This is a Call (51 page)

‘I’d started the band Goatsnake with Pete Stahl so I’d run into Dave now and again, and every time I’d see him we’d sequester ourselves in a corner and talk about metal,’ says Anderson. ‘He was this giant pop star in my eyes but all he wanted to know about was what cool metal records he should go out and buy, and I thought that was cool. Dave would mention to me that he was putting together these songs and he mentioned Lemmy and Cronos, so it was just kinda talk, he never, ever mentioned business to me. And then the way I heard the story from Pete Stahl was that one day Dave was playing Pete songs from it and saying, “What the hell should I do with this stuff? I don’t feel like a major label will understand,” and Pete said, “Well, what about Anderson’s label?” I laughed about that and thought nothing would come of it, but then Dave called me and said, “Hey, I wanna talk about this
Probot
record.”’

And, so it came to pass that, in one 52-minute swoop, Dave Grohl introduced some of underground metal’s leading lights – and the cult Southern Lord label itself – to a brand new audience.

‘I’ve been told by several people that
Probot
was their gateway to check out Wino’s band, or COC for the first time,’ says Anderson. ‘It was like an introduction to this music, like “Dave recommends …” We got a lot of attention and the label profile as a whole was really elevated. And having that record in our catalogue was a great foot in the door for us.’

Towards the end of 2003, on the promotional trail for
Probot
, Grohl and Anderson found themselves in London, with both men desiring of a night out. Enlisting the services of Lee Dorrian as host for the evening, the party met in Kensington and headed north to Notting Hill Gate in order to visit the Death Disco club, run by Creation Records impresario Alan McGee, figuring that the instantly recognisable Grohl would be ignored by the club’s hipster clientele.

‘I thought, “Well, everyone is too cool for school there,”’ recalls Dorrian. ‘If Keith Richards walked in everyone would pretend not to notice, so I thought, “Dave won’t be hassled.” The doorman was being arsey, so we had to queue for 45 minutes to get in, and as soon as we got in literally everyone from the bar staff to the cloakroom attendant were all jumping on him. I was like, “Shit, sorry, man.” But he just stood there drinking Absinthe and having a good time. He just dealt with it and humoured everybody. I couldn’t deal with it; it’d weaken me. But he has such a good personality that he can handle it.’

‘Each person had their own story about what a certain band or a certain song meant to them,’ remembers Greg Anderson. ‘And I’d be like “Fuck man!” I was getting worn out. But Dave would sit with every single person until they were done talking. And I asked him, I said, “Dude, does this bother you?” And he said, “No man, I actually really love doing this, it’s part of the whole thing. And I just like talking to people.” I was blown away. He’s the real deal.’

If Dave Grohl is the real deal, then so too is
Probot
, a treacherously heavy collection instantly identifiable as a genuine labour of love.
Probot
has about it a heft and a greasy gravitational pull that is nothing if not authentic, that is nothing if not the sound of a kind of music made simply for its own sake. It is also something that cannot be bluffed. The point of underground metal, or of thrash and hardcore punk, was that its tonality and totality was such that it discouraged the attentions of the poseur. This was a world populated by people who genuinely loved the music, and the love of this music fostered a community that amounted to much more than a mere ‘scene’.

More than anything,
Probot
’s most striking characteristic is that it is able to bring this notion of community, of fraternity, to life on a five-inch CD. Despite its number of different vocalists, this is an album that stands proud as a single body of work, of a celebration of an artistic mindset that spares no thought for commercial ends. Cronos might be over-egging the pudding slightly with his belief that this project might prove sufficiently extreme to ‘destroy’ Dave Grohl’s career – in truth, most Foo Fighters fans politely ignored this raw, savage and only moderately successful outing – but as an addition to Grohl’s CV this is an album that has no thought for long-term consequences, just like the genres it celebrates. Whether it takes the form of the hectic aggro-punk of the 1 minute 24 second ‘Access Babylon’ (sung by Corrosion of Conformity’s Mike Dean), the super-heavy sludge of ‘Ice Cold Man’, the deathlesss rattle ’n’ roll of Lemmy’s ‘Shake Your Blood’ or the relentlessly ominous thud that propels the Max Cavalera-helmed ‘Red War’, this is a set that throughout sounds deliciously unclean and mili-taristically committed to its cause. It is the work of men who know what it is like to taste blood, and to find themselves with puke on their shoes. But in truth
Probot
came and went with little noise or ceremony. It was noticed by those who care about such music – and given approving looks from those who believe it is their job to judge the authenticity of underground metal – while the rest of Foo Fighters’ constituency waited patiently for the band to return to active service. Which soon enough they would do.

As it was the purchase of D.R.I.’s eponymous 22-track seven-inch single on 3 July 1983 that propelled Dave Grohl into this musical netherworld, it seems only appropriate that the last word on this chapter of Grohl’s life should be given over to that band’s vocalist Kurt Brecht, who guests on the rumbling ‘Silent Spring’. When I spoke to Brecht in 2010, his verdict on the
Probot
album, and indeed Grohl’s career to date, was simple and perceptive:

‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘that Dave Grohl has got what every musician wants: freedom.’

When Grohl returned to his day job, and the creation of Foo Fighters’ album number five, his aim would be to demonstrate exactly that.

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I want to be a band that can do fucking anything. Because we can do fucking anything …

Dave Grohl

The date of 7 July 2007 was an occasion when the well-fed and well-paid members of the world’s musical communities were given cause to feel pleased with themselves. Just shy of five months earlier, failed US Presidential candidate Al Gore and promoter Kevin Wall staged a press conference in Los Angeles in order to announce a series of worldwide summer concerts organised to raise awareness of the issue of global climate change. Fashioned after the Live Aid concerts of 1985 (organised to raise money to combat famine in Ethiopia) and the Live 8 spectaculars of twenty years later (an octet of open-air shows staged to highlight the issue of Third World debt) this upcoming stable of musical events would be known as Live Earth. Happenings were set to take place at such locations as Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, the Coca Cola Dome near Johannesburg and the Makuhari Messe in the Tokyo suburb of Chiba; there was to be a free show held on Rio’s iconic Copacabana Beach too.

But the brightest stone in Live Earth’s glistening cluster of diamonds could be found in London, albeit in a not particularly attractive part of the city. The suburban borough of Brent may be as far removed from the lights and landmarks of Westminster as Staten Island is from Times Square, but this rather grey neighbourhood was the home of the then brand new Wembley Stadium. The original venue, built in 1923, became the grand old lady of European stadia: the place where in 1966 England won football’s World Cup, the location of Bob Geldof ’s Live Aid spectacular and the setting for showcase football finals and concerts by iconic rock acts such as the Rolling Stones, Queen and U2. Rebuilt from the ground up in 2000, the second Wembley Stadium may have taken seven years to complete and cost more than a billion pounds, but with its 133 metre tall supporting arch and its inner bowl of 90,000 fire engine red seats, the second largest stadium in Europe could hardly have been more impressive.

The new Wembley Stadium branded itself, rather smugly, as ‘The Venue of Legends’. But on the first Saturday in July such a claim amounted to a good deal more than hubris. Gathered in North-West London on that bright day were some of the biggest and most storied names in popular music, artists such as Madonna, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Genesis, Metallica, Beastie Boys, Duran Duran and the mighty Spinal Tap. Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters sat among this stellar bill of performers who had never before publicly uttered a single word on the subject of climate change, and have been largely mute on the subject ever since. Opening the show, Genesis singer and drummer Phil Collins told the crowd that in plugging in their instruments his band had made the global warming problem worse, while Metallica frontman James Hetfield – whose band would headline Wembley Stadium the very next day, and who provided the stage on which Live Earth’s many acts performed – subsequently said of the occasion, ‘I really avoided talking to the press around the Live Earth day. I didn’t quite agree with what was going on there.’ Meanwhile, performing his open-air show in the grounds of the Tower of London on 7 July, one-time Dave Grohl collaborator Elvis Costello made a point of joking to his own crowd that a slight frog in his throat had been caused by ‘all the hot air coming from Wembley Stadium’.

When the performers playing at ‘The Venue of Legends’ received the running order for London’s Live Earth concert, a running order not announced in advance of the day itself, the Foos found themselves below only Madonna on the bill: Metallica were appearing in a teatime slot that the BBC, broadcasting the event live to homes across the United Kingdom, opted only to air in part. Two days previously, on 5 July, Foo Fighters had played a secret show at the tiny 500-capacity Dingwalls club in London’s Camden Town, an event attended by Queen drummer Roger Taylor. Grohl took the opportunity to ask Taylor what the new Wembley Stadium was like. ‘Too big,’ came the answer. ‘Fucking huge.’

‘And when someone from Queen says a place is too big,’ Grohl told me in 2010, ‘that means it’s really fucking big.’

As if the occasion wasn’t pressurised enough, on the evening of 7 July, as the sun was dipping below Wembley’s iconic arch and his charges were about to step onstage for their most high profile show ever, Foo Fighters’ manager John Silva approached Dave Grohl with a simple injunction.

‘Okay, I just need you to do one thing,’ he said. ‘I just need you to be better than Metallica.’

Grohl looked at his manager and thought, ‘Are you fucking insane? That’s impossible. That’s the most ridiculous thing anyone has ever said to me in my entire life …’

But then again, maybe not. All day, a ‘kinda strange day’ as he remembers it, Dave Grohl had been watching the bands come and go on the Live Earth stage; he sensed from most of them a lack of any real connection between themselves and the 80,000 people gathered inside the stadium. And he made the decision that, in his own allotted stage time, Foo Fighters would go for the jugular.

The five songs that Grohl selected for Foo Fighters’ set were ‘All My Life’, ‘My Hero’, ‘Times Like These’, ‘Best of You’ and ‘Everlong’, each one a tried-and-trusted arena rock anthem. Inspired by his memories of Queen’s legendary set at Live Aid a generation earlier, his intention was to reach out to every single person gathered within the vast bowl, as well as those watching on television all over the world, not least on network television in the United States. And in doing this, and in doing it with considerable grace, charm and heart, the profile of Dave Grohl’s band changed. Foo Fighters went from a band who were known to hundreds of thousands of their own fans but remained something of a well-kept secret to the wider world, to being a truly mainstream concern. All in just 25 minutes’ work. In the week following their set, a two-year-old song, ‘Best of You’, appeared once more in the UK’s Top 40 singles chart on downloads alone.

‘I felt like I was being challenged by all of the bands before me,’ Grohl recalled after the event. ‘I’m not a competitive dude, but I thought, “Okay motherfuckers, watch this.” I had my wife and my daughter at the side of the stage. I was standing there behind the curtain with a guitar in my hand, after four beers, and thought, “Fuck it, this is going to be good.’”

Three years after his game-changing first appearance at Wembley Stadium, Dave Grohl told me that he felt that his band’s Live Earth set marked his first true moment as a frontman.

‘We showed up that day to Wembley, and we thought, “Oh God, how can we possibly entertain this size with this many people?”’ he said. ‘And then I looked at the line-up and saw that we were after Metallica, we were after the Chili Peppers and the Beastie Boys, and after the Pussycat Dolls, and I just couldn’t imagine how our band was going to stand up. But I realised that we had five songs and 25 minutes, so we’ll play the five songs that everyone knows the chorus to, and I’ll get them to sing along with me. And in those 25 minutes I became the frontman. And every concert since then has been a little bit easier.’

Grohl may be being slightly disingenuous here when he says this. To those who had followed his band from their earliest days it appeared that Grohl always seemed comfortable behind the microphone, has always striven to make those in attendance feel like guests in his home rather than customers in his shop. And for five years prior to their appearance at Live Earth Foo Fighters had been headlining festivals to tens of thousands of people in the United Kingdom without Grohl giving anyone the impression that he was a frightened rabbit frozen at the front of the stage. But this was a band whose circumstances
were
changing, and for the better. From a band who in 2002 were at their wits’ end and struggling to cobble together the songs that would comprise
One by One
, by the middle part of the decade the group seemed to be comfortably growing into their own skin. And the same could be said of their leader.

In August 2003 Dave Grohl took his marriage vows for the second time, on this occasion to MTV producer Jordyn Blum, whom he had met one evening in 2001 at Hollywood’s chic Sunset Marquis hotel. Grohl was there that day only to make up the numbers for Taylor Hawkins, who’d snagged a date with one of the hotel’s pretty barmaids, but he ended up writing ‘you’re my future ex-wife’ and his phone number on a piece of paper he handed to Blum, there to support her friend, Hawkins’s date. Prior to their marriage, as the couple’s courtship grew more serious, so too did Grohl’s relationship with, and commitment to, the city in which he’d met his partner.

‘I went back and forth to Los Angeles for years and I basically used it like a dirty fucking whore,’ he says. ‘I took it and I dragged it around and I fucked it and I drank it under the table and I left it lying in the middle of the road, and then I would be like, “Okay, I’m done with this place, I’m going home now.” It all changed when I met my beautiful Californian wife, Jordyn, and I figured, “Well, I can’t take a born and bred Angelino out of Los Angeles. It’s just not what you do.’”

Jordyn Blum became Mrs Dave Grohl on 2 August 2003. The wedding itself took place that afternoon on the tennis court of Grohl’s new home in Encino. Having decided that he no longer wished to treat the Los Angeles metropolitan borough like ‘a dirty fucking whore’, Grohl had decided to put down both money and roots in order to live full time on the West Coast. For his and Jordyn Blum’s nuptials, Dave Grohl enlisted the services of Krist Novoselic as best man, with the job of usher being shared by Taylor Hawkins and Jimmy Swanson. Following the wedding ceremony, the 250 or so guests invited to share the happy couple’s day were able to dance the night away to the sound of The Fab Four, a top notch Beatles tribute act.

But if domestic life was providing Dave Grohl with happiness and stability, domestic politics certainly was not. Since the election of Barack Obama – a man whose oratorical brilliance and melting-pot ethnicity made him a dream candidate for liberal America – much has been forgotten about the febrile atmosphere of the US body politic and the popular arts in the middle part of the first decade of the twenty-first century. But as George W. Bush prepared to run for a second term as President of the United States, and with that country’s armed forces mired in unpopular conflicts in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the artistic community kicked up in protest in a way that hadn’t really been seen since the days of the Vietnam War. Green Day released the Bush-baiting
American Idiot
, and sold 14 million copies of a set that spoke to people who wished not to be part of ‘a redneck agenda’. Filmmaker Michael Moore released the film
Fahrenheit 9/11
, a documentary which stopped just short of labelling Bush and his cronies as being war criminals. Similarly disruptive was the Rock Against Bush movement, NOFX mainman Fat Mike’s campaign (which enlisted the help of many of his punk rock pals, including Foo Fighters, to contribute songs that ended up on one of two Rock Against Bush compilation albums) to unseat the incumbent President.

But while the queue to hit the Bush-shaped piñata with a stick stretched from Pennsylvania Avenue to the Pacific Coast Highway, there was a marked reluctance among the great and good of the music industry to join their voices in song with Bush’s political opposition. John Kerry, the Democratic Party’s nominee for the 44th President of the United States, may have had all the easy-going charm of a six and a half foot ironing board, but in his endless rallies around the American heartlands the Massachusetts-raised Vietnam veteran was accompanied by musical support only from Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen. That was until the campaign trail hit the Midwest, whereupon the New Jersey superstars were joined in a number of cities by Dave Grohl and his Foo Fighters, stung into action by the news that the Republican party was using the Foos’ own everyman anthem ‘Times Like These’ to soundtrack George W.’s rallies.

‘I was personally offended that George Bush was using “Times Like These”,’ Grohl explained the following year. ‘We were trying to think of a way to get him to stop, like, “Fuck man, I’m gonna send the President a cease-and-desist order.” I wrote that fucking song. I know what I’m singing about and it basically mirrored what John Kerry’s campaign was trying to represent.

‘I went out on the John Kerry campaign and tried to help them out because I really believed in getting Bush out of office. And it was really inspirational because you’d see tens of thousands of people gathered together with the common idea and will to make things better. We did a lot of stuff with the campaign, just travelling around through Middle America and seeing people who really needed to be rescued.’

It was this time spent on the fringes of Presidential politics that led Grohl to author a collection of songs for the next Foo Fighters album inspired by the experience.

‘Every day before Kerry got up to speak, I’d go play acoustic music,’ he explained. ‘And the audiences weren’t Foo Fighters audiences. The front row was World War II veterans and teacher unions and blue-collar workers. I came back from that so inspired by the people and the real emotion and the feeling of a small community all coming together for an honourable reason. But rather than write an angry Rage Against the Machine record, I wanted to give them a sense of hope and release and faith.’