It was 1991, Nirvana had signed to Geffen and they gave us a budget to come to Los Angeles - probably so they could keep an eye on us - to make our album, which was to be Nevermind. So we hired Butch Vig." Grohl recalls, "And we found a place in the San Fernando Valley." Sound City, it was called, as is the documentary film which Grohl directed and stars in.
Sound City is a love story: to the studio, to the mixing board and to music itself. Like a lot of romances it wasn't love at first sight. "We walked into this place and it was a shit hole - brown shag carpet on the walls and a couch that they've rented for over a decade. And it was out in the fucking ghetto, a flat expanse of suburban houses and these warehouse complexes behind the train tracks." But the console, he remembers, "Was beautiful, and one-of-a-kind. A Neve, custom ordered by producer Keith Olsen in 1973. It was battleship grey, and it's knobs were falling off; you could tell it had history." The hallway was lined with platinum records recorded at Sound City, "like Neil Young's 'After The Gold Rush' Tom Petty's 'Damn The Torpedoes' and Fleetwood Mac's first record with Stevie and Lindsey. Wow all these fantastic records were made in this dump?" Nirvana spent 16 days there recording the album that would sell 30 million. When Grohl went back to the studio three months after Nevermind's release he spotted their disc on the wall and realised they'd become part of its history.
But the digital revolution took its toll on Sound City and when Grohl learned it was closing, "I called and very gently said, 'If you guys ever want to sell that Neve board let me know'. The studio manager said 'I'd rather sell my grandmother' and I honestly thought it would go straight to the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame because everyone from Johnny Cash to Barry White to Charles Manson, Metallica everyone fucking recorded on that board. But they phoned back and said he could have it. "They knew I would use it. And that's how it all started."
Where is it now? "You'll have to see the movie," Grohl laughs. In fact the films been accepted for the Sundance Festival. "I'm pretty blown away he enthuses. "Having never done this before I've been flying by the seat of my pants. When we started it was just me and a friend and wanted to make sure web documentary about the board. Then as we got into it and more and more people wanted to be involved we realised, Wow this is a movie. Not unlike making the first Foo Fighters record - which I thought was just a demo tape and recorded in six days by myself - I was kind of doing it without knowing how it was supposed to be done. But the thing about this movie is that everyone in it" - Young, Petty, Rick Rubin, Lars Ulrich, Lee Ving, Trent Reznor, John Fogerty, Barry Manilow, among them - "is so passionate about the arts and crafts of making music.
I spent a late night in a bar with pretty much everybody in the movie, and to sit down and talk for 2 hours with your favourite musicians about music is simple. When you talk to Neil Young about live analog recording it gives you chills. It's inspiring. And that's the intention of the film; to inspire the next generation to fall in love with music as much as we have. Because you think, Wow, is music just a contest on TV now? Something that's made with the touch of a button? It might sound pretentious and missionary," Says Grohl, "but I swear, it would be my life's greatest achievement if one kid saw this film and said, 'Lets start a band.'"