This is a Call (48 page)

‘I remember getting a promotional schedule for that album, looking at it and thinking, “Wait a minute, I don’t even like this music, how am I supposed to promote it? How can I tell anyone I’m proud of this when I’m just not?”’ the singer recalls. ‘And to be honest, the last thing in the world the band wanted to do was [for us] to be in the same room as each other. So I thought, “Fuck it, okay, I’m going to play with Queens of the Stone Age for a while, and if the other guys want to be in the band again, then we can be in the band. But right now nobody wants to be in the band.”

‘It’s nice to know that we always have that emergency switch, that we don’t have to be in this band, we don’t have to do anything that we’re doing,’ Grohl told me when the dust had settled. ‘We make commitments and we honour those commitments, but at any time we could always say, “Nah, fuck it, let’s stop.” And we know that, and it’s great. Honestly, I don’t feel obligated to anyone but the other guys in the band, and if the day comes where we all look at each other and say, “Nah, fuck it and fuck you,” it’ll be easy just to pull the switch. And that was about to happen then.’

In switching his attention from his own band to Queens of the Stone Age in 2002, Dave Grohl didn’t so much ‘pull the switch’ on Foo Fighters as press the ‘Alarm’ button.

‘My first thought was, “Man, I’m not even going to get to make a record with these guys? Are you kidding me?”’ says Chris Shiflett. ‘Bands are funny organisations: lines of communications tend to be pretty bad, but you tend to fumble your way through it. But when I heard we’d postponed the album it made me very nervous. Very nervous indeed.’

Temporarily released from the pressures of being bandleader for Foo Fighters, Grohl instead revelled in finding himself once more working in the engine room of a powerful rock band. To prepare for the tour the drummer worked out; on the road he guzzled Crowne Royale whisky, smoked cigarettes, drank coffee and ate pungent cheese as an alternative to the QOTSA-approved list of narcotics eulogised in their crowd favourite, ‘Feel Good Hit of the Summer’. Tiring of journalists continually enquiring as to the future of his own band, Grohl turned down most of the interview requests that came during the time of his busman’s holiday, all of which meant that he was free to do something that it seemed he’d been unable to do for some time – take pleasure in the simple act of making music.

‘Around the time I started playing drums with Queens I got these two red tribal symbols on my arms,’ he told me in 2009, rolling up his T-shirt sleeves to exhibit his tattoos. ‘At the time I didn’t think too much about it, but I think I had these tattoos done because I was getting my arms back. There’s a reason why I’m here, and it’s not my voice, it’s because these arms taught themselves how to play drums by listening to punk rock albums and Led Zeppelin. And so in a way it’s like I have these tattoos as a way to say, “Don’t forget what you’re here to do!”

‘When I joined Queens I think it’s the first time that I’ve ever felt truly confident and strong in a band. After doing that Troubadour show we walked offstage and [sometime QOTSA collaborator] Mark Lanegan said – and this was one of the few things that Mark Lanegan ever said to me – “You know, it’d be a shame just to do that only once.” So my decision was purely musical and motivational: I was now playing drums in the best band I’d ever been in.

‘Being in Queens was one of the greatest experiences of my life without question. If you can say that you were a member of Queens of the Stone Age that’s like wearing a patch on your chest that says “I am a badasss” for the rest of your life, because the only people that get to play in Queens of the Stone Age are badass motherfuckers, and that’s the truth.

‘Walking through the backstage area of a festival with Queens is like the moment in a Western where the saloon bar doors swing open and the piano player stops playing and everyone just stares. You have Josh, Lanegan, Oliveri and me walking in a straight line and it’s like being in the coolest gang. We never had a bad show, every show just got better and better.

‘Playing drums in Queens was like ESP – we barely talked about music, we just made it. It was like the perfect fuck – like fucking the hottest fucking porn star – something that memories and legends are made of. That precise musical connection is something you search for your whole life.’

It was, though, surely inevitable that Dave Grohl’s happy world of escapism with Queens of the Stone Age would soon enough come crashing against the realities that were his obligations as a Foo Fighter, both to his bandmates and to the music that they made together. Like a warning sign flashing on a motorway, the weekend of 27/28 April 2002 must surely have been present in his mind. This was the date of the annual Coachella Music & Arts Festival in Indio, California. The bill for the year in question included The Prodigy, The Strokes, Oasis and Bjork; also booked, albeit on separate days, were Foo Fighters and Queens of the Stone Age.

It was during rehearsals for their appearance at Coachella that unspoken tensions and resentment in the Foo Fighters camp came noisily to the surface.

‘The whole band had a big blow-out,’ explains Grohl. ‘We were trying to write a set list and that turned into a petty, ridiculous little argument where then I thought, “Okay, I think this is probably going to be the last show.” But I didn’t say anything. We started rehearsing, but the vibe was so bad that Chris said, “Hey guys, maybe we should talk this out …” And then it just exploded.

‘There was finger pointing and yelling and, honestly, I thought that would be the last show. And it would be a good way to go.’

‘I was being an asshole,’ says Taylor Hawkins with disarming honesty, ‘so it was mainly Dave and I shouting. I felt that Dave was elsewhere at the time. We had a huge argument, but it did clear the air. That was when Dave let everyone know, “I’m leading this band.” The argument was kinda a bit like, “Don’t question me, everyone can have their opinion, that’s fine, but I’m the leader, I’m gonna have the final word, I’m gonna make the decisions and I’m gonna essentially write the songs.” So that’s when everyone went, “Okay, well, now I understand where we’re at, it’s Dave’s band and Dave’s ideas and if you don’t like it that’s okay, we can agree to disagree, but that’s the final word.” The dynamic changed a little bit then, but in a way it made things easier, it got rid of any lingering questions. Now we know who’s driving the ship. I’m not saying Dave’s a total control freak, because he’s not, he’s interested in everyone’s opinions and he wants everyone to enjoy what they’re doing, but at the same time if he feels strongly about something there’s not much to be discussed.’

In Dave Grohl’s mind, Foo Fighters’ Coachella performance on 28 April 2002 saved his band, “turned everything around”. It was a show that convinced him that Foo Fighters were a powerful, vital band in their own right, and a show that convinced Shiflett, Mendel and Hawkins that Grohl’s focus was unwavering.

Watching from the sidelines, Josh Homme was able to see the situation for what it was, rather than for what it appeared to be to its panicked combatants.

‘I always knew that Dave was going to go back to Foo Fighters, and I knew this was just a classic moment for us,’ he told me in 2009. ‘I was always trying to intimate that this wasn’t something the other guys needed to worry about, but that’s kinda impossible. Band people, and I mean this in a very blanket way, are very easily rattled: many bands don’t last and they’re such an unpredictable animal, so it’s easy to get your confidence rattled. Dave might even have had a moment or two wondering what he was going to do, but I knew. And what was great about that time was that Dave did go back, and that said that it’s possible to have a musical mistress. It would have been terrible if Dave had stayed in Queens, because it would have eliminated and killed the suggestion that you can do multiple things. In a rare moment it proved that having multiple personalities isn’t a bad thing for someone playing music. Once you feel you can do anything in music, that’s when you get closer to God …’

Never mind being closer to God, in spring 2002 Foo Fighters would have settled for being closer to completing their troublesome fourth album. Prior to taking the decision to consign the work recorded in Virginia and at Conway Studios to the bin, Grohl had played a selection of songs for former guitarist Pat Smear. The response from the usually positive guitarist was lukewarm at best.

‘He was the only person to say he didn’t like it,’ says Grohl. ‘He said, like, “I don’t know, it’s not your best.” And we were like, “Fuck you! What are you talking about?” But he was correct. And then of course we threw that in the trash can and fucking did it again.’

In truth, Pat Smear wasn’t the only one harbouring reservations. In his role as engineer on the project, Nick Raskulinecz hadn’t felt it his place to speak out loud regarding his concerns about the quality of the music Foo Fighters were recording, but such concerns did exist. Eventually, at Grohl’s prompting, his true feelings were brought out into the light.

‘I knew it wasn’t as good as it could have been,” says Raskulinecz, ‘but I wasn’t the producer at that point, so it wasn’t really my job in the recording to make those comments. My job was to make it sound good. But Dave called me up point blank one day and asked if I thought the record was as good as it could be and I said, “No, I thought it could be better …” And then he asked me if I thought I could produce it, and we went back to Virginia and tracked the whole album in two weeks.’

‘It took about four months to do those Million Dollar Demos, and that’s far too long for a rock record,’ says Hawkins. ‘Unless you’re doing
A Night at the Opera
. When we went back in, me and Dave had done some demos for five or six new songs, three of which – “Low”, “Times Like These” and “Disenchanted Lullaby” – made it on to the record. And fuck, if those songs weren’t on the record …

‘“All My Life” we had for a long time, not necessarily with all the lyrics, but the basic structure. The same with “Have It All”. But we ended up making them better when we re-recorded them, because we did it without all the technology and ProTools, and went for more of a real human feel, as opposed to this quantised Limp Bizkit version. So when we went back we were just planning on recording these five songs, and adding them to “Have It All” and “All My Life”. But we ended up rearranging a lot of them. “Come Back” is completely unrecognisable from the old version, “Lonely as You” is completely unrecognisable, “Overdrive” is … recognisable, but we put a big line of cocaine on top of it, we did it in an early Police record fashion, as opposed to the sterile “Learn to Fly” fashion that it was originally. And “Burn Away” was completely different. So basically we rearranged a lot of them.’

Even with the foundations for the album laid down in just thirteen days – a work rate that equalled a day for each month Foo Fighters had wasted on recordings that were deemed unfit for purpose – the sessions for the album that would become
One by One
were far from routine. For one thing, time was of the essence, with more Queens of the Stone Age shows crowding the horizon and the start of the summer festival season hovering into view. But necessity being the mother of invention appeared to light a spark that had previously been missing from Foo Fighters’ efforts to make music in the twenty-first century. From 6 to 18 May Grohl and Hawkins hammered out the nuts and bolts of their band’s fourth album with something approaching ease; later in the month, with Grohl back on the QOTSA tour bus, Mendel and Shiflett were trusted to lay down bass guitar and lead guitar parts with Nick Raskulinecz in the absence of their band leader. The recording process may have been unorthodox – Shiflett later described the experience as being a ‘weird, broken way of making a record’, while Hawkins admitted the process was ‘a little bit shoddy’ – but with the band now hundreds of thousands of dollars in hock to their record company the time had clearly arrived to paint in broad strokes rather than to obsess over finer details. And as unorthodox as the process may have been, ultimately it ensured the band’s survival.

‘There’s that cliché, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” and that absolutely applied,’ says Nate Mendel. ‘Stumbling on that record was tough: it was the first time it was hard and it frustrated us, to know that it wasn’t good enough. So what do you do? And then the record came out good and it really crystallised the idea of what we do, it made us realise that we had something valuable that we’d created for ourselves.’