How do you go from thinking you might never make another record to creating a double-album? Soul-searching, self-interrogation and ripping up your own rules, that’s how…
As the Foos’ first decade drew to a close, Dave Grohl needed to take stock a little. For one thing, he hadn’t really planned for things to end up as they had done, much less be in a situation where the answer to the question ‘now what?’ would actually be important.
It was the longest he’d ever been in one band. And in the three years since One By One, he’d been busy on a number of non-Foo activities, drumming on tour with Queens Of The Stone Age after playing on their 2002 Songs For The Deaf album, as well as with his heroes in Brit post-punk agitators Killing Joke on their self-titled 2003 album. Then there was Probot, the metal album he made in 2004, in which he roped in a bunch of heavy idols from his youth – Cronos from Venom, Celtic Frost’s Tom G. Warrior, and Lemmy from Motörhead.
Question marks, meanwhile, had begun to form around Foos and their future. Dave even admitted it had occurred to him that, massive as they now were, the band might have reached some sort of natural conclusion.
“With every record we’ve made, I always imagined that would be our last album,” he told K!. “I always thought that would have been enough. Having done the whole Nirvana thing, gone out and done Foo Fighters records, played with Queens and done all the things I’ve done, I thought it would be enough and I could then begin a normal life.”
If this was something that had occurred to Dave, the group’s leader, it had also begun to prey on the minds of his bandmates. The feeling of distraction, coupled with a lack of communication between one another about it all, led to an atmosphere in the ranks where the writing appeared to be on the wall.
“There was a moment of like, ‘Oh well, that’s over,’” recalled Taylor Hawkins. “We were like, ‘Do we have another good Foos record in us?’”
Dave agreed.
“There was a moment when I thought, ‘Well, that was fun and we had a good run at the thing.’ I’ve always thought bands shouldn’t last forever; there’s always an expiration date. So yeah, for a minute I thought we should call it quits and end on a high note.”
This, however, raised questions of its own. What exactly does one do after you walk away from a monster such as theirs? It was this epiphany, and actually digesting where the enormous thing they had built sits in their lives, that made Dave realise the answer to his question was right in front of him the whole time.
“There’s a lot more to being in a band than being in a band,” he would later muse to Kerrang!. “It’s such a big part of your life. I know it’s a clichéd analogy, but it’s like a marriage, an unspoken foundation, and it’s something you know you can rely on. When I was out with QOTSA, I felt like I was losing some of that and it didn’t feel right. I didn’t feel solid or balanced. Playing with Queens was great and I’ve known those guys for a long time, but if there’s a band you can dip your toes into and then run away from, it’s QOTSA.”
And so, realising that their future was still theirs to write, Foos headed back into the studio. Only this time, it would be quite unlike anything they had done before.
With this newfound clarity on what Foo Fighters were and how they fit into his life and the world, Dave had a definitive idea. Their fifth record was, right from the beginning, planned as a double album. The frontman admitted that the medium “sounds pretentious”, and while the format has given the world important musical gold like The Beatles’ White Album, The Who’s Quadrophenia and Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti, the notion of a multi-disc musical binge still brought to mind prog indulgence like Aphrodite’s Child’s 666 and Yes’ Tales From Topographic Oceans. From Foos’ contemporaries who had embarked on similar projects, both Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins had drawn criticism for the sprawling nature of 1999’s The Fragile and 1995’s Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness respectively. The good stuff was genius, some had said, but it simply couldn’t be sustained across either’s full duration.
But for Dave, the concept was a simpler one: to really get to the two fundamental sides of his band’s sound – “fucking loud and heavy and chaotic, and delicate and beautiful” – and separate and explore them both fully.
“We have songs that are loud and obnoxious, and we have songs that are beautiful acoustic ballads, and trying to fit those two things on the same album is tricky,” is how the frontman explained it. “I thought I’d make it easier on everybody so we can go further in each direction without it sounding strange.
“We have a lot of different sounds, which I think has been the foundation of all our records,” he expanded. “But then you start wondering, ‘What is Foo Fighters? Is it just one thing, or should it be any kind of music made by any member of the band?’ And I kind of lean towards that. I used to get caught up with worrying that something shouldn’t go on the record because it doesn’t sound like anything we’ve ever done before. But that kind of runs you into a rut and you end up getting trapped into one particular sound for the rest of your life.”
It was in this spirit of reconnecting with themselves that the band decided to build their own studio. The name originally given to the setup in Dave’s basement back in Virginia where he’d record demos and ideas, plus much of what would become the Probot record, it was decided to move ‘Studio 606’ into a more proper, professional, permanent setting out in California. A portion of the work on renovating the building was done by the band’s own hands, getting busy with hammers, screwdrivers and paintbrushes to help make their new base of operations their own.
That they had somewhere in which to do their thing in comfort, with no pressure or distractions, was of paramount importance to Dave.
“The studio represents what I love about the band because we can hide away and shut ourselves off from the outside world,” he explained, of the way the studio environment can tighten the bonds between band members, if the conditions are right. “I don’t go looking for new friends or family because I have them here.”
Thus work began on a record which not only reaffirmed in their minds just where Foo Fighters sat in the band members’ own lives, but also redrew their boundaries. From realising they didn’t necessarily have a predestined shelf-life and that they could have a lengthy, ongoing career in the vein of their heroes in Rush, Iron Maiden or Motörhead, to not being locked into one sound or method of presentation, for the first time, the possibilities seemed endless.
Which, actually, presented something of a headache for producer Nick Raskulinecz, such was the volume of material the band began to amass. In total, the Foos recorded around 40 songs, which were then shortened down to half that number. At one point, feeling that the album’s quality was weighted on the ‘acoustic’ material, a brace of new songs for the ‘rock’ disc were written, with a sharpened focus on showing every strength in its best light.
From the start of the opening title-track, it was clear that things weren’t just business as usual. Riding in on a scything riff, it showed the depths of the band’s new horizons perfectly, embracing a stadium-chomping ambition to basically be Queen, while also keeping a loose, jam-room feeling. Singles DOA and No Way Back, meanwhile, took their expert radio-rock formula and beefed it up until it was a juggernaut. On the acoustic side, friends popped up to make their mark, like QOTSA’s Josh Homme (Razor), Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones (Another Round and Miracle), and American singer-songwriter Norah Jones (Virginia Moon). Taylor Hawkins added vocals to Cold Day In The Sun, a track he penned himself, while a song Dave wrote in 1990 about his friends in Nirvana, Friend Of A Friend, finally saw the light of day.
But even among all this, the album’s highlight and song that would prove the rocket fuel for its success, comes three songs into the first disc, and very nearly didn’t make the cut at all. Hard as it is to imagine, Best Of You was saved from the reject pile only by the intervention of the band’s manager, John Silva, who convinced them to give it a second crack.
Prior to making the record, Dave had gone out on campaign with Democratic presidential candidate and Jay Leno lookalike John Kerry. Though not wanting to be an overly political man, he also wanted to help “getting [George W.] Bush out of office”. With the war in Iraq in full swing and social problems stacking up on home turf, this was an honourable quest. But even if Kerry would ultimately lose, Dave’s experiences with everything he saw as he followed him through America affected him to the point where he admitted many of the record’s songs drew from it. But it was on Best Of You where the message was most clearly articulated.
“It was really inspirational because you’d see tens of thousands of people gathered together with a common idea and will to make things better,” he recalled. “We did a lot of stuff with the campaign, travelling around through Middle America and seeing people who really needed to be rescued, from trying to get their kids home from war, to figuring out some sort of healthcare system, to trying to get married. But rather than focus on the specifics, it’s that simple need or passion to make change and make things better. I’m not a political person, but I was moved by a lot of what’s happened in the last year. A lot of the lyrics on the new record have to do with passion and courage and fighting for things you believe in. But it’s not a political record. It has to do with human reaction to what happened before and after the election.”
Clearly, this struck a chord. The song became glued to radio from its release, and the album hit number two in the U.S. and UK, selling a cool million copies at home. In our 5K review, we declared that “they’ve revealed a new depth and complexity to their sunshine power-pop”. Out on the road, meanwhile, the twos-up nature of the album was reflected in enormodome rock shows coupled with more intimate acoustic gigs for the second disc.
The biggest achievement, however, came on British soil, when the band headlined London’s Hyde Park to a reported crowd of 85,000 people, their biggest show to date. Not only that, but they had Queens Of The Stone Age and Motörhead supporting. And this, perhaps, is the most poetic point of all: where once Dave’s involvement with QOTSA and Probot had appeared to be itchy feet and an indicator that perhaps things had found a conclusion, it was followed up with grand ideas and new heights. From here, things could only get bigger…
