This is a Call (47 page)

‘I think honestly what happened is that we started working too soon on the record,’ is Grohl’s admission. ‘We just weren’t ready to do it. We started in on it again before we were ready, before Taylor was ready, before the songs were ready: we felt obligated, in a way. That’s kinda the difference between the first album and the fourth album. In a way they were both made for the same reason – the first album, unconsciously – but the fourth album was a conscious attempt at healing the band. And it didn’t work. It had the opposite effect.’

‘We just weren’t ready,’ Hawkins agrees. ‘We were almost forcing ourselves to make that record. And it just wasn’t right.

‘I think that I just wanted to stay busy. I wasn’t quite at home with my new lifestyle yet, so I didn’t know anything other than “I should be working.” But looking back, I probably could have used three or four months to get my head together.’

Perhaps adhering to the maxim that creativity is 90 per cent perspiration and only 10 per cent inspiration, force themselves to make an album is exactly what Foo Fighters did. Ensconced in Grohl’s home on Nicholson Lane with producer Adam Kasper and recording engineer Nick Raskulinecz, throughout November and much of December 2001 the musicians fought to regain their creative mojo, and struggled to recapture the sense of unity and creativity that had informed their previous sessions at 606. Each day Grohl would bring into the studio the bare bones of a song – he had 20 or so such sketches that he hoped would serve as the framework onto which he and his colleagues might graft a completed composition – and at the end of each day these ideas would have amounted to naught. As time ticked on, stagnation set in. By the time Christmas 2001 had become the new year of 2002, the band’s plan to record their fourth album in a homely and organic setting in Virginia had been ditched. Instead, the band shifted their operational HQ back to the West Coast, to Conway Studios, a state-of-the-art facility set in tropical gardens on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. Conway had previously played host to sessions by Soundgarden, Beck, Fleetwood Mac and U2, and was considered one of the most luxurious, and expensive, studios in the city, a far cry from Grohl’s humble set-up at 606. But in going from chalk to cheese Foo Fighters also went from bad to worse.

‘Nothing was being accomplished,’ Grohl told me. ‘The songs lacked any sort of life, they were just weird carbon-copy versions of songs that they were meant to be. It’s hard to explain. And then someone would come in and record half a track and go, “Okay, I gotta go see my acupuncturist, I’ll be back later,” and meanwhile we’re paying $4,000 a day for this room …’

As if things could hardly have been any more complicated, or disheartening, for the principal players, into this scenario stepped Queens of the Stone Age, a band having a little local difficulty in the studio themselves in 2001. Formed from the ashes of cult Palm Desert stoner/psychedelic riff monsters Kyuss, and piloted by that band’s guitarist Josh Homme – a man whose effortless cool earned him the nickname ‘The Ginger Elvis’ – and his mercurial wingman Nick Oliveri, by 2000 the ‘robot riff ’ collective already had two stellar albums to their credit, 1998’s self-titled début and
Rated R
, released two years later. During the early part of the 2000s one would have been hard pressed to nominate a more critically acclaimed or creatively vibrant rock band.

‘We had Queens of the Stone Age on tour with us for a really long time in 2000,’ says Grohl, ‘and instead of putting “Queens of the Stone Age” on their dressing room door we used to put “Critic’s Choice” because they were the coolest band in the world. And honestly, we thought that too.

‘I first met Josh in 1992, at a show at the Off Ramp in Seattle as Kyuss were touring with Pete Stahl’s band, Wool and The Obsessed. This was the first time I’d seen Kyuss and I was blown away, they were fucking great. They seemed like us, like kids who grew up in the suburbs listening to rock ’n’ roll records, doing petty crime and drugs, just little vandals from the middle of nowhere.

‘So in 2000, as we were touring with Queens of the Stone Age, someone asked me what was my biggest regret of the year 2000 and I said it was that I didn’t get asked to play on the Queens of the Stone Age
Rated R
record. So Josh said, “Dude, if you want to come and play on a couple of songs on this new record why don’t you do it?” So we went in and recorded a couple of songs – an early version of “Little Sister” and the song “… Millionaire”, the first song on the record – and then I split. Then Taylor wound up in the hospital, and we came back and Josh called me and said, “Hey dude, what are you doing?” I was driving up the Pacific Coast highway going to the beach, so I said, “Just heading up to the beach.” He said, “Dude, things aren’t working out with our drummer. Do you want to play on our whole record?” And I said, “Absolutely. I’ll be there at eight o’clock.” I made a U-turn and went straight back to the studio, a studio that was owned by the producer Eric Valentine in Hollywood. And we recorded the drums for the
Songs for the Deaf
album in like, ten days, maybe two weeks.

‘And so then I told them I would help them find a new drummer. I said, “So what about [former Kyuss drummer] Brandt Bjork? Let’s get Brandt, man, fuck, that’d be amazing, the three of you together again? That would be unbelievable.” So I get on the phone with Brandt, and I say, “Dude, have you heard the stuff?” And he’s like, “Yeah, I’ve heard it, but …” I don’t remember how the conversation went, but he wasn’t into it. And then there’s this other drummer, [former Page & Plant sticksman] Michael Lee, so I’m like, “Josh, there’s this guy Michael Lee, you’re gonna freak out, he’s perfect, he’s fucking unbelievable, let me call him.” So I called up Michael Lee. And once Michael Lee was interested I thought, “Uh-oh, that guy is the most amazing drummer in the world, so maybe I should do one show with Queens of the Stone Age before Michael Lee does.” And so we set up a show at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, and we started rehearsing for it.

‘At night I’d go rehearse in a closet with Queens and I’d be in the best band in the world. And then I’d come back to Foo Fighters studio and be totally dismayed by the apathy and lack of any sort of passion. So things started getting tense in the studio.’

With work on Foo Fighters’ forthcoming album understood to be nearing an end – and recording costs now sailing towards a cool one million dollars after two months in Alexandria and almost three months at Conway – in March 2002 the Foos invited the world’s press into their lair. Unaware of the tensions behind the scenes at Conway, RCA, the group’s record label, flew English journalist Ian Winwood to Los Angeles to write a cover feature previewing the album for the readers of
Kerrang!

‘Even the most dysfunctional bands are loath to air their laundry in public, at least not at the time that it’s happening,’ says Winwood, reflecting back on the experience almost a decade on. ‘There’s also a tendency in journalists, especially journalists with less experience, which would have been me at the time, to want to believe the best of a given situation, especially with a band as likeable as Foo Fighters. So at first glance it seemed that everything at Conway Studios was just fine. Dave was commanding company, cracking jokes and telling everyone how he’d just spent many thousands of dollars on a gun-metal BMW M5. He also played a selection of new songs through the speakers in the studio’s console room. Looking back on the occasion, and knowing what I now know about what life in the camp was like at that time, it seems quite obvious to me that there were signs that all was not well, signs that I should really have picked up on.

‘I remember being with Taylor Hawkins in one of the rooms, and him asking me what I honestly thought of the songs that I’d just heard. It’s always difficult listening to new songs in the company of the people that wrote and recorded them – even if you really like the material you sound like a sycophant when you try and find a way of articulating this – but the truth is that Foo Fighters songs I’d been played hadn’t really made much of an impression on me at all, so I was more concerned with couching my answers in diplomatic terms without betraying myself or telling an outright lie. It seems obvious now that had I been listening properly to what I was being asked I would have sensed that the reason Taylor was asking me what I really thought of the songs was because Taylor himself wasn’t at all sure about them. No one in the band was.’

Winwood, though, didn’t know the half of it. As Grohl and Hawkins posed in Conway’s smart garden area, pulling faces for photographer Tony Wooliscroft, the pair’s expressions showed no trace of the argument that had taken place away from prying ears just moments before, an argument that had potentially taken Foo Fighters to the point of fracture.

‘I remember getting into a fight in the control room with the
Kerrang!
people outside,’ Grohl recalls. ‘It wasn’t even a fight, just people making little jabs and little comments here and there. And I said, “Okay, do you want me to go and tell those guys that we’re going to break up right fucking now? Because I will. We can if you want.” And then the room was kinda silent. We did our photo shoot and we did our stuff and then I played the show with Queens of the Stone Age.’

By all accounts, Dave Grohl’s live début with Queens of the Stone Age was a magical evening:
Kerrang!
later hailed it as ‘a classic, once in a lifetime show, one of those rare nights that seems to last forever and yet is over all too soon’. Billed as ‘An Evening of Communion and Fellowship’, it took place on 7 March 2002 at the Troubadour club at 9801 Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. It was Dave Grohl’s first full live set behind a drum kit since Nirvana’s 1 March 1994 show in Germany.

The choice of venue also came steeped in history. Since opening its doors in 1957, the Troubadour has provided the setting for early performances by artists such as Elton John, Fleetwood Mac and Tom Waits; it was here, too, that the ‘hair metal’ scene brought to international prominence by Mötley Crüe and Guns N’ Roses in the 1980s was incubated. With its black walls and claustrophobic interior the venue may rightly be described as a toilet, but it is a toilet with hundreds of famous signatures on its walls.

Dave Grohl saw many friends descend on the legendary Los Angeles club on the evening of 7 March. One notable comrade, however, was conspicuous by his absence: the man at whose hospital bedside he had sat for day after day the previous summer.

‘It was the first time I’d played a show on drums since Nirvana,’ says Grohl. ‘It was a big deal for me, it had been a long time. There were people in the audience I’d known for five or six years, close friends, that had never seen me play the drums before. It was a part of me that I hadn’t revisited in a long fucking time. And the one person who wasn’t there was Taylor. And that really hurt me. It was like him not turning up for my wedding or something.’

‘I can see why that would be hurtful,’ Taylor Hawkins admits. ‘The funny thing is Dave and I have never discussed this, but I can guess we can discuss it here. Now that we’ve all gone off and done other things it’s not as big of a deal, but at that time that was the first time any of us had gone off to do something else and the band was at a point where we were not really looking good. And to me, going to see Dave play with Queens would have almost been like going to see your girlfriend fuck some other dude. I know he wasn’t trying to hurt me, he was just out doing what he wanted to do and enjoying what he wanted to do, but I think if he gave it real thought to what was going on at the time with the band, he’d have to understand that him playing with someone else and us being at the point where our band was falling apart was a little hurtful to me.

‘It was a tough time, and I wasn’t really interested in going to see Dave play with another band when our band felt like we were breaking up. He’s never even said anything about this to me really, but I understand. While on one hand I was excited for Dave as a friend – as a friend I’m always excited for Dave playing with someone else and enjoying flexing his musical muscles – but on a band level, on our little family level, I was upset. I wasn’t exactly over the moon that Dave was enjoying his rise with Queens of the Stone Age, because to me that spelt out the end of this.’

‘Me and Dave get along the best,’ Hawkins once told me, ‘but we don’t get along the best either, do you know what I mean? Because we’re more like brothers. He can really hurt my feelings worse than anybody else. I’m not just talking about the music or whatever, he knows how to fucking make me feel like shit if he wants to. And I know how to fucking press his buttons too, I know where his weaknesses and insecurities are. And that can be a hard thing for us. He doesn’t like too many people to know too much about him.’

With communications in his own band at all-time low, on 24 April Grohl returned to the Troubadour for a second time with Homme and Oliveri. This time, joined by A Perfect Circle guitarist Jeordie White (formerly known as Marilyn Manson sidekick Twiggy Ramirez) the trio took to the stage as the cast of Oliveri’s side-band Mondo Generator. This too was a truly remarkable night, a gig I count myself fortunate to have seen. Officially Oliveri’s ragtag collective were playing in support to local punks Amen, but the fact that a good 80 per cent of the paying audience filed back out into the muggy LA night air as soon as Mondo Generator finished their set told the real story of the evening.

For Grohl, the camaraderie, spontaneity and slightly unhinged nature of the gig brought his own band’s current malaise into perspective, too much fucking perspective as Spinal Tap once pithily observed. It was at this point that he decided that the desperate circumstances in which his band found itself required drastic actions as a means of, if not redemption, then at least stopping the rot. With his band having authored music that for the most part they did not care for, and certainly did not believe in, Grohl took the executive decision to take what had been recorded thus far and simply toss it in the bin. When one considers the notion of artistic integrity – or perhaps the concept of what it means to be ‘punk rock’ – the willingness of a band to put its money where its mouth is to the tune of something like one million dollars is a hard gambit to top.