Foo Fighters Are Still Not About Image
You may already know this about the Foo Fighters, but
in case you don't, listen up: The band is all about the music, OK?
No image tinkering for this group, thank you very much.
Sure,
the Foo Fighters have platinum albums, Grammys, loyal fans, love
from critics. And the guys appreciate all of it. But at the end of
the day, after all the praise and controversy, after folks get over
the fact that the Foo Fighters are not Nirvana, you get a quartet
that rocks hard and with energy to spare.
"I think we're one
of the best live bands out there," says drummer Taylor Hawkins,
phoning from a hotel room in California. "When you have a band
that's confident, you're gonna get a good show, the best of what we
can do. I always think of us as the Stones meet Rush. That's kind of
a high compliment, but, well ... whatever, you know?"
Still
high on the success of its fourth album, One by One (whose single
"All My Life" snagged a Grammy for best hard-rock performance a few
months back), the band likes to keep things spontaneous, charged and
moving. On the latest disc, the Foo Fighters were focused on an
organic blend that was raw but cohesive at the same
time.
"Dave [Grohl, the group's leader and famed former
drummer for Nirvana] at first wanted to make this perfect record,"
says Hawkins, 31. "You know, so much of today's music got a boob job
or a face lift, so to speak. Everything sounds so perfect. We
started out making this record so dead-sounding. Then we just
stopped and took a break. We didn't know where we were
going."
In the meantime, Grohl went on tour as the drummer
for Queens of the Stone Age. The band didn't know if there was even
going to be another Foo Fighters album. Hawkins, who almost died
from an overdose of booze and painkillers last August, spent some
time in rehab. After he got himself together, the Texas-born
musician retreated to his home in Topanga Canyon, Calif., and smoked
cigarettes, lounged on the beach, frolicked by the pool, played
drums in his tiny studio late into the night. When Grohl had a
two-week period off the road with Queens, he joined his buddy in
Topanga, and the two refocused on the album.
"The genesis of
the ideas, the riff and melodies, came from me and Dave in the
studio," Hawkins says. "The germ of the ideas are his, but I would
add an idea here and there, a drum idea. And if he didn't like
something, he'd let me know. We have that kind of relationship.
After this, like, two-week dream of music, we got there. We had the
energy we were looking for."
The result has been mistakenly
called "angry" by some critics. Sonically, the CD may be the darkest
and most aggressive one the group has recorded. But there isn't much
angst in the lyrics. "Tired of You," for instance, is actually about
never getting tired of a girlfriend. The bulk of the songs on One by
One center on the more positive side of relationships. When the Foo
Fighters picked up their Grammy last February, Grohl thanked his
girlfriend for inspiring some of the lyrics. After eight years and a
few personnel changes, the Foo Fighters have become elders of grunge
rock, the band that continues to stretch and evolve despite legal
battles and the long shadow of Nirvana. Perhaps years from now, the
Foo Fighters' contributions to the genre may rise to the level of
the legendary Seattle band that rocketed to superstardom in the
mid-'90s but crashed after front man Kurt Cobain killed himself.
It's impossible not to hear traces of Nirvana on One by One or any
other Foo Fighters album. But the group is steadily moving into its
own groove.
"Eight years, that's a long time in a business
like this," Hawkins says. "But you can't look at [stuff] like that.
It can trip you out. One of the keys to our success is that we are
not huge. We've always been a working band; we're road dogs. And
that's fine with us. It keeps us creative. The beauty of not having
sold, like, 7 million copies of one album is that we get to make a
different one every time. We're dedicated to the music. It's who we
are."
