This is a Call (46 page)

Born on 6 May 1971 in Santa Barbara, California, Christopher Aubrey Shiflett first picked up a guitar at age 11: by 14, his first band, the cutely titled Lost Kittenz, were playing garages and backyard parties in the wealthy beach town. Originally a fan of Kiss, Dio and the sleaziest rock ’n’ roll bands strutting on Sunset Strip, by his mid-teens Shiflett had discovered punk rock; one of his early bands, Rat Patrol, actually supported Scream in Santa Barbara. The guitarist landed his first ‘serious’ gig in rather fortunate circumstances: he was working in the San Francisco office of Fat Wreck Chords, the punk rock imprint owned by NOFX mainman Fat Mike, when he heard that guitarist Ed Gregor from No Use for a Name, one of the label’s most popular acts, had quit the band; one noisy audition later Shiflett was a professional punk rocker. Four years on, he heard a similar rumour about Foo Fighters.

‘I was a huge Foo Fighters fan,’ says Shiflett. ‘My friend had a cassette of the first album way before it was even out, and I loved it. And when the second record came out I was an even bigger Foo Fighters fan. Of all the big rock bands of that era they were by far my favourite. In the summer of 1999, No Use for a Name had just made a new record and we were getting ready to go on tour, when I heard from a friend that Foo Fighters were looking for a guitar player. I was like, “Dude, you
gotta
get me an audition.” He knew somebody that worked at their law firm and he actually managed to get me an audition. Then I just sat down in my room and played along with those first two records for a week.’

One week after his first audition, Shiflett received a call from Dave Grohl inviting him back down to Los Angeles for a second try-out. That evening he joined the band at the Sunset Marquis hotel to drink into the small hours. The following day he received a second phone call from a hungover Grohl.

‘Say goodbye to your friends,’ said Foo Fighters’ frontman. ‘You’re going on tour.’

With Foo Fighters dates in Australia, Canada and the USA under his belt, Shiflett had clocked up significant air miles even before
There Is Nothing Left to Lose
dropped. Released on 2 November 1999, the album débuted in the Top Ten in both the United Kingdom and United States, and in the Top Five in Australia and Canada. Not everyone was taken by the band’s new blissed-out atmospherics, however. ‘The artist formerly known as Grunge Ringo remains stuck in the generic grunge mediocrity mire,’ snipped
NME
.
Kerrang!
was rather kinder: ‘Grohl has seemingly discovered where his biggest strength lies – tugging at heartstrings rather than slashing at powerchords.’ Falling somewhere between the two,
Rolling Stone
rather meekly commented, ‘
There Is Nothing Left to Lose
is distinguished by its punky guitar-bass-drums directness. In almost every way it is a more modest effort than its predecessor.’

But of all the words devoted to weighing up the band’s latest offering, the most significant piece of writing around
There Is Nothing Left to Lose
appeared not in a magazine or newspaper, but rather came inked on the neck of the Foo Fighters’ inspirational leader. Chosen to adorn the cover of the album, the simple ‘FF’ logo inked by Londoner Lal Hardy was Dave Grohl’s own subtle way of asserting that, for all the tumult and tension of the past years, his band was here to stay. He was not to know that the Foo Fighters’ most challenging years still lay ahead.

Disenchanted lullaby

When Taylor overdosed that was the first time in my life that I ever considered quitting playing music. Because it had got to the point where I wondered if music just equalled death.
Really?
Because I’m in it for the fucking music, but I don’t want to do it if everyone is just going to die all the time …

Dave Grohl

On the eve of Dave Grohl’s 32nd birthday, Foo Fighters brought the curtain down on their fourteen-month-long
There Is Nothing Left to Lose
world tour in front of 200,000 fans at the Rock in Rio festival in Rio de Janeiro. As he blew out the solitary candle on the birthday cake presented to him mid-set by his new girlfriend, 28-year-old former Hole/Smashing Pumpkins bassist Melissa Auf der Maur, Grohl had every reason to believe that 2001 would be for him a vintage year, both personally and professionally. John Silva already had his schedule for the upcoming twelve months loosely mapped out. The first half of Grohl’s year was to be given over to the writing and recording of the fourth Foo Fighters album, the summer months would see his band swing into Europe for their by-now-traditional high-profile festival shows, and the back end of 2001 would see the quartet return to arenas worldwide once again. By Grohl’s own workaholic standards, it was hardly the most punishing itinerary.

After embracing his girlfriend and saluting the cheering crowd with a heartfelt ‘Obrigado!’, the birthday boy restarted the Foo Fighters’ set with the apposite ‘Next Year’.

‘Into the sun we climb
,’ he sang.
‘Climbing our wings will burn bright. Everyone strapped in tight, we’ll ride it out. I’ll be coming home next year
.’

At the time, Grohl could not possibly have known just how prophetic those lyrics would turn out to be.

After a little time off to reacquaint themselves with the faces of family and friends, and following a band outing to Los Angeles’ Staples Center on 21 February to pick up a brace of Grammy awards for
There Is Nothing Left to Lose
(Best Rock Album) and ‘Learn to Fly’ (Best Short Form Music Video), it was with no real sense of urgency that Foo Fighters regrouped in early March at Taylor Hawkins’s home in the Los Angeles suburb of Topanga Canyon to begin recording demos that they hoped would form the basis for their as-yet-untitled fourth album. Despite Grohl’s avowed aversion to the trappings of Los Angeles, and of Hollywood in particular,
chez
Hawkins provided a setting that was very different from the neon and the nonsense of ‘The Strip’. Arguably Los Angeles’ foremost bohemian enclave, Topanga Canyon had in the past provided the inspiration for Neil Young’s deathless 1970 album
After the Gold Rush
, as well as Joni Mitchell’s
Ladies of the Canyon
collection, released the same year; a generation on the neighbourhood was still providing both shelter and muse for many of Southern California’s artists, musicians and performers. Hawkins’s own home, a three-bedroom property he shared with his two dogs Bud and Pharia, afforded views of both the winking, glistening Pacific Ocean and the canyon. Like its owner, the house had a laid-back, chilled-out feel: visitors to the property were invited to swim in the outdoor pool, bounce skywards on a circular trampoline in the garden or simply stretch out on a hammock slung between two poplar trees to take in the awe-inspiring views. Inspired by Dave Grohl’s decision to install a 24-track recording studio in his home in Alexandria, Hawkins had followed suit by assembling a similar set-up in his own garage. In this setting, playfully dubbed ‘Pussy Whipped Studios’ by the drummer, the working environment came to be informed by ‘vibe’ and ambience as much as it did work rate, notes and melodies.

‘This place is like our own little boot camp,’ Grohl told LA-based writer Joshua Sindell for a studio report filed in
Kerrang!
magazine. ‘The whole idea of building a home studio is just to be in complete control of everything. I will never work another way again. There’s just no way. There’s no clock on the wall, it’s your fucking house, which also means that you’re allowed to decide who’s allowed to come by the studio and who’s not.’

Free from the constraints of the professional recording studio, as well as the considerable expense of making music in such facilities, Foo Fighters demoed their new material at a relaxed pace.

As the days of 2001 grew warmer and longer, Grohl, Hawkins, Mendel and Shiflett committed to tape rough versions of ten to fifteen songs that they hoped would make the grade. Working titles for the new material included ‘Tom Petty’, ‘Knucklehead’, ‘Spooky Tune’, ‘Full Mount’, ‘Lonely as You’ and the mildly amusing ‘Tears for Beers’. In contrast to the laid-back, FM radio vibe of their previous recording, initial reports from the sessions promised a new album high on energy and volume: ‘A lot of the stuff we’ve been writing now has been written with everything [turned up to] eleven,’ explained Grohl, channelling the spirit of Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel.

Tapping a similar vein, Grohl delighted in playing visitors to Hawkins’s home recordings he had made with Hollywood actor/ comedian Jack Black’s new tongue-in-cheek project Tenacious D. He would also preview a clutch of heavier recordings he himself had laid down for a project the world would come to know as
Probot
. But his focus, he maintained, was very much on Foo Fighters, and a collection of songs he considered as strong as any he had recorded in his career to date.

‘There’s freaky time signatures, it’s fucking fast, it’s loud, and some of it’s even tuned down really low, but it also has a great melody to it,’ he revealed. ‘Taylor said to me that this new stuff is the kind of music he’s always wanted to play in a band.

‘I was talking to Taylor about how I think it’s a good idea that we really take our time on this record,’ he added. ‘But we’ve been on a roll. It’s just coming so quickly that we’re all really satisfied.’

With the benefit of hindsight, that quote should perhaps be filed under the heading ‘Famous Last Words’.

Summer 2001 gave Foo Fighters the opportunity to spread their wings and flex their musical muscles on the European festival circuit. With their star in the ascendant, the quartet flew to Germany to play a fifteen-song Friday night set at the Bizarre Festival in Weeze, Germany, on 17 August, before touching down in the UK for appearances at the V Festival. On 18 August the band performed eleven songs for more than 50,000 people gathered in the Weston Park in Staffordshire, and then again the next day to a similar number of faces gathered at Hylands Park in Chelmsford. In the days that followed, the quartet were slated to appear at the hard rock Ilha do Ermal festival in Portugal, as well as in the more intimate surroundings of London’s Forum in Kentish Town and Edinburgh Corn Exchange. Their working holiday in the Old Continent was set to finish at the beautiful Slane Castle estate outside Dublin on 1 September, with an early evening slot warming up a 80,000-strong crowd for the arrival of local heroes U2. But a sudden, shocking turn of events ensured that Foo Fighters would not fulfil the final four bookings of that summer’s tour.

Following their appearance at the Chelmsford leg of the V Festival, the quartet travelled the short distance to London, where they were booked to stay in the stylish Royal Garden Hotel, just off Kensington High Street in the city’s western quarter. The precise details of exactly what transpired in the early hours of 20 August remain somewhat clouded to this day, but what is known, though, is that prior to their morning bus call Dave Grohl was informed that his band’s drummer had overdosed, and had been rushed to the private Wellington Hospital in St John’s Wood in North West London. In the 2011 Foo Fighters documentary film
Back and Forth
Chris Shiflett refers to Hawkins’s hospitalisation as being the result of a heroin overdose, though this has always been strenuously denied by Hawkins himself. Whatever, in the summer of 2001 the seriousness of what had transpired remained largely hidden from public view. A statement released to the press was short and succinct. ‘Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins was hospitalised yesterday [Monday] morning after having apparently overindulged during festivities following the V2001 festival in Chelmsford, UK,’ it read. ‘Hawkins is reported to be in a stable condition. Foo Fighters’ remaining UK and European dates, including the Ilha do Ermal festival in Portugal and a support slot with U2 at Dublin’s Slane Castle, have been cancelled.’

When Dave Grohl could bring himself to talk about the incident, he revealed that Hawkins had fallen into a coma that lasted for ‘maybe ten or twelve days’. Hawkins’s own estimation was that he was without consciousness for around 48 hours. What is certain, though, is that in the days following an event the other three members have come to label ‘Taylor’s little nap’, the drummer’s life was very much in danger.

Speaking to me in 2009, Grohl described his friend’s misadventure in London as being an event that ‘changed everything’.

‘That was the first time in my life that I ever considered quitting playing music,’ he admitted, ‘because it had got to the point where I wondered if music just equalled death.
Really?
Because I’m in it for the fucking music, but I don’t want to do it if everyone is just going to die all the time. It just didn’t seem worth it. I would walk back from that hospital to my hotel every night and talk to God, out loud, as I was walking. I’m not a religious person, but I was out of my mind, I was so frightened, and heartbroken and confused, like, “How could that possibly happen?” It was just not fair, it just wasn’t fair.

‘When that happened to Taylor, I just told everyone that I don’t even want to hear the word Foo Fighters for a long time, until
I’m
ready to fucking say it again. And thank God Taylor survived. So when we brought him back to the States the most important thing from that moment on was that everyone be healthy and happy. Fuck the band, fuck Foo Fighters. And still to this day it’s that way. I love everything about what I do, but the most important thing to me is that people live happily ever after. So then we had this conversation within the band: “Whenever you’re ready, Taylor, you let us know, and we can start working.”’

Speaking for the first time publicly on the subject of his mishap in spring 2002, Taylor Hawkins denied that what had happened in his hotel room in London was the result of the misuse of either cocaine or heroin, but was in fact caused by an addiction to painkillers. Pressed as to what kind of painkillers, the drummer snapped at his interviewer, and said, ‘Just fucking painkillers, okay?’

‘It doesn’t matter what they were,’ he insisted. ‘All that matters is that I had a problem with them. It was a situation that had gotten out of control for me. That’s all. And last summer I took too many of them and I went into a coma for two days. It was very serious. I’ve been into rehab and cleaned up. It’s all in the past. It’s over now and I’ve come through what happened. End of story.

‘Believe me, I’m not proud of what happened,’ he added. ‘I don’t want to celebrate it and I don’t want to dwell on it. I’m happy to clear up what happened, but that’s it. It ends there. It was such a cliché. Member of a rock band – the drummer of a rock band, no less – takes too many drugs, becomes ill, has to go into rehab. If you spell it out it’s just so embarrassing. It’s so obvious.’

Speaking to me in 2009, some eight years after the event, Taylor Hawkins had this to say about the events of that August morning:

‘It was a very difficult time for me. That was when I had to decide if I wanted to be a kid for the rest of my life or to grow up and be a man. I had to let go of … [pauses] There was a lot of things going on in my life personally at the time, and it just sorta culminated in that. But that was my battle, that was my thing to deal with. Dave was there, and everybody was there, and everybody talks about, you know, it was tough for them. But it was no tougher for anybody than it was for me … That was the end of my youth and my stupidity of thinking I was bullet proof. And hopefully I’ve grown up a lot since then.’

Having returned from the United Kingdom to the United States, Dave Grohl, Nate Mendel and Chris Shiflett afforded their bandmate the time and space he needed to at least begin to address his medical and mental needs. By the time summer had given way to autumn, both parties felt the time had come where work on Foo Fighters’ fourth album could recommence. By the autumn the group was reunited in Grohl’s basement studio in Alexandria, recording new material once more. With hindsight, both Grohl and Hawkins now recognise that their desire to see business returning to normal – as if establishing a working routine was all that was required to draw a line beneath the unpleasantness of that summer – as a decision made in haste. It was a mistake from which they were able to repent at painful leisure.