This is a Call (44 page)

Despite the trauma and instability of both his private and professional life, Grohl hid his problems from the public gaze. Having secured a promise from Smear that the guitarist would remain by his side until a suitable replacement could be found, on 2 May 1997 Grohl was back in London, performing ‘Monkey Wrench’ on Channel 4’s Friday night entertainment show
TFI Friday
, with his trademark beaming smile fixed firmly on his face. As Foo Fighters hit the promotional trail for the release of their second album, to the outside world at least, Grohl appeared ready to take on the world.

The Colour and the Shape
was released on 20 May 1997, to somewhat mixed reviews. Cutting-edge electronica, as supplied by The Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers, was now the flavour of the month among music critics, and rock bands touting glossy, shiny rock anthems aimed squarely at the mainstream were considered decidely
déclassé
. Jessica Hopper’s review of the album in
Spin
encapsulated the patronising tone of many of the initial notices received by
The Colour and the Shape
: in her six out of ten critique, Hopper pegged Grohl as ‘a simple rock guy in a simple rock band who occasionally manages to write some really good songs’.

‘He’ll probably never come up with a godhead masterpiece,’ Hopper concluded, ‘but then again, he already played drums on one.’

Rolling Stone
too referenced Nirvana in their review, noting that Foo Fighters’ eponymous début album had been ‘hungrily received by a nation of Nirvana fans looking for a substitute’. For writer Christina Kelly, the second Foo’s album was ‘over-produced’, with a ‘big, radio-ready, modern rock sound’: ‘Screaming can get boring,’ Kelly noted tartly, ‘but it’s what Grohl does best.’

Many of the album’s UK reviews were equally ambivalent. ‘At it’s worst,’ wrote
Select
, ‘[the album] puts remarkably little distance between Foo Fighters and any run-of-the-mill band with tattoos, big shorts, bleached hair and a bug up their ass.’ ‘There is a touch of desperation about the album,’ wrote Andy Gill in the
Independent
, ‘as if Dave Grohl and his cronies realise that there’s not that much mileage left in this kind of lumpen, overwrought American rock.’

In May 1997 I reviewed
The Colour and the Shape
for
Kerrang!
magazine. Awarding the album a maximum 5K rating, I celebrated it as ‘one of the most captivating and sublime collections of songs you’ll hear this year.’ Fourteen years on I stand by those words.

The album can be read as a quest, one lost soul’s attempt to make sense of a world crumbling beneath his feet. It opens with Grohl whispering, ‘
In all of the time that we’ve shared I’ve never been so scared
’ (‘Doll’), then descends into the noisy rush of ‘Monkey Wrench’, a song dealing with the exhilaration that comes with overcoming feelings of entrapment, claustrophobia and suffocation. The track concludes with Grohl singing, ‘
I was always caged and now I’m free
,’ and from this point on the album is in freefall, as the singer tries to take stock of his changing world. There are songs about love and obsession (‘Everlong’, ‘Up in Arms’), about insecurity and betrayal (‘Walking After You’, ‘February Stars’) and about childhood dreams and adult responsibilities (‘Hey Johnny Park’, ‘My Hero’). Throughout Grohl flits between rage and reconciliation, but the album closes (on ‘New Way Home’) on a positive note, with the newly empowered, emancipated singer screaming ‘
I’m not scared
’ as he faces up to an uncertain future.

An artistic triumph,
The Colour and the Shape
was also a confirmed commercial success. The album reached number 10 on the
Billboard
200 and peaked at number 3 in the UK; the album also reached the Top Ten in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Looking back, Gil Norton hails the album as ‘a big, bold statement’.

‘It really elevated Dave to where he should be,’ says the producer. ‘It helped established Foo Fighters as a new band and gave Dave the platform to go on to do what he’s done. I’m proud of what we achieved.’

Following a homecoming show of sorts in the parking lot of Tower Records in Rockville, Maryland, Grohl took his new-look Foo Fighters out on the road. Following a UK theatre tour, the band embarked upon a small-scale American club tour, then hit the global festival circuit, appearing at Japan’s FujiRock festival, Germany’s Bizarre Festival, Lowlands in Holland, Pukkelpop in Belgium, England’s V97 festival and Ireland’s Feile. The shows were strong and, despite the clock ticking on Pat Smear’s tenure in the band, morale was high, due in no small part to the effervescent Hawkins. ‘I think I helped bring Dave out of his shell a bit,’ says the drummer. ‘We were young bachelors at the time and I remember saying to Dave, “Hey man, you were the fucking drummer in Nirvana, get rid of your punk rock ethos and let’s go find some chicks!” On a personal level it was easy to fit in.’

On 29 August, at the start of Labor Day weekend, the quartet returned to Seattle to play the 27th annual Bumbershoot Festival at the city’s Memorial Stadium. It would prove to be an emotional, historic night.

Opening his band’s set with ‘This Is a Call’, Grohl told the 75,000 strong crowd that Foo Fighters were now ‘officially associated with stadium rock!’The quartet then tore through a fifteen-song set, climaxing with ‘New Way Home’, with Seattle’s adopted son drawing huge, appreciative cheers as he sang of driving to his Shoreline home past ‘
the boats and the King Dome
’. Those cheers were just fading when Krist Novoselic walked onstage holding his bass guitar. With Grohl on drums and Pat Smear on vocals, the trio launched into covers of ‘Purple Rain’ by Prince and Led Zeppelin’s ‘Communication Breakdown’. The final song carried a certain amount of irony, for unbeknown to the crowd this would be Pat Smear’s last full show with Foo Fighters for nine years.

‘When he left I was kinda happy to see him go, to be honest,’ recalls Grohl. ‘In those few months shit went really south with Pat and I, it was not a good few months. And it took a while for Pat and I to talk again – I don’t know how long, it was a few years. He had finally got the paperwork [confirming] that he was officially out of Foo Fighters and he sent me a very sweet letter that said, “I’m sorry that it all went down that way, and whether you like it or not we’ll forever be connected by these things, Foo Fighters and Nirvana, and I love you and I hope you’re doing well. And here’s my phone number …” And I immediately called him because I missed him so much. He answered the phone and I think for the first five minutes we just laughed, we didn’t even say anything, we were just laughing at the absurdity of it all. And now he’s back in the fucking band again!’

On 4 September 1997 Pat Smear officially announced his (initial) retirement from Foo Fighters. He did so in the most public way imaginable. The quartet were booked to play outdoors on the balcony of New York’s iconic Radio City Music Hall for MTV’s Video Music Awards; after a storming run through ‘Monkey Wrench’, Smear stepped up to the mic and declared that he was leaving the group.

‘The last song we played was my last song with the band,’ he said. ‘I’d like to introduce you to Franz Stahl, who’ll be taking over. Rock on, guys!’

Franz Stahl had been tipped off by his brother Pete that he might get a call about joining Foo Fighters. While his older brother was tour managing Dave Grohl’s band, Franz Stahl was in Japan, playing guitar with Jun ‘J’ Osone, bassist of the hugely successful J-Rock band Luna Sea, then just striking out as a solo artist. When the call from Grohl came, Stahl immediately accepted his old friend’s invitation to join the band. On 3 September the guitarist bade farewell to his Japanese friends and flew from Tokyo to Los Angeles and then on to New York to meet up with his new bandmates; the following day, as his father and brother looked on from the street, he was playing ‘Everlong’ in front of a TV audience numbering tens of millions. ‘It was crazy,’ says Stahl, ‘but I couldn’t have been more happy.’

‘When Pat decided to leave I knew we should ask Franz [to join],’ Grohl told me. ‘I’d been in a band with him before, and we’d grown up playing music together and I knew he was a great player and we came from the same place: how could it not work?’

There was precious little time for Stahl to adjust to his new surroundings: two weeks after he joined Foo Fighters, the band kicked off a six-week American tour at the Huntridge Theatre in Las Vegas.
Kerrang!
’s Lisa Johnson, a long-time friend of the group, was invited along to rehearsals to see how the new boy was settling in. She found the band, and their new guitarist, in ebullient spirits.

‘Had Franz not been in Wool at the time, he would’ve been Foo Fighters guitar player when we started the band,’ Dave Grohl disclosed. ‘But he was, and Pat’s awesome and he was a friend, so …’

It would be eleven months before Foo Fighters paused to draw breath again. On the evening of 29 August 1998 Grohl’s band brought down the curtain on their
The Colour and the Shape
world tour with a main stage performance at England’s Reading festival. The weekend was a special one for Dave Grohl, surrounded as he was by familiar faces. His friend Greg Dulli’s Afghan Whigs had a main stage slot on 28 August on a bill topped by ex-Zeppelin duo Page & Plant. Washington DC’s Girls Against Boys, featuring former Lünchmeat men Scott McCloud, Johnny Temple and Alexis Fleisig, were to open up the main stage on 30 August, on a day headlined by Butch Vig’s Garbage. But even as he enthused to friends about his fourth appearance at the legendary weekender, Grohl’s mind, typically, was racing ahead.

‘Now I’m looking forward to our next record more than I ever have been,’ he said. ‘For a while I was thinking, “God, what are we gonna do for our next record?” But Taylor plays piano and guitar and writes songs and sings. Nate writes stuff. It’s just gonna be the freak-out record. And now with Franz I just know it’ll be this big, strong … rock opera! We have to do it. It’s time for our version of The Beatles’
White Album.
’

It was spring 1999 before Foo Fighters regrouped to make their third album. By now Grohl had tired of living the bachelor lifestyle in Los Angeles and had relocated to Virginia, where he purchased a family home at 1800 Nicholson Lane in Alexandria, just minutes from his former high school. It was in the basement of this house that the third Foo Fighters’ album was created. But before the band arrived at this stage, Grohl had some painful housekeeping to attend to.

Issues with Franz Stahl began to arise as soon as the quartet reconvened to begin writing for the new album. Grohl had booked the band into Barco Rebar, a small rehearsal space in Falls Church, Virginia, just minutes from the site of his very first Scream audition with Stahl, but the sessions were stilted and unproductive … or at least they were when the band jammed as a quartet.

‘We didn’t have any songs so we had a rehearsal space in Virginia and everyone would fly out and we’d jam for a week or two and write, and then break off for a month and then come back and do it again,’ Grohl recalls. ‘And in those rehearsals Taylor, Nate and I really started to click, we really started to play together, and it was the first time our band started to feel like a band, where everyone was contributing and it was starting to sound like Foo Fighters. There’s a song off that third record called “Aurora”, which is still one of our favourite songs, and it means a lot to us because that was one of the first songs we wrote for the third record and it just came out of nowhere: the three of us pulled it together and it really seemed like a new beginning for the band, so that I didn’t feel responsible as the composer any more. I was like, “Wow, this is a band, we could do beautiful things together.”