Dave Grohl Recorded The Entire Foo Fighters Debut In One Week
After the tragic loss of collaborator and friend Kurt Cobain in 1994, Dave Grohl was in a state of total devastation. He and bandmate Krist Novoselic withdrew from the public eye for several months before speaking about Cobain’s death. Reflecting on the loss several years later in an interview with Kerrang! magazine, Grohl said, “I miss Kurt. I have dreams about Kurt all the time…I have great dreams about him and I have sad, heart-wrenching, fucked-up dreams about him.”
Once his period of mourning passed, Grohl showed remarkable resolve. “If you’re dealt a fucking hand, then you deal with it,” he told Kerrang. “If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that you’ve got one life and you’d better live it as best you can. I’m not going to sit back and be some pitiful fucking mess.”
His first step was figuring out what his next move would be with his music career. Though he had many high-profile suitors courting him as a drummer, he decided to turn them all down. “I was getting offers from all these different people to join their band as a drummer — Tom Petty, Danzig — but I didn’t want to stay behind the drum kit and think about Nirvana for the rest of my life,” Grohl said in an interview with Q.
“I’d deliberately written nonsensical lyrics: there was too much to say.”
Instead of going with a known quantity for the second act of his career, Grohl embarked on a more personal project. Having already made rough demos of all but three of the song’s on Foo Fighters, he went about re-recording and compiling them into a limited-release album. “I booked six days at Robert Lang studios in Seattle, which to me was an eternity — I’d never been in a studio myself for more than six hours,” he told Q. “I went in with [producer] Barrett Jones. We got there at nine in the morning and by noon we were ready to go. We wound up recording four songs a day.”
The fast pace of recording led to the hasty scribbling of the album’s lyrics. “I had seven days to record fifteen songs,” Grohl said in a 1996 Alternative Press interview. “There wasn’t too much time spent sitting on a chair thinking.”
Though the limited studio time certainly played a role in the composition of the lyrics, so did the recent loss of Kurt. “I’d deliberately written nonsensical lyrics: there was too much to say,” Grohl told Mojo.
This didn’t stop fans and writers from trying to draw their own interpretations. “After what happened to Kurt, there was a lot of emphasis placed on the meaning of the first Foo Fighters album,” Grohl told Mojo.
“I have dreams about Kurt all the time…I have great dreams about him and I have sad, heart-wrenching, fucked-up dreams about him.”
Even though Grohl may not have seen deeper layers of meaning at the time he wrote the lyrics, in the years since he feels a connection to them. “A lot of times, the things you write down spur of the moment are most revealing,” he told Alternative Press. “Now I look at them and some of them seem to actually have meaning.”
In addition to working through the challenge of having to write so much material in such limited time, Grohl also struggled to gain confidence with his singing voice. “You know how people double their vocals to make them stronger? That album the vocals are quadrupled,” he told Q. “I didn’t want to be a lead singer, I couldn’t fucking sing."
While wrestling with his new role of singer, Grohl also played almost every bit of instrumentation on the album. This, much like the lyric-writing process, was completed at a frantic pace. “This Is A Call” — one of the albums singles — was recorded in a mere 45 minutes. Describing the intensity of the process in Jeff Apter’s The David Grohl Story, Grohl said he would come walk out of one of the studio’s rooms “still sweating and shaking from playing drums and [then] pick up the guitar and put down a track, do the bass, maybe another guitar part, have a sip of coffee and then go in and do the next song.”
The behind-the-scenes details of the Foo Fighters album are impressive, but it is the quality of music that stands out. Grohl was able to transform a collection of half-finished demos into a remarkable album in the span of one week. Originally intended for a small release, the album’s fan base grew and helped Grohl launch the next chapter of his career after the tragic end of Nirvana. Though made with great haste, it remains one of the strongest albums in the Foo Fighter’s extensive catalog.
Connect with the Foo Fighters on Facebook, YouTube, and on Twitter @foofighters. Also check out the Foo Archive fan site. This article wouldn’t exist without their incredible archive.
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