This is a Call (55 page)

‘It was not unlike a blind date,’ he said, ‘where you cross your fingers and hope it’s not awkward. Because jamming with the wrong person can feel just as awkward as fucking someone you don’t like. But we started playing and we didn’t stop, at all, for maybe 30 minutes. The first jam was long and it was fun and everyone had smiles [on their faces]. And it sounded fucking great. So we did that for a few days and then looked at one another and said, “Well, should we be a band?” And that was that.’

‘As soon as the Queens thing ended we were looking for an opportunity to do this again,’ admits Josh Homme. ‘I can’t stand people who embrace mediocrity in music, and every time I’ve played with Dave he has absolutely gone to the limit of his abilities. Dave’s goal is exactly like mine, to keep recharging your battery and finding new ways to stay creative. He’s a really happy person in a sea of people who can’t stand themselves.’

Unusually in an industry where there are very few genuine secrets, the trio managed to keep details of their new venture under wraps until July 2009, when Homme’s wife, Brody Dalle, acknowledged the existence of the project in an online interview for her new band Spinnerette: ‘I’m not at liberty to talk about it …’ she said, ‘[but] the thing … which I’m not supposed to talk about is pretty fucking amazing. Just beats and sounds like you’ve never heard before.’

The following month, at the stroke of midnight on 9 August, Them Crooked Vultures made their global début at the 1,100-capacity Metro club in Chicago, premiering a hard-driving, classic rock ’n’ roll sound Homme classified as ‘perverted blues’. Two weeks later, in keeping with the clandestine nature of their ‘career’ to date, the trio (augmented by live guitarist Alain Johannes from Spinnerette) strolled onto the stage of London’s Brixton Academy to play an unannounced hour-long set as support to the Arctic Monkeys, whose new Josh Homme-produced album
Humbug
had been released that same week. And three months after that, without very much hype or hullabaloo at all, the band’s own self-titled début dropped.

Given the three musicians’ impeccable CVs, and the fact that Grohl and Homme’s previous collaboration, Queens of the Stone Age’s
Songs for the Deaf
, had been roundly acclaimed as the finest hard rock album of the decade, expectations for
Them Crooked Vultures
were sky high. Early reviews only added to the hype. ‘
Them CrookedVultures
flouts the supergroup manual,’ wrote
MOJO
. ‘It doesn’t sound like the work of rich men on holiday, but rather three serious individuals looking to prove themselves over again.’ The
Sunday Times
hailed the album as ‘thrillingly, breathtakingly odd’. The
Washington Post
was equally captivated. ‘When rock bands swarmed Earth 40 years ago, they seemed otherworldly – hirsute tribes clad in kaleidoscopic garb, brandishing their guitars like medieval weapons,’ wrote Chris Richards. ‘But over time, these mongrel hordes and their misshapen songs assimilated into American culture so seamlessly, they practically vanished into the normalcy of popular music. Today, our guitar heroes reside mostly in video games. In that sense, supergroup Them Crooked Vultures makes for an evocative throwback, recalling an era when riff-hurling rock troupes felt dangerous. And bizarre. And totally worth listening to.’

The key reference points for
Them CrookedVultures
are Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top, Cream, Foghat, Masters of Reality and, perhaps most significantly, the stress-free, narcotics-friendly Desert Sessions collaborations Josh Homme has presided over at Rancho de la Luna in Joshua Tree, California since 1997. Like The White Stripes’ superb 2003 collection
Elephant
,
Them Crooked Vultures
reeks of sin, sweat, sex and bad-ass braggadocio: swinging and swaggering, it’s very much the (dirty) work of grown men old enough to know better, but stubborn enough not to give a rat’s ass. Opening with the lewd, lascivious, cowbell-accented stomp of ‘No One Loves Me’ (‘
I told her I was trash, she winked and laughed and said, “I already know, I got a beautiful place to put your face
”’), the trio invoke the unholy trinity of sex (on the steamy Southern Gothic swamp-blues ‘No Fang’), drugs (on the nightmarish, woozy, wonky, acid-trip-gone-horribly-wrong ‘Interlude with Ludes’) and violence (almost everything else), with the drawling Homme portraying his renegade posse as ‘
unwanted strangers, exploited and dangerous
’ on the cock-and-balls strut of ‘Elephants’. This desperado gang vibe seeps through every move TCV make, which might seem a tad silly if the trio didn’t have a fearsome arsenal of white-knuckle riffs to back up their lairy, priapic strut: the occasions where Homme, Jones and Grohl lock telepathically, and thrillingly, into extended driving grooves are reminiscent of Zeppelin at their most testosterone driven. Them Crooked Vultures might not be breaking new ground, but few bands shake the foundations with such muscle and majesty.

One week into the band’s début US tour, I caught up with Dave Grohl backstage at Boston’s House of Blues. Them Crooked Vultures’ hard-hitting drummer was in playful mood, describing the tour as ‘awesome’.

‘We did the Austin City Limits festival and melted a few faces down there,’ he beamed. ‘Then we kicked Nashville in the balls. Then we went to Columbus, and beat them up for a little while, then went to Detroit and smacked them around a little bit. Then we went to Canada, and held them upside down by their feet. It’s been fun, really good.’

On 17 December the TCV bandwagon rolled into London for the first of two sold-out nights at the famous Hammersmith Apollo, formerly known as Hammersmith Odeon, and one of the capital’s most storied venues. In July 1973 David Bowie killed off Ziggy Stardust on the stage of the Odeon, in November 1976 a chunk of Thin Lizzy’s
Live and Dangerous
album – arguably the greatest live rock album of all time – was recorded in the same venue. In the mid-1960s The Beatles sold out no less than 38 shows over 21 nights in the 5,000-capacity room, and on 18 December 2009 Paul McCartney returned to the venue to show his support for Grohl, with whom he had become firm friends in the wake of their onstage collaborations at McCartney’s 2008 Liverpool Sound concert and at the Grammys in 2009. Discreetly tucked away on the left-hand side of the stage, McCartney and his girlfriend Nancy Shevell stood smiling and bopping as rock’s latest fab four delivered a thunderous masterclass in elemental grooving, controlled power and wall-shaking volume, a display which marked out Them Crooked Vultures as a vital force in their own right.

Later that night, the Vultures and various family and friends took over a charming Italian restaurant in West London for an end-of-tour party. Against a wholly incongruous soundtrack of Slayer, Metallica and Pantera, Grohl and Homme held court with grace and humour, occasionally breaking off from chatting to their guests to indulge in spontaneous, sporadic bursts of air guitar thrashing and/or air drumming. Grohl, temporarily relieved of the weight of carrying Foo Fighters, Inc., on his broad shoulders, had rarely looked more content or at ease.

‘I now have three loves,’ he told me as the party wound down. ‘My family, the Foos and the Vultures. Shit man, the position I’m in right now, where I get to be in this band with two of my favourite musicians of all time and then I get to be in a band with my friends and family and play festivals and stadiums? That’s a good thing, it’s fucking great. John is already asking me when we’re going to do a new Vultures record, and that will happen one day, and it’ll be amazing. But right now I think it’s time for me to return home.’

In May 2008, one month prior to Foo Fighters’ brace of Wembley Stadium headline dates, Grohl was asked by
Kerrang!
magazine where he saw his band heading next.

‘How could it get any bigger or better than it is?’ he mused. ‘We’ve never had a Number One record in America, and I remember Pat [Smear] saying once, “I never want a Number One record because, after that, what do you do?” So thankfully we’ve never had a Number One record in America.’

Three years later, on 20 April 2011, Foo Fighters’ seventh album
Wasting Light
débuted at Number 1 on the
Billboard
200.

Advance press on
Wasting Light
centred largely around the fact that the album had been recorded to analogue tape in Dave Grohl’s garage. That the process merited such attention speaks volumes about the sterile state of the music industry in 2011. In 1999 Foo Fighters had recorded
There Is Nothing Left to Lose
to tape in Dave Grohl’s basement in Virginia without Pro Tools technology and without any real fanfare, but by 2011 the idea that rock music
should
be pristine and polished was so endemic in the recording industry that the notion of making a record in any other way was considered heretical. On the same November evening that photographer Lisa Johnson and I dropped in upon Foo Fighters’
Wasting Light
sessions at Grohl’s Encino home, I interviewed San Diego pop-punks Blink 182 at their North Hollywood studio as they toiled upon the creation of their sixth studio album; in conversation with the band’s vocalist/guitarist Tom DeLonge I mentioned the manner in which Dave Grohl’s band were working with Butch Vig elsewhere in the city. DeLonge looked dumbfounded.

‘Why would you do that?’ he gasped. ‘That would be like you carving your article into tablets of stone instead of using a computer!’

In truth, this mindset had only recently been banished from Foo Fighters’ own sessions.

‘The first song we recorded, we get a drum take and Butch starts razor-splicing edits to tape,’ Grohl recalled to
Electronic Musician
magazine. ‘We rewind the tape and it starts shedding oxide. Butch says, “We should back everything up to digital.” I start screaming: “If I see one fucking computer hooked up to a piece of gear, you’re fucking fired! We’re making the record the way we want to make it, and if you can’t do it, then fuck you!” Nobody makes us do what we don’t want to do. “What if something happens to the tape?” “What did we do in 1991, Butch?” You play it again! God forbid you have to play your song one more time.’

Sessions for
Wasting Light
actually began in a more traditional manner in the autumn of 2008, using state-of-the-art digital recording technology at Grandmaster Recorders studios in Hollywood, the same facility in which three-quarters of the original Foo Fighters line-up completed the recording of
The Colour and the Shape
in 1997. The band had been writing and rehearsing new material in soundchecks while touring
Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace
, and Grohl’s original plan was that Foo Fighters should record a new album and release it quickly and quietly without committing to any touring, press interviews or promotional activity at all. With Butch Vig handling production, songs such as ‘Wheels’, ‘Word Forward’ and ‘Rope’ were laid down in a conventional fashion, but Grohl could see that his band were burnt out after a solid year’s touring, and in the back of his mind he knew the songs weren’t quite ready. Mindful of past mistakes, he called a halt to the session. Within three months he was back in the studio, but this time with John Paul Jones and Josh Homme.

‘The Vultures did a lot more than I originally expected it to,’ he told me as we sat in the studio control room at his home in Encino in November 2010. ‘At first it was just an idea that Josh and I had to play together and not have to tour, and not have to do all the things that we were tired of doing with our other bands, and then I asked John to come jam with us and within five minutes I wanted it to be more than just a studio project. Because we were good – we were good in the room, we were good on tape, we were good onstage, we were just
good
. It was obvious within the first few weeks that it was going to be a good record and that we were going to be a fucking blazing live band. So it was just a series of challenges: write the first song, record the first song, record all the songs, release the album, perform in front of people, perform
everywhere
in front of people. And it just started snowballing …

‘We could have done much more, but by New Year’s I realised that if I waited any longer to do Foo Fighters’ thing, there’s going to be a really big gap between our last album and this one now. And, ultimately, this is where I belong. But it was a hard decision to make because I was in a band with John Paul Jones, who’s one of my heroes, and Josh, who’s one of my best friends, and I was playing better than I’ve ever played before and having the time of my life. But I wanted to be here in Foo Fighters at the same time. So in January I called Taylor and said, “Okay, let’s start working on some ideas.”’

On 16 August 2010, just two weeks after Them Crooked Vultures closed out their world tour onstage at the Fuji Rock festival in Naeba, Japan, Foo Fighters regrouped to restart work upon their seventh studio album. Inspired by the purity of the Them Crooked Vultures experience, Grohl now had a new vision for the album: his band would record to analogue tape, in his garage, and have a documentary film crew record the process.