(Credits: Far Out / Exclusive Media Group)
Tue 29 April 2025 19:30, UK
Professionalism hasn’t always been the biggest priority in the music business. Most people are looking to get what they want out of any artist they work with, and many great musicians have horror stories about how they were dropped like a bad habit the minute the label figured out they didn’t need them any more. But for someone that is as ingrained in pop culture as Dave Grohl has been, he wasn’t shy about bringing up those moments where he felt like a cheap piece of meta.
Then again, Grohl had been striving for a more authentic approach to music ever since the Nirvana days. No one in the Seattle cene wanted to be treated like some faceless product when they started making their first steps into the mainstream, and while Kurt Cobain made no secret about the fact that he hate the complications wiht fame, Grohl was the last person to take himself seriously in the way that people expected him to.
Because if you look at his approach, Grohl has the opposite traits of what anyone would expect from a frontman. Most people would see the person at the front of stage as the one with the inflated ego who insists that everyone treat them like a god among men, but Grohl is more than willing to be the perfect goofball onstage half the time, whether that means taking the piss out of himself onstage or being willing to screw stuff up and shrug it off like it’s nothing.
When someone’s in the studio, though, they need to be a bit more precise than that, and Grohl was known to get the best groove with anyone he worked with. He could lay back into a John Bonham groove when he wanted to with Queens of the Stone Age, but his history of working in influences from funk acts like Cameo and The GAP Band was what caught producers’ ears when it came time to resurrect some songs from ‘The King of Pop’.
People had been clamouring for new Michael Jackson music ever since his tragic passing in 2009, and if his posthumous work would be salvaged, it made sense to get someone like Lenny Kravitz in the mix. After all, he had been a longtime friend of frequent Jackson collaborator Slash, and if they needed something with a heavy groove for ‘I Can’t Make It Another Day’, it made too much sense to get Grohl in the mix.
“That was messed up, actually. Lenny Kravitz – who I met once – called and asked if I [wanted] to play drums on a track. I play drums on it and never hear from them again.”
Dave Grohl
But Grohl would have definitely preferred it if he had heard his actual drum takes rather than slapping his name on the record without asking, saying, “That was messed up, actually. Lenny Kravitz – who I met once – called and asked if I [wanted] to play drums on a track. I play drums on it and never hear from them again. On the sleevenotes, it says ‘Michael Jackson featuring Lenny Kravitz and Dave Grohl’ but they didn’t use any of my recordings. Dude, that’s not cool!”
For any record that Jackson ever released, though, it wasn’t uncommon for them to get the best take and forget to change the credits. As far back as the album History, Jackson even previews a guitar break by shouting out the name ‘Slash’, only for the solo to be played by someone completely different.
In the case of Grohl, though, it was a much different reason why he was upset. He only wanted to play on tracks for people he admired, so this kind of musical cameo would always rub him the wrong way. He was into music for the art of making it, and this was the first time his name was being treated as a PR stunt.
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