This is a Call (53 page)

‘It was the same with Nirvana,’ observed Grohl. ‘We exploded in England before we did in America. I think the UK’s always had a pretty good idea of what’s about to break. If it blows up in England, it’s only a matter of time before it blows up everywhere else. Even so, I never imagined something like Hyde Park would work.’

But work it did, and spectacularly well. Featuring not just a selection of Foo Fighters favourites – ‘Stacked Actors’, ‘Everlong’, ‘Monkey Wrench’ and ‘Breakout’ among them – the set also found space for a
Probot
song (‘Shake Your Blood’, sung, as on its parent album, by Lemmy) as well as Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘Tie Your Mother Down’, songs which saw Queen guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor emerge from the wings to join Foo Fighters onstage. By any measure, this was rock played by A-list musicians.

Prior to his band’s headline set in front of 85,000 people, though, Dave Grohl could be found backstage barbecuing for friends, just as he had done when the insanity around Nirvana threatened to spill out of control, just as he had done when recording
There Is Nothing Left to Lose
within a stone’s throw of his old high school in Virginia. Amid the sizzle of steaks and the chatter of friends and family, you could have been forgiven for thinking that Dave Grohl had not a care in the world.

‘It didn’t feel like the most important show of our career,’ he later admitted. ‘It was more like I was hosting a barbecue for 85, 000 people. It just felt like the biggest party I’ve ever had.’

Asked around the time of the release of
In Your Honor
if Foo Fighters planned to incorporate an acoustic set into their otherwise fully electric live show, drummer Taylor Hawkins laughed and answered in the negative, the reason being that ‘people would throw piss’. But by 2006 the group had enough confidence in its quieter side to embark on a tour of theatres armed not with Marshall amps but with hollow-bodied guitars and, that most telling sign of a band in quiet reflection, stools. Towards the end of the summer the quartet appeared live at the Pantages venue in Los Angeles for a three-night stand that would be recorded for release as a live album. The core musicians were joined by players such as Rami Jaffee, percussionist Drew Hester, violinist Petra Haden, harmonica player Danny Clinch, as well as a familiar beaming face, guitarist Pat Smear.

A selection of songs from these performances was collated for Foo Fighters’ first live album, titled
Skin and Bones
, released on 28 November 2006. Featuring imaginative reworkings of such staples as ‘Times Like These’, ‘My Hero’, ‘Friend of a Friend’ and ‘Everlong’, the fifteen-song set showed just how confidently the group had grown into their acoustic selves. Evidence of this came with the fact that, by definition, an acoustic live album from Foo Fighters would be compared to the similarly reflective Nirvana live album,
Unplugged in New York
, released in 1994. And while
Skin and Bones
was never likely to equal the majesty of that album, an album which is now recognised as one of the finest of its type, if not
the
finest, there is anyway something rather fanciful, perhaps even fatuous, about such a comparison.
Unplugged in New York
is the work of an entirely different band playing entirely different songs in an entirely different era. On its own terms, those Foo Fighters had since set for themselves,
Skin and Bones
is a worthwhile and enjoyable addition to its creators’
œuvre
.

In the same month that the Foos’ first live album found its way into record shops, the group in its acoustic form accepted an invitation to tour Canada with the legendary Bob Dylan, then touring his acclaimed
Modern Times
album. There was something rather fitting about this partnership. In 1965 Dylan had outraged his supporters by ‘going electric’, playing a UK tour that saw his show split into two halves, one acoustic and one electric. Audiences did not take kindly to the latter section, with one ticket holder at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall exclaiming that the night’s headliner was a ‘Judas’. Five time zones east, at that summer’s annual Newport Folk Festival acoustic protest singer Pete Seeger reacted to Dylan’s plugged-in performance with such displeasure that he threatened to sever the power cables leading to the stage with an axe.

‘We don’t usually jump on other people’s tours because we’re out doing our own thing,’ Grohl told
Uncut
magazine. ‘But being asked by Bob Dylan to go on the road with him is like being knighted or something. How could we say no? We were asked by the man who turned rock ’n’ roll from boogie-woogie into bad-ass. Respect and honour, and for us it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.’

In the weeks immediately before the trek, Grohl and his bandmates pumped keyboard player Rami Jaffe, who had previously played with Dylan’s son Jakob’s band, The Wallflowers, for some insider knowledge on the old master.

‘We all spent weeks asking him, “How’s Bob? What’s he like, man?” Grohl recalled. He said, “Bob’s the coolest guy in the world. He’s totally fucking chilled. But here’s the deal, though. If he’s got the hoodie on with the sunglasses, don’t even fuckin’ think of talking to him. If the hoodie is down and the sunglasses are off, it’s fair game to go and say hello.” That’s the best advice anybody has given me all year!’

The tour was in Canada when Grohl received a message in his dressing room that Mr Dylan wished to see him. With some trepidation, Grohl headed for the door.

‘So I walk out,’ says Grohl, ‘and I came around the corner and he’s standing like a silhouette in a dark corner – black leather boots, black leather pants, black leather jacket. He said, “What’s that’s song you got, the one that goes, ‘
The only thing I ever ask of you is you gotta promise not to stop when I say when
?’” I said, “Oh, yeah, ‘Everlong’.” He said, “Man, that is a great song, I should learn that song.”

‘So I don’t give a fuck what anybody else thinks,’ Grohl laughed. ‘Bob Dylan likes one of my songs. That right there is enough for me.’

Always an evolving entity, by the time Foo Fighters came to prepare themselves for their sixth studio album the participants opted for a more fluid approach than that taken on the
In Your Honor
set. Whereas that album had rather uniformly separated its electric and acoustic elements, with an unplugged tour underneath their belts it seemed that in re-entering 606 to record their next collection of songs the band felt more confident in mixing things up somewhat. Reunited with Gil Norton, Grohl, Mendel, Hawkins and Shifflet secluded themselves in their $750,000 bespoke recording studio in the San Fernando Valley and set to work. Their efforts amounted to the most supple and dexterous Foo Fighters album to date.

‘You know, at some point you turn [the] warning light off,’ said Grohl at the time. ‘At this point, having done it for as long as we have, it becomes a little more introverted. As a musician you need to do the things that satisfy yourself. One of the great things about our band is that we’ve built this little world with our own studios and our own label and directing our own videos and finding our own producers and producing ourselves … We were able to walk into our fortress, Studio 606, and lock the door and turn everything outside off, and I think that’s helped us survive this whole time. So at some point you can turn that off. I mean, of course I hope the people enjoy what we do, but it’s not a main motivation for doing it. It’s a challenge.’

The group emerged from 606 with a dozen well-rounded songs, songs that would gather under the rather portentous title
Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace
.

‘It’s always been a challenge to name any of our albums …’ admitted Grohl. ‘I picked through the lyrics and found a lyric from the last song, “Home”, which says “
Echoes, silence, patience and grace, all of these moments I’ll never replace
.” I thought it was nice because it’s open to interpretation and I think it’s a beautiful title and I think the album is beautiful in its diversity and its melody and its musicality. It goes from delicate acoustic moments to the heaviest shit we’ve ever done.’

Indeed it did. From the opening dynamite blast of ‘The Pretender’ – the album’s lead-off single, a track that spent a then record eighteen weeks atop the
Billboard
Alternative/Modern Rock Chart – to the fabulous Paul McCartneyesque pop roll of ‘Long Road to Ruin’ to the quite gorgeous closing track, the stately piano-led ‘Home’ – which its author described as ‘the kind of song I can’t imagine singing live because it’s going to be too much’ –
Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace
is the culmination, and a seamless culmination at that, of everything Foo Fighters had been experimenting with since they decided to move away from only practising the type of loud rock music heard on the
One by One
album.

‘Dave has always had the ability to write a great riff,’ believes Gil Norton, the album’s producer. ‘He’s prolific. We were joking about doing a website called Spare Riff at one time, because he just comes up with a million riffs all the time. But obviously he has slightly different subject matter now: he’s older, he’s got a family … With the last album the whole sonic palate had increased and that sort of helped with the writing, because it just gave him more scope atmospherically.’

Released on 25 September 2007,
Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace
débuted at number 1 in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. In the US, Foo Fighters’ sixth studio album entered the
Billboard
Top 200 at number 3, with 168,000 first-week sales, a sizeable drop from the 311,000 sales racked up by
In Your Honor
on its first seven days in shops.

Critical reception to the album was, as ever, mixed.
Kerrang!
’s Ian Winwood was generous in his praise, writing, ‘The fact that this is a record that doesn’t sound like it was hard work means that it’s good work. In fact, it’s good enough to remind you just why you turned your ears towards Foo Fighters in the first place.’
NME
believed that the set was ‘as consistent a record as Foo Fighters have ever made’. Not everyone, though, was as kind as they might have been.
Spin
said of the new album that it was ‘another quality entry in a fantastically average career’.

Still, being a critic’s band doesn’t always pay the bills – being a ‘fan’s band’ does. And Foo Fighters were definitely the latter, as they proved beyond argument in the summer of 2008. Almost a year on from their show-stealing performance at Live Earth, the band’s agent Russell Warby booked the band as headliners at Wembley Stadium for the evening of 7 June 2008. They gave themselves almost six months to sell the 86,000 tickets required to completely fill the national stadium; as it turned out all the seats were sold in a few hours. A second date was pencilled in for 6 June; this, too, quickly sold out, adding up to 172,000 tickets purchased in a matter of days.

For six months prior to the first of the two concerts, Dave Grohl would ask himself just what his band had up its sleeve in order to rise to the challenge of filling this vast space with both his band’s music and, just as importantly, its personality.

At approximately 10.30 p.m. on the evening of 7 June Grohl brushed his hair away from his eyes, looked out across the expanse of Europe’s second-largest stadium and pronounced the night ‘the greatest fucking night in our band’s lives’. As he spoke, a smiling grey-haired man in a khaki army shirt holding a sunburst Gibson Les Paul walked onstage from his left, while another familiar face appeared stage right.

‘We knew from the beginning that this wasn’t going to be just any other show,’ said Grohl. ‘We’ve been planning this shit for six months, a long time. We knew that this country, you guys, you made us the band that we are today. So we’d like to invite a couple of very special guests, Mr Jimmy Page and Mr John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin …’

Seven months earlier, Grohl had sat three rows behind me at London’s 20,000 capacity O2 Arena, as the reunited Led Zeppelin played the most hyped gig of the decade, as a tribute to late Atlantic Records mogul Ahmet Ertegun. So frantic and full-on was Grohl’s air-drumming that night, mirroring every snare, tom and kick drum beat hammered out onstage by Jason Bonham, the late John Bonham’s son, that he was literally shifting the air above my head.