(Credits: Far Out / Kenny Stoff / Foo Fighters)
Fri 18 April 2025 16:20, UK
It’s easy for many artists to become a lot more conceited as they get older. It’s easy to separate the classic albums when looking back on one’s legacy, but there comes a point where they have to thank everyone who brought them to that spot before they had any kind of buzz behind them. While Dave Grohl was more than appreciative of anyone who helped him reach rock stardom, some people deserved something more than a simple thank-you behind the scenes.
Then again, there are a handful of people in Grohl’s life that he doesn’t have the chance to thank any more. There isn’t a day that goes by where he probably isn’t reminded about being the drummer in Nirvana, and despite being the John Bonham of the 1990s in many respects, one of the only reasons why Foo Fighters works the way it does is because of what Kurt Cobain brought to Grohl’s other band when he started making the anthems of his generation.
Any band member like that is someone you hold onto tight, but Cobain ended up falling into the trap that far too many people never recover from. After he took his own life, Grohl was convinced that he didn’t need to play music ever again, but once he started picking up the pieces of his broken state of mind, Foo Fighters was the kind of cure that made him realise why he wanted to play music for the rest of his life.
But beyond the actual players, there’s much more to offer on Nevermind than the songs. Cobain had the basic pop melodies down to a science, but the way that Butch Vig produced everything was the ideal version of what a rock album should sound like, making sure that the guitars are roaring throughout every song and pushing Cobain to run through as many vocal takes as he could to make sure that they had a lot to work with.
For Grohl, it was always important that he had the drums exactly right. He may have had trouble tracking some tunes on the record like ‘Lithium’ and ‘Something in the Way’, but since Vig was a drummer first in Garbage, he knew the importance of getting the drums to pop in the mix, and when listening to the massive drum roll that kicks off ‘Stay Away’ or the opening crack of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, Grohl’s snare hits may as well have been a cannon blast announcing the grunge movement.
Grohl may have lost touch with Vig for a few years, but when collaborating with him on a Garbage track later in his career, Grohl felt that it was the least he could do for the man who helped make him a superstar, saying, “I play on a Garbage track called ‘Bad Boyfriend’. Butch Vig called me and said ‘Come in and play on it’, and you know, if there’s anyone in the world I owe a favour to it’s that dude, so I figured I’d go and do it.”
In terms of Grohl’s journeyman mentality working with rockstars, though, it always comes back to the way he plays the drums. Hearing him play off of Shirley Manson’s vocals has the right amount of muscle behind it, and since he had turned in time working with Queens of the Stone Age a few years prior, he hadn’t lost an ounce of the chops that he had in the beginning, even when leaving the drums to Taylor Hawkins on In Your Honour.
Nowadays, though, Vig seems like an unofficial Foo Fighter in many respects, having worked with them during Wasting Light and Sonic Highways as well as being one of the main producers when Grohl put together the Sound City documentary. Then again, that also has to do with the way that Grohl sees music. Because once you’re in the band’s circle, you’re more than another worker. You’re family.
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