Credit: Far Out / Raphael Pour-Hashemi
Tue 12 May 2026 20:30, UK
Dave Grohl has faced more hurdles in his career than perhaps any other modern rock musician.
Not only would most people in his shoes have thrown in the towel after the disbandment of a band as era-defining as Nirvana, but they also likely wouldn’t have had the resilience to get there in the first place. Especially in such a competitive arena, where talents were rarely recognised for what they were, let alone praised in the way they should have been.
After all, even when Grohl was a trusty cog in the Nirvana operation, he wasn’t always treated proportionately to his drumming skills or technique, often sidelined when it came to the so-called ‘face’ of the band. And to make matters worse, Kurt Cobain didn’t exactly ensure that his musical comrade felt seen and appreciated either, often overheard discussing how much Grohl ‘sucked’, thinking that he couldn’t hear.
Of course, like the rest of the world back then and still now, Cobain didn’t actually think those things, not even close. In fact, Grohl’s concern that Cobain’s dislike of him was true was put to rest one night at a disco in England, when the frontman turned to him and said he loved his performance on In Utero, telling him that he thought it was “awesome”.
Still, though, as tough as potential band friction can be from time to time, Grohl’s challenges as an outlier in the band were likely nothing compared to the strain of having to navigate a brand new world following Cobain’s death, a time when most musicians in his position would have likely called it a day, especially lone drummers who didn’t actually believe they could ever step out front as a successful leader.
But alas, with nothing but sheer passion and a willingness to make the music he wanted, he did just that. Around this time, he was also learning what it meant to refocus on his own influences and musical tastes, taking everything he’d learned as an almost 25-year-old and figuring out what he actually had to offer to the world that wasn’t just more of the same.
Or rather, what he could offer that wasn’t just more of the same in precisely the same way it’d been presented to Grohl before. At this time, when he was on the cusp of launching the one band that would change the landscape of modern rock forever, he was paying attention to all those who repurposed traditional musical structures and styles, and made them feel fresh, crafting that magical space where nostalgia and modernity could thrive.
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Which is where Kyuss comes in. At 24, Grohl heard Blues For The Red Sun and couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing, feeling like someone had quite literally extracted something from the 1970s and made it sound even better than it ever did back then.
“Oh my God! This album changed my life,” the rocker told Melody Maker in 2000.
“I was 24 and something about the grooves and the guitar sounds and the drums and the bass made this new noise that kinda sounded familiar, like you’d heard it in the early ’70, but you’d never heard it that good,” he said, crediting the band with “reinventing” ‘70s hard rock. Suffice to say, the same could be said for Grohl, who took traditional rock and rock ‘n’ roll and repackaged it for a new audience, all at a pivotal time when the landscape needed a complete refresh.
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