an excellent 40-minute album, one of the best Foo Fighters have ever done,’ noted reviewer Matt Stephens. ‘As it is, though, with its heaps of filler, dated production, and needless separation of rockers from ballads, it may actually be their weakest.’

In Your Honor
isn’t Foo Fighters’ weakest album – that dubious honour must go to its predecessor – and some of the reviews it attracted were perhaps unduly harsh (as a rule, the music press tends not to like it when it praises an album, as it did with
One by One
, that its creators subsequently dismiss out of hand). But the notion that its finest moments are harder to find for being obscured by tracks that aren’t as remarkable as they might be is justified comment.
In Your Honor
opens and closes with some of the finest material Grohl has ever authored, but for all the admirable ambition and ability the band display, keeping the whole enterprise airborne across 21 tracks proves to be too much of a strain.

The title track provides a stirring opening to this epic endeavour. Over martial beats and guitars which soar skywards and beyond, Grohl’s own fanfare for the common man is delivered with an intensity and raw passion that cannot fail to prickle the skin: ‘
Mine is yours and yours is mine / There is no divide / In your honor I would die tonight
,’ Grohl sings. Only the hardest of hearts could fail to be moved. ‘No Way Back’ fizzes with an invigorating vigour, and ‘Best of You’ shrugs off a chest-beating opening which sounds like a pumped-up US military recruitment ad to blossom into an open-hearted everyman anthem capable of filling the biggest of stadiums. ‘The Last Song’, meanwhile, like ‘Enough Space’ on
The Colour and the Shape
, seems written with the express design to cause festival crowds to bounce, while its punchy call-and-response chorus – ‘
This is the last song that I will dedicate to you
’ – is a gloriously uninhibited declaration of independence. There is art and craft too in the likes of ‘DOA’ and ‘Resolve’, but even amid their well-honed melodies there is still the nagging feeling that this album’s noisier half has been somewhat taken for granted.

On the second half of the band’s first double album too there are songs which shine with an incandescent brilliance. The reflective, delicate ‘Friend of a Friend’, reprised from the
Pocketwatch
cassette, is moving in its own right, even without the knowledge that the song was written in Kurt Cobain’s apartment in Olympia some fifteen years earlier. Elsewhere, the gently rolling ‘Cold Day in the Sun’, voiced by Taylor Hawkins, flies by on a jaunty beat and the strength of its own breezy melody, while ‘Miracle’ sounds like the perfect song to accompany a cold beer and a last cigarette at the end of a stressful and taxing day. And tucked in the middle of this disc is the undeniably beautiful ‘On the Mend’, a touching tale of love and brotherhood written by Grohl in a London hotel room in August 2001 as he wondered whether his comatose friend Taylor might live or die.

There is here a subtlety and poise not always displayed in the album’s rather self-consciously ‘rocking’ opening disc.

The tour in support of
In Your Honor
saw the band’s tour buses pull up to the backstage doors of some of the world’s largest indoor venues. And festival season found the Foos taking star billing at some of the most prestigious events on the circuit – among them Japan’s Fuji Rock Festival, Denmark’s Roskilde, Holland’s Lowlands, Belgium’s Werchter, Scotland’s T in the Park, Ireland’s Oxegen and, once again, the Reading/ Leeds double-header.

But if evidence was required that Foo Fighters’ profile was expanding beyond even that of festival headliner, such evidence came the following summer, when on Saturday 17 June 2006 the quartet headlined an outdoor show at London’s Hyde Park. Ironically, the site of the Foos’ greatest triumph to date took place less than a mile from the spot where they endured their darkest hour following Taylor Hawkins’s overdose almost five years earlier. But in headlining a concert at London’s most prestigious royal park, Dave Grohl’s band were joining a roll-call of rock royalty. In 1969 the Rolling Stones performed a free gig on the site, just two days after the death of guitarist Brian Jones. Seven years later Queen followed suit with their own free show. More recently, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Simon & Garfunkel were just two of the acts that had filled the air of one of London’s most exclusive quarters with music.

Dave Grohl told the audience gathered in the greenery just off Park Lane that when the idea of playing Hyde Park was put to him he thought that maybe 30,000 people might turn up. As it transpired, a crowd of some 85,000 people enjoyed a day in the sunshine watching Juliette Lewis & the Licks, Angels & Airwaves, old friends Queens of the Stone Age, the redoubtable Motörhead, and then, finally, Foo Fighters. As if this wasn’t proof of popularity enough, the next night the band headlined a show at Lancashire County Cricket Ground in Manchester, supported by The Strokes, Angels & Airwaves, The Subways and Josh Homme’s side band The Eagles of Death Metal. And although Foo Fighters’ fanbase was blossoming all over the western world, it was still the people of England that were carrying the brightest torch, and who had been carrying it the longest.