This is a Call (41 page)

When the Foos’ tour with Watt drew to a close in San Diego on 20 May, the band were given two weeks to prepare for their début appearance on foreign soil, at the tiny King’s College student union hall in London on 3 June.

The gig drew rave reviews from those in attendance. But, really, for those paying attention the advent of the summer was not so much about appearances in small clubs in large cities as about the forthcoming début album from the band in question. Two months earlier, in April,
Ker rang!
had been played each of the fifteen songs that comprised Grohl’s demo tape recorded the previous year with Barrett Jones, and had judged the music to be ‘awesome’. By July, shorn of three songs – ‘Winnebago’ and ‘Podunk’ would be used as future B-sides, while the rather excellent ‘Butterflies’ would remain to this day unreleased – Foo Fighters’ eponymous first album was ready to drop.

Released on Dave Grohl’s own Roswell Records, distributed by Capitol Records and featuring artwork by Jennifer Youngblood,
Foo Fighters
was released to the world on 4 July 1995, perhaps tellingly a date known to Americans as Independence Day. Advance press was warm and supportive.
Rolling Stone
awarded the twelve-song set four stars, with the reviewer, Alec Foege, shrewdly observing that ‘Dave Grohl could turn out to be the ’90s punk equivalent of Tom Petty.’
Melody Maker
hailed the album as a ‘play-loud Summer blast’ while its sister paper the
NME
countered that Dave Grohl’s band had recorded a set that was ‘massively important’, praise indeed from a magazine that viewed itself in much the same terms.
Kerrang!
awarded the album a maximum KKKKK rating, predicting that this was a collection that would ‘sell by the millions’.
Q
, as was its habit, was rather more sniffy. ‘Too much may be placed upon Foo Fighters, expectations which Grohl, never regarded as a songwriter or vocalist, hardly deserves or needs,’ wrote John Aizlewood. ‘These expectations may prove to be his undoing, but, just as likely right now, they may yet be his making. He’s done what he can.’

Foo Fighters
is a superb statement of intent. Early in 2011, discussing his approach to songwriting in
Guitar World
, Dave Grohl said this: ‘I approach every song trying to write the biggest chorus I possibly can. But then what I’ll do is use that as the prechorus and go ahead and write an even bigger fucking chorus.’ This formula runs right through
Foo Fighters
, most effectively on three brilliant singles – ‘This Is a Call’, ‘I’ll Stick Around’ and ‘Alone + Easy Target’ – which fuse The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Hüsker Dü and
Trompe Le Monde
-era Pixies into irresistible, fizzing distorto-pop gems. The last of the three shines with such incandescent brilliance that Kurt Cobain actually considered claiming it for Nirvana.

‘I recorded “Alone + Easy Target” at the tail end of 1991,’ Grohl told me. ‘Barrett and I were now living together, and I recorded songs like “Floaty” and “Alone + Easy Target” and maybe “For All the Cows” in our basement. I told Kurt that I was at home recording and he was staying in a hotel in Seattle at the time, as he was living in LA, and he said, “Oh, I wanna hear it, bring it by …” So I went over to his hotel and I played him “Alone + Easy Target”. He was sitting in the bathtub with a Walkman on, listening to the song, and when the tape ended he took the headphones off and kissed me and said, “Oh, finally, now I don’t have to be the only songwriter in the band!” And I said, “No, no, no, I think we’re doing just fine with your songs.” But it was funny, because Nirvana would play the “Alone + Easy Target” riff at soundcheck sometimes. I think he liked the chorus.’

Cobain, of course, would not have the opportunity to hear the other two standout tracks on
Foo Fighters
as both ‘This Is a Call’ and ‘I’ll Stick Around’ were written after his death. The latter song is arguably the most controversial song on the record. Seeking references to Grohl’s painful recent history, fans and critics alike seized upon the song’s incendiary chorus – ‘
I don’t owe you anything
’ – and jumped to the erroneous conclusion that the track was about Nirvana’s late frontman, an interpretation which both embarrassed and irritated Grohl. In reality, with lyrics such as ‘
How could it be I’m the only one who sees your rehearsed insanity?
’, the song is about Courtney Love, though Grohl denied this for years. ‘I don’t think it’s any secret that “I’ll Stick Around” is about Courtney,’ he finally admitted to me in 2009. ‘I’ve denied it for fifteen years, but I’m finally coming out and saying it. Just read the fucking words!’

‘This Is a Call’, the album’s searing opening track, is harder to decipher. Written in a Dublin hotel room while Grohl and Jennifer Youngblood honeymooned in Ireland, the song’s verses contain unfathomable references to fingernails, Ritalin and acne medication Minocin, before exploding into a widescreen chorus – ‘
This is a call to all my past resignations
’ – which sounds suspiciously like a kiss-off to the drama of the Nirvana years.

‘I intentionally wrote nonsensical lyrics, because there was too much to say,’ Grohl told me. ‘I mean, with “This Is a Call” the verse is just bullshit, it’s nothing, I wrote it in a bathroom, but the chorus on the other hand means a lot to me. This was me finally saying goodbye to my past.’

Elsewhere, though,
Foo Fighters
is clearly indebted to Grohl’s past, or rather to his teenage record collection. The breezy and beautiful ‘Big Me’ owes a debt to early R.E.M., the punk-ish ‘Wattershed’ – titled in tribute to Mike Watt’s role in setting Grohl back on his feet – could have been lifted from
Back to Samoa
, while ‘X-Static’ (which features a guitar cameo from Greg Dulli) nods towards the glistening dream-pop soundscapes of My Bloody Valentine. But it would be churlish to suggest that
Foo Fighters
is wholly in thrall to the ’80s: the warmth and wit of the lounge jazz-meets-hardcore fuzz live favourite ‘For All the Cows’ and the slow-burning, blissed-out drawl of ‘Exhausted’ display a new openness and experimental edge to Grohl’s songwriting which suggested he had both the chops and the chutzpah to stride away from familiar formulas and ghosts of the past.

That said, however, in 1995, without exception, each reviewer of the début Foo Fighters collection contextualised the album by referencing Nirvana. This, perhaps, was inevitable. But when it came to discussing the songs on the album, their author proved unwilling to buy into the process. That journalists desired to ask questions regarding not only the music of Grohl’s previous band, but also its messy conclusion, was to be expected, but Foo Fighters’ frontman’s refusal to comment on such matters – for reasons that were probably as political as they were personal, at least in terms of attempting to position his new group as far away as possible from Kurt Cobain’s headstone – ran counter to the expectations and wishes of magazine editors.

‘I understand that people want to know this, but there has to be a line drawn,’ Grohl told
Rolling Stone
firmly. ‘Because the day after your friend dies and
American Journal
wants to talk to you and [ABC news anchor] Diane Sawyer wants to do an interview … It made me so fucking angry. It made me so angry that nothing was sacred anymore. No one could just stop, not even for a day or a year or the rest of our lives, and just shut the fuck up. So I decided that I was just going to be the person to shut the fuck up.’

But while all over the world journalists’ heads were banging against a Dave Grohl-shaped brick wall, over their heads things were going swimmingly. In the UK,
Foo Fighters
débuted at number three in the national albums chart; in the US it entered the
Billboard
Top 200 at number 23. Beyond such bald statistics, more satisfying for Grohl was the idea that those who had bought Foo Fighters’ début album seemed to concentrate on what it was rather than it what is was not, and to accept the group on the terms its creator wished for – as a band in their own right, and not an adjunct of Nirvana.

Evidence of this came late in the summer of 1995, in what would become one of the most famous stories in Foo Fighters’ file. The final weekend of August found the band at Reading festival, the site at which Nirvana had headlined to more than 70,000 people three years earlier. Perhaps wishing to avoid comparisons to this event – one that had quickly attained the status of great cultural significance – Dave Grohl decreed that Foo Fighters’ first appearance at the Berkshire site would be not on the main stage but rather in one of the marquee tents that lay on the fringes of the site. And so it was that on Saturday, 26 August, Grohl’s new band appeared in the wholly unsuitable confines of the
Melody Maker
tent, a facility designed to hold just a few thousand people but which, here, had attracted the attentions of tens of thousands of festival goers, all desiring their first glimpse of Foo Fighters. The set was witnessed by English music journalist Paul Travers, who remembers the occasion well.

‘Whoever decided – and it appears it was Dave Grohl’s idea – that a band with as much ready-rolled interest and anticipation as Foo Fighters should play one of their first-ever UK shows in a smallish tent at Reading needed their head examined,’ he says. ‘Half an hour before they were even due in the tent and its surrounding environs were already jam-packed and it took some serious elbow work to get within sight of the stage. When they did arrive, the place exploded. The walls and ceiling became slicked with sweat and people were passing out from the heat. Others started shinning up the huge supporting pole in the middle of the tent and scrabbling up any climbable bit of structure around the sides. A few made it, to huge applause, to the rigging that started about 15 feet up the central pole and continued straight up to the ceiling. When the power was pulled and Dave announced that he’d just been told the show would be cut if people didn’t get down, it looked for a moment like things might go either way. Thankfully, the most prominent climbers did eventually descend into the waiting arms of security, the power was restored and a potential riot was averted.’

But if Foo Fighters’ appearance at the Reading festival was the most remarkable live appearance the group made in support of their début album, it was far from the only one. In the time between the release of the band’s début and the final date of the tour to support that release, the Foos played no less than 151 concerts worldwide. While some of the dates were glamorous in terms of their profile – on 14 and 15 November 1995 Grohl fulfilled his October 1990 dream of playing on the stage of London’s Brixton Academy not once, but twice – other shows, such as that staged at Paris’s cosy Bataclan theatre, were bookings made by a band willing to work for their audience and earn their wings. This strategy worked, and worked well. Through perspiration as much as inspiration, Dave Grohl’s insistence that Foo Fighters were more than an excursion, and were in fact a band that were here to stay, became a self-fulfilling prophecy. By the time the quartet returned home from the road more than twelve months after the release of
Foo Fighters
, they had to their credit almost two million album sales. Not bad work for a group Grohl feared would be viewed as nothing more than the folly of ‘that guy from Kurt Cobain’s band’.

‘I remember there being a lot of emphasis put on the meaning of that album, or what that album represented,’ he recalled, speaking to me some fourteen years after the fact. ‘I would read reviews and it seemed like to a lot of people it was more than just a demo tape that was recorded down the street, that it was some sort of token continuation, and as with most things I do, I try not to over-think things, or think too much about something like that. I knew what it meant to me to be able to go down and make music. After Nirvana, it was hard for me to even listen to music for a while after Kurt died. So to go into a studio and take thirteen or fourteen songs that I liked the most and book fucking six days, which I considered an eternity, to record those songs, was a big deal to me: it was important that I did that at that time in my life. But I remember there were people that really resented me for having the audacity or gall to fucking keep playing music after Nirvana. It was the most ridiculous thing. I was fucking, what, 25 years old? I was a kid, man. I wasn’t finished.’

‘No one has every said anything to my face, like “You were a fucking asshole for doing this,”’ Grohl told writer Tom Doyle in 1996. ‘But every so often you sense a tinge of resentment. I’m sure that the thing I was supposed to do was become this brooding, reclusive dropout of society and that’s it. Nirvana’s done, I’m done, that’s the end of my life. Fuck that. It was a blast. I miss Nirvana with all my heart; I listen to live bootlegs because I miss it so much. I miss Kurt. I dream about him all the time – I have great dreams about him and I have sad, heart-wrenching, fucked-up dreams about him. I miss it all a lot. But if you’re dealt a fucking hand you deal with it. And I’m not about to drop out and stop living.