For album eight, Dave Grohl turned America into both his muse and his studio, as the Foo Fighters embarked on a cross-country journey to celebrate the United States’ musical heritage on record and TV screen…
“To know your future, you have to know your past,” suggests Dave Grohl in the second episode of Sonic Highways, the HBO series that accompanied, and chronicled the birth of, Foo Fighters’ eighth album of the same name.
The band’s leader has certainly always been in tune with where he and his music had come from. And while it wasn’t deliberate that the 20th anniversary of the loss of his Nirvana bandmate Kurt Cobain was when Dave chose to explore the rich tapestry of America’s musical history, it makes sense in retrospect, given the stock the grunge legends had put in the community dimension of music.
When Nirvana experienced breakout success in the early ‘90s with the release of Nevermind, they enthusiastically repaid those who had influenced them or provided a leg up over the years, inviting the likes of experimental art-rockers Sonic Youth and sludge wizards Melvins to join them on the bigger stages, thereby introducing these cult bands to crowds to whom they wouldn’t ordinarily have played. And while Nirvana weren’t the first to perform this act of paying dues, they were responsible for bringing some of the weirdest and most wonderful rock music to a mainstream audience with an appetite whetted for more, having had their imaginations captured by the sound and fury of the grunge explosion.
Dave never lost that desire to open the door for others, and had the perfect excuse to explore the concept further and deeper. In 2013, Foo Fighters were preparing to celebrate their two-decade anniversary as a band the following year. In October 1994, six months after Kurt’s suicide, Dave had entered Robert Lang Studios in Nirvana’s native Seattle to record the songs that became Foo Fighters’ self-titled debut album, a landmark the frontman would recall in the first episode of Sonic Highways – the televisual component of his band’s most ambitious project to date.
“Over the last 20 years we’ve been all over the world,” explained Dave. “But it’s always a day here, a day there. We never really get a chance to get a feel for the places that we’re in, or what they have to offer. So, for our 20th anniversary, we decided to do something to make the creative process new again. Something we’d never done before.”
In truth, by that point it seemed there wasn’t much Dave Grohl hadn’t done, given his gift for dream fulfilment. Not only had he manned the kit for one of the greatest, most influential rock bands of all time, he’d played drums with an enviable list of his heroes on whose music he had grown up, like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Queen, all of whom he’d perform with the surviving members of as an adult. With Sonic Highways, however, Dave wasn’t just making a record, or a TV show, or fulfilling some lifelong ambition, but performing a cultural duty – shining a light on all corners of the United States and the various musical scenes and movement the country has cultivated across the decades. He also wanted to tell the story of and celebrate artists revered and under-appreciated alike, as a reminder that our favourite musicians have favourite musicians, and so on.
“I look at American music as a community of musicians,” Dave told K! at the time. “If it weren’t for [Chicago blues guitarist] Buddy Guy, if it weren’t for Cheap Trick… we wouldn’t be where we are musically [today].” Whether this referred to Foo Fighters or the musical world at large doesn’t matter. What does is that the two acts mentioned by Dave made an appearance, in one form or another, on Something From Nothing, the song recorded by the Foos in Chicago – the first of eight for the album that accompanied the show’s eight episodes, each exploring a different influential musical city. In the Chicago episode, Buddy, who admitted not knowing what a radio was until he was 16, recalled a childhood down in Louisiana spent experimenting with the sounds he could make by threading a piece of string through a button. He’d later recall the success he found in the Windy City, too, describing his graduation to the guitar and becoming friends/collaborators with his hero Muddy Waters as “looking for a dime and [finding] a quarter”.
These revelations directly inspired the lyrics of Sonic Highways opener Something From Nothing – a feature continued across the album’s seven other songs – while the additional guitar work came courtesy of Rick Nielsen. Having earned his apprenticeship playing with the likes of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, and putting what he’d learned into action with his band Cheap Trick, Rick simultaneously embodied Chicago’s blues and punk rock sides, so was the ideal candidate to fortify the song’s choppy riffs.
It wasn’t Buddy Guy that Something From Nothing brought to the mind of listeners, though. Nor was it Cheap Trick. It wasn’t even Chicago. Rather, it was the city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, birthplace of Ronald James Padavona, better known as Ronnie James Dio, due to the song’s funky break bearing a striking resemblance to Dio classic Holy Diver. In 2019 Dave described the late metal hero’s 1983 record of the same name as “one of the best fucking albums of all time”.
Sonic Highways – both the album and the show – didn’t just showcase the musicians that changed the sounds of America, but the rooms in which their music was captured and the people who aided in its creation. “[Sonic Highways] all started with one idea: that the environment in which you make a record influences the end result,” explained Dave at the time. “When I listen to our records I remember everything about the experience. It’s like I hear memories.”
Those recollections included the moment he first heard his drums receive the Steve Albini treatment while making Nirvana’s third album, 1993’s In Utero. “It was one of my life’s greatest gifts,” Dave said of working with the producer who’d helmed albums by Pixies, PJ Harvey and The Breeders, and fronted influential outliers Big Black, Rapeman and Shellac. He had also earned himself a reputation as a “cynical prick”, with a punk ethic that meant that he didn’t take royalties from the records he produced, however successful they ended up being. Dave received another gift when Something From Nothing was recorded in Electrical Audio, the studio Steve bought in 1995 and designed to his own specifications – though as with the rest of Sonic Highways, it was actually Nevermind producer Butch Vig who manned the console.
Sonic Highways – the show – also acted as something of a potted history of the members of Foo Fighters. Despite the band’s story being captured fairly comprehensively in 2011’s Back And Forth documentary, it managed to explore the musical upbringings of its constituent members, thereby highlighting what each bought to the DNA of Sonic Highways, the album.
Partly retracing his formative role in the U.S. capital’s underground scene as drummer for the band Scream, the Washington D.C. episode explored Dave’s relationship with punk, having been begrudgingly introduced to it by an older cousin, before revealing the Foos’ spiky tribute to the city, The Feast And The Famine. The Los Angeles episode, meanwhile, centred on guitarist Pat Smear, a lifelong resident of The City Of Angels and synonymous with its own punk scene as a member of the Germs, whose short career yielded just one album, the Joan Jett-produced (GI), before their frontman Darby Crash committed suicide in 1980, aged just 22. Given this focus, the resultant song, Outside, benefitted from the same punky steer as The Feast And The Famine, even if its moodiness was contrasted somewhat by a soaring solo courtesy of Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh.
Elsewhere, they visited country icons Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson in Nashville, and Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top in Austin, while the New Orleans stop features jazz hero Dr John. And in the New York episode, as well as input from KISS’ Paul Stanley and David Bowie producer Tony Visconti, Dave sat down to discuss the importance of music on American culture with no less an influential figure on the country than then-President Barack Obama.
Obviously, Sonic Highways couldn’t leave out a visit to Seattle, given the Pacific Northwest city’s role in bringing Dave Grohl to the world, as well as being where bassist Nate Mendel cut his teeth as a member of Sunny Day Real Estate. The weight of the city’s status as the last place Nirvana recorded before Kurt Cobain’s death and where Foo Fighters began life in the very same studio meant that its song, Subterranean, made for a powerful and emotional listen. Featuring Ben Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie, it chronicled the loss Dave had to endure, and the rebirth he’d go on to experience. Focusing on the way he returned to the studio in order to pull himself up and make music again, the significance of this musical journey is thrown into sharp focus. “I went back to that same studio, and recorded again, and my life started over again,” explained Dave. “So that becomes the theme of the episode, and that also becomes the theme of the song.”
Despite being solidly received, critically and commercially, and having its fair share of powerful moments, history will likely cast Sonic Highways as a release less interesting than the story behind it. That’s not surprising, given its creation off the back of a series that deftly encompassed the history of American music, as well as race, class, politics, the music industry, the nature of creativity, and much more besides. But taken without that fascinating exposition, and having pitched itself against some of the greatest music of all time, not to mention the Foos’ own discography, Sonic Highways is an album that doesn’t quite have enough cohesion or, for uninitiated listeners, much discernible essence of each song’s corresponding city. And at just eight tracks, it was on the brief side, presumably because it was a big job to make and had to remain faithful to the eight-entry format of a show to which Dave had also given time directing.
Sonic Highways was important in other ways, though, capturing a band innovating their ways of working to keep things interesting for themselves after so many years of making records. This, in turn, suggested a degree of creative risk-taking you wouldn’t necessarily expect from one of the world’s biggest and most successful bands. All in all, Sonic Highways was an album more about the breadth and depth of its ambition. Thinking in those terms, then, it probably earned its authors a bronze medal at the Rock Olympics, though the reinvigoration it brought their creative process would result in gold – with a side order of concrete – later on…
