This is a Call (56 page)

‘The process I think comes out in the music,’ he said. ‘When I listen to the second record [
The Colour and the Shape
], it’s kinda complicated: there’s some things that I like to listen to and some things that I don’t, because I know what was happening at the time and what I was singing about. And then there’s an album like the third album [
There Is Nothing Left to Lose
], which we made in my basement in Virginia which was just nothing but fucking good vibes, it was a pleasure to make that record, and when I listen to it, it sounds that way to me, just a nice, laid-back album because that’s the way we felt at the time. So I feel like this whole process, you can actually hear it in the album. And it’s been pretty fun.

‘I know that whenever I listen to these songs in 20 years from now I’ll remember recording “These Days” and having Violet tapping me on the shoulder the whole time I’m doing my guitar track. Or a song like “Miss the Misery” and I look down and Harper has got her pinkie in her mouth and she’s dancing along. The kids are part of the album in a way, they’re part of the memories for me.’

As photographer Lisa Johnson and I drove away from Grohl’s home that November evening, the man of the house was already back at work, framed in the light in his studio control room, cradling a guitar. But before we said our goodbyes he had this to say about his band’s forthcoming album:

‘With the last album we were too concerned with being
musical
. When we went out and did that acoustic tour it made us feel like a band of musicians, like we were doing something a lot more than just turning on a fucking DAT machine and bouncing around to lasers, so that had a lot to do with the last album, making it more than just four-chord shit. But it seems like every album we’ve made is a result of the one that came before it, or a response to it. And we haven’t made a really heavy, full-on eleven-song rock record in a long time. There are a few bands that later in their career have made one album that kinda defines the band: it might not be their best album, but it’s the one people identify the band with the most, like [AC/DC’s]
Back in Black
or the
Metallica
record. It’s like you take all of the things that people consider your band’s signature characteristics and just amplify them and make one simple album with that. And that’s what I thought we could do with Butch, because Butch has a great way of trimming all the fat and making sense of it all. And I think that’s what he’s done with this shit. We have a tendency to over-complicate things. But now it’s time for us to go out and be a rock band again. Someone has to do it, right?’

Wasting Light
was released on 11 April 2011 in the UK and one day later in the US, emerging to the most enthusiastic reviews of the band’s career. ‘Most bands struggle to follow a Greatest Hits abum,’ noted Johnny Dee in his 8 out of 10 review for
Classic Rock
. ‘Foo Fighters have followed theirs with a record that sounds like another Greatest Hits album. They’re unstoppable.’
Q
awarded the album 4 out of 5, and hailed the ‘indecently thrilling’ collection as a ‘career-defining return’.
MOJO
too considered
Wasting Light
worthy of a 4/5 review, with Stevie Chick applauding ‘high velocity thrills from the master of unreconstructed rock’. And
Rolling Stone
’s David Fricke wrote, ‘If you ever thought Foo Fighters were Nirvana-lite because Grohl lacked Cobain’s torment, get ready to apologise.’

The record-buying public responded with enthusiasm. In topping the
Billboard
chart,
Wasting Light
racked up first-week sales of 235,000 units in the US, their second-highest sales week ever. The album also hit the No. 1 spot on a further eleven national charts, including those of the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and Germany. In the months prior to the album’s release, after analysing chart figures worldwide, media organisations had devoted countless column inches to the idea that rock music is ‘dead’, with veteran US DJ Paul Gambaccini, the self-appointed ‘Professor of Pop’, declaring, ‘It is the end of the rock era. It’s over, in the same way the jazz era is over. That doesn’t mean there will be no more good rock musicians, but rock as a prevailing style is part of music history.’
Wasting Light
stands as a rather robust, defiant rebuttal of such a foolish notion.

The key to unlocking the album is contained within ‘I Should Have Known’, the most nakedly emotional song Grohl has ever penned. Grohl can be a maddeningly oblique lyricist, comfortable only when dealing with universal themes which give little of his own heart away, but ‘I Should Have Known’ is a raw, haunting tale of personal loss so laden with guilt and regret that listening in almost feels like an intrusion. Given added pathos by mournful accordion and fuzzed-out bass riffs supplied by Grohl’s erstwhile Nirvana bandmate Krist Novoselic, the song will inevitably be interpreted as an elegy for Kurt Cobain, but while Grohl has acknowledged that it’s a tribute to those he has loved and lost, the true inspiration behind the track is his lifelong companion Jimmy Swanson, who passed away on 18 July 2008 as a result of a drug overdose. In Swanson, Grohl always saw himself, or rather a version of himself that would exist had fate not dealt him a different hand; just as ‘Word Forward’ on Foo Fighters’
Greatest Hits
collection opens with the poignant lyric ‘
Goodbye Jimmy, farewell youth
’, lines here such as ‘
I should have known, I was inside of you
’ and ‘
I cannot forgive you yet, to leave my heart in debt
’ carry an almost unbearable emotional charge.

But in undertaking this painful soul-mining, and revisiting the memories he shared with Swanson, Grohl uncovered the source materials for the most life-affirming album of his career. The songs on
Wasting Light
, delivered with the same breathless intensity and hunger Grohl brought to his earliest band practices in Springfield garages and basements, can be considered his ‘thank you’ notes to the artists that soundtracked the adolescence he shared with Swanson, and to the life experiences which blossomed as a consequence of that musical education. As such, there are nods to Grohl’s past dotted throughout the album. ‘I Should Have Known’ features the lyric ‘
came without a warning
’, a subtle allusion to the title of the opening track of Scream’s début album
Still Screaming
. ‘Bridge Burning’ references Revolution Summer’s definitive anthem ‘Dance Of Days’ and namechecks both Ian MacKaye’s Embrace and Alec MacKaye’s Faith. And in ‘Arlandria’, a song titled in tribute to the area of Virginia in which Grohl was raised, over bouncing, thrust-and-drag guitars the 42-year-old sings, ‘
My sweet Virginia, I’m the same as I was in your heart,
’ a proud boast that the teenage punk within him will never be silenced.

At other points, links with Grohl’s past are musical rather than lyrical. ‘White Limo’ melds the red-eyed bruiser-punk of Queens of the Stone Age’s ‘Quick and to the Pointless’ with the kinetic fury of Refused’s ‘New Noise’ to deliver a rasping rave-up which Motörhead’s Lemmy could have proudly fathered, while ‘Rope’, with its angular, colliding art-punk guitar riffs, could have been lifted from an unreleased Dain Bramage demo tape.

Wasting Light
most explicitly acknowledges Grohl’s formative musical influences, however, with the appearance of Bob Mould on the Hüsker Dü-esque ‘Dear Rosemary’. Grohl met Hüsker Dü’s frontman for the first time at the 9:30 Club’s 30th Anniversary party in Washington DC on 31 May 2010, and was moved to tell his teenage hero that he’d been ripping him off musically for 15 years. The pair swapped phone numbers, and on 27 September Mould was invited to Grohl’s home to trade vocal lines on ‘Dear Rosemary’.

‘I think he’s known for a long time that I’m a huge Hüsker Dü fan, as is anybody from my musical generation,’ Grohl told me. ‘He’s a legend, an American hero. So I texted him and said, “Hey, I have this song I think you should come down and sing with me on.” And I’ve never done a duet, outside of the Norah Jones thing, and it turned into a duet and it works perfectly. He walked in and said, “Okay, well, where should I start?” and we said, “Well, why don’t you start just by doing harmonies?” And he has such a signature sense of melody and composition, and the sound of his voice is the same – it hasn’t changed whether it’s
Copper Blue
or
Zen Arcade
or whatever, his voice is his voice – so when he started singing our jaws just dropped, like, “Oh my God, that’s the voice!” And then I intentionally left the bridge unfinished so that the two of us could collaborate on a part, and it turned out so well that at one point he said, “Yeah, that’s basically
Copper Blue
right there.” It was so easy, he was a pleasure to work with and a pleasure to hang with.’

Inevitably, though, it was Krist Novoselic’s guest appearance on the album which attracted most commentary. For snarky online commentators, the idea that Grohl would reunite three of the four men responsible for making
Nevermind
as the album’s 20th anniversary approached was opportunistic and conceited. For Grohl himself, however, the motivation was pure and straightforward: Novoselic and Vig are family. ‘I’d have to be pretty stupid to think it would go unnoticed!’ he acknowledged in 2010. ‘When we recorded with Butch last year I had so much fun just being in the studio with him again. We only recorded those two songs but it was the same feeling, it reminded me of making
Nevermind
in 1991 – not the music, just the experience of being with Butch. And we’d talked about making an album together again for years, we started talking about it in 2000 for the fourth record, his name always comes up whenever it’s time to make a record. And after recording those two songs I thought, “Okay, it’s time, it’s time to work with Butch.” And then I realised that it’s also going to be the 20th anniversary of
Nevermind
. So I can either keep that from letting me make a record with Butch, or just not pay attention to it, because the idea of making this album with Butch in this way and having Krist come down and play on it is all for the sake of not being afraid of that. Does that make any sense?

‘Ultimately what we’re doing here isn’t meant to recreate what happened 20 years ago, it’s more of a reminder that we’re here for the same reason, and we’ve all survived: we’re fathers and we have families and we still love making music the same as we did 20 years ago. I know that when the album comes out there will be a ton of unneeded pressure and a lot of the focus will be on the fact that Butch and I are working together again after 20 years and that Krist Novoselic is playing bass on one song, and I’m okay with that, it’s totally fine. I love our album, I think it’s great, but it’s a Foo Fighters record, it’s not a Nirvana record, and it’s important that people realise that I’m here to make a Foo Fighters record and not a Nirvana record. Krist and I are still great friends, we talk all the time and see each other a lot, and there’s no question that this year will be a big year for Krist and I because of that anniversary, but what we’re doing here isn’t about that.’

Wasting Light
is no
Nevermind
, nor was it ever intended to be, but it shares with that album an unselfconscious, unabashed love of volume, noise and melody, and a simplicity of purpose which echoes with memories of jam sessions in a spartan Tacoma rehearsal room before life got complicated. Grohl isn’t looking to subvert rock ’n’ roll, but rather to celebrate it – for Jimmy, for Kurt, for every kid whose life has been changed by a seven-inch slice of black vinyl delivering three chords and the truth – and nowhere is this more evident than on album-closer ‘Walk’, an anthem so open-hearted and optimistic it risks tipping into mawkish sentimentality. As waves of guitar build and roar behind him, Grohl screams, ‘
I never wanna die!
’ over and over, a howl of exultation rooted in DC punk positivity and delivered with electrifying, undeniable conviction. Closing out an album which both consciously and unconsciously sets Dave Grohl’s whole life into context, it’s a sentiment that betrays the singer’s fervent belief that his future starts here.

In the same week that
Wasting Light
débuted atop the
Billboard
200, a new exhibition opened at the Experience Music Project in Seattle. Titled ‘Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses’, the interactive exhibition celebrates not only the music and history of Seattle’s most iconic grunge collective, but also traces – via oral histories delivered on film by underground icons such as Greg Ginn, Ian MacKaye, Steve Albini, Mike Watt, Keith Morris, Mark Arm and the B-52s’ Kate Pierson – the evolution and development of the American punk rock underground community. In display cases hewn from elm trees grown on Krist Novoselic’s farmland in rural Washington, more than 140,000 cultural artefacts related to popular music are on show: among them the black Fender Stratocaster smashed by Kurt Cobain during the recording of ‘Endless Nameless’ at Sound City during the
Nevermind
sessions; the T-shirt Cobain wore in the ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ video; one of Dave Grohl’s Tama drumkits; and Grohl’s handwritten set-list for Foo Fighters’ first Seattle club show at the Velvet Elvis, alongside thousands of flyers, photographs, ticket stubs and Krist Novoselic’s teenage record collection. It’s a fascinating, illuminating exhibition.