![\"Dave](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Dave-Grohl-Drumming-Nirvana-1993-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Credit: Alamy<\/p>\n
Making the leap to becoming the lead singer of a band is something that Dave Grohl<\/a> was never going to be comfortable with.\u00a0<\/p>\n Foo Fighters was barely an idea when he laid down what turned up on the band\u2019s debut record, but he felt that there was a lot of ground to cover if he felt that he could make the whole thing work as an actual group. But while he could be more than a little bit of a perfectionist behind the scenes, he remembered that more than a few new faces could put him to shame on his instrument from time to time.<\/p>\n First of all, it wasn\u2019t like any of Grohl\u2019s best songs showed him to be the best guitarist in the world. He didn\u2019t like the idea of making Eddie Van Halen-style tapping licks every single time he played, and a lot of times he was approaching the guitar the same way that he approached a drum set when he played in Nirvana. It was all part of one big musical symphony in his mind, so if he was going to play guitar, he was going to be the one laying down the foundation.<\/p>\n But if there was one place where he felt the most at home, it was behind the drum kit. Grohl had honed his chops when he was back home playing some of his favourite Led Zeppelin and Rush records as loud as he could in his room, and when he first joined Nirvana, he was putting everything he had to make people like Neil Peart proud<\/a> whenever he smacked the hell out of the snare drum.<\/p>\n He certainly had time to let off steam when he worked with bands like Queens of the Stone Age, but why would anyone want to compete with the likes of Taylor Hawkins when he joined? William Goldsmith was already having his fair share of issues before he quit the band<\/a>, but once Hawkins got behind the kit, it was like Grohl had found his musical soulmate and never had to worry about the drums again.<\/p>\n They practically shared a brain half the time they played, and even by 1997, Grohl said that Hawkins was already miles ahead of anything that he ever did, saying<\/a>, \u201cSince Taylor\u2019s in the band, I don\u2019t even get behind the drum set `cause he makes me feel like a fool. I watch him do all this crazy stuff, then I sit down and do an AC\/DC beat! He\u2019s so far out of my league, it isn\u2019t funny. Being a guitar player who\u2019s also a drummer, I understand the relationship between the two instruments. And Taylor is a drummer who\u2019s also a guitar player, so he understands it too. So there\u2019s not much I really need to explain to him.\u201d<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not like Grohl didn\u2019t know how to bring the thunder when he wanted to as well. He already had his fair share of moments of working with Hawkins by playing the drums together on \u2018Subterranean\u2019 from Sonic Highways, but even years before that, Grohl was convinced that there was going to be no one else that was going to live out his rock star fantasy of playing drums with Jimmy Page<\/a> and John Paul Jones in Wembley Stadium but him.<\/p>\n Further reading: From The Vault<\/strong><\/p>\n It took a lot of stamina for anyone to be able to compete with the likes of Grohl, but that also came from Hawkins\u2019s love of prog music. He was already practiced in the likes of Zeppelin, but learning from people like Bill Bruford and Phil Collins as a kid was already going to give him the kind of musical foundation that would have given any other rock and roll band their secret weapon.<\/p>\n So when people talk about how strange it was for the Foos to settle on a drummer after Hawkins\u2019s death, it wasn\u2019t exactly meant to be a diss towards Josh Freese when he asked to leave the band after touring with them. Grohl knew that Hawkins was a core part of their sound, and even if they decided to carry on, he wasn\u2019t going to let anything slide from any drummer until he knew it was absolutely perfect. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/faroutmagazine.co.uk\/wp-content\/themes\/far-out-magazine\/img\/google-discover.svg\")
<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Alamy Making the leap to becoming the lead singer of a band is something that Dave Grohl…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":947375,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3936],"tags":[12285,77,49034,269,49036,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-947374","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-dave-grohl","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-foo-fighters","11":"tag-music","12":"tag-taylor-hawkins","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116542274945783977","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/947374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=947374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/947374\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/947375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=947374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=947374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=947374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}