Prior to Nirvana's 1994 European tour, the band had scheduled studio time to work on demos. Cobain was absent for most of that time, so Krist Novoselic and Grohl worked on demos of their own songs. They completed several of Grohl's songs, names of which included "Exhausted", "Big Me", "February Stars", and "Butterflies". At other times during his time with Nirvana, Grohl had booked studio time on his own in order to lay down demos of songs that he was composing, given the lack of output in this regard in his time with Nirvana. Once he had gotten his head back into the game, he spent six days at the same recording studio, Robert Lang Studios, and completely recorded 15 songs, on which he played all instruments and sang on all of the songs. Despite this, he still was unsure if he wanted to start a band, or just be a member of another band. In November of that year he went on tour as drummer for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as a fill-in, after which he was offered a permanent spot in the band, which he refused. There were other offers out there as well but Grohl was still unsure exactly what he wanted to do. He had begun to pass around cassettes of his songs that he had recorded in October of 1994 to friends for feedback on what he had produced. The news of these tapes moved swiftly through the music industry, and soon enough created enough interest for record labels to become interested. He eventually signed a deal with Capitol Records, and the songs were remastered for eventual release. However, Grohl was insistent that it should not be seen to be a solo project. He wanted this to be a band project, even though for this initial album it would only be him that actually played on it. So he brought together musicians that he felt would be suitable for the purposes of acting as the first to tour and support the album, those being bass guitarist Nate Mendel and drummer William Goldsmith of the recently disbanded band Sunny Day Real Estate, as well as Nirvana touring guitarist, and former Germs member, Pat Smear. And though none appeared on that first album, they were to become an important part of the band that became known as Foo Fighters.
Of the 12 songs that finished up on the final version of the album, only four of them were composed after Kurt Cobain’s death. Eight of the songs had been composed and recorded as demos while Nirvana was still a going concern. And there are certain differences between the songs that Grohl wrote while in Nirvana, and those he wrote as a consequence of its demise.
The opening tracks here are furious, angry, spitting, taking on the post-Nirvana critical mass. The world had changed for Dave, and that comes across in the writing especially, but also in how hard he is playing and singing the songs. “This is a Call” evokes a call back, a look back to his past and a decision on how to spend his time in the future. He was quoted in Kerrang! Magazine saying: "'This Is A Call' just seemed like a nice way to open the album, y'know, 'This is a call to all my past resignations...' I felt like I had nothing to lose, and I didn't necessarily want to be the drummer of Nirvana for the rest of my life without Nirvana. I thought I should try something I'd never done before and I'd never stood up in front of a band and been the lead singer, which was fucking horrifying and still is!” This is followed by the classic “I’ll Stick Around”, where frustration rises to the surface in his lyrics and in the music, the harder hit drums, the heavy guitar riff. All of it combines into the first instance where we hear Dave utilise his aggressive passionate vocals, driving the song into both a fury and yet consequentially a question lyrically. For years Grohl denied the song was about his relationship with Courtney Love post-Nirvana, but in more recent years has openly admitted that it is. I don’t think that surprised anyone.
Of the songs here that comprise those earlier tracks, the style has a calmness and yet effective hard rock tone about them. While there appears to be no effort put in to be attractive to any one genre of fans, or even to appeal to all fans of all genres, to then drag them into the album through several songs and hope that they enjoy the entirety of it all, it still has that feel about it. In the long run this is just a whole bunch of songs that Grohl write over a period of a few years, not trying to create and album with a direction about it, just recording songs as they came to him to create. And that is both the beauty and the curse of the album. It attracts as many fans as it disappoints BECAUSE of its slightly haphazard songwriting.
For instance, take “Big Me”, which Grohl has always admitted was just an out and out love song for his then wife, and elsewhere suggested it was about "Girl meets boy, boy falls in love, girl tells him to fuck off!" It is, in many ways, reasonably lame, only gathering fans through the amusing film clip that the band made for it in The Rocks in Sydney. The same came be said for most of “Alone + Easy Target”, the clear guitar and sweet styled vocals for most of the song give it a similar feeling to “Big Me”, though the added distorted guitar in the chorus picks it up into a slighter better character.
When you listen to songs such as “X-Static” and “Exhausted”, they were either drawing on the template for what became alternative rock and metal in this period of music, or it was at the very forefront of that period of music. The phasing fuzzy guitars underneath, the melancholic lyrics in that meandering mournful tone, all while sitting in a mid-tempo range that feels like it is never really getting anywhere in a hurry, but doesn’t sound as though it is overstaying its welcome, or taking up time from moving on to the next track. They stand as a bridge between the love sick depressing halting tracks of the era and the extension into a faster based angrier tone of track. The fact that “X-Static” was written post Nirvana, and “Exhausted” was written during Nirvana makes for an interesting comparison of the two era of Grohl’s writing and composing. Separating these two songs at the end of the album is “Wattershed” which is Dave’s tribute to his time coming up in the hard core scenes, especially playing in the band Scream, and this has the most hard and punk tones of any song on the album.
The middle of the album combines these styles intricately. “Good Grief” is a mid-range alt-rock song with a the right tempo to get people moving in concert or in clubs. “Floaty” performs in the same misjoinder throughout, Grohl’s higher clear vocals and guitar dominating the track, at least again at the tempo that makes it likeable and not unlovable. “Oh George” has been quoted by Grohl himself as his least favourite song of his with the band. Complying with the same style of clear guitar and vocals, only mutating from that later in the track, it suits the style that the majority of this album resides in. The last of these tracks is “For All the Cows”, that moves from the clear and happy pronunciations to a hard and heavier thrash on the guitar and drums in between these sections.
On the other hand, “Weenie Beenie” comes at you with that fuzzy guitar and drums attack, Grohl’s vocal effects singing sounding like he means something on this track, pushing harder and more in the style of the hard core he had grown up loving and playing.
Lyrically, this album isn’t offering a great deal. Outside of a couple of songs here, there is a lot of nonsense being sprayed about, which Grohl admits was his style at the time, just coming up with words 20 minutes before recording the track. That changed from the next album onwards, when there was a far more regimented and patterned effort in writing and recording songs that mattered in a band sense.
I would guess that my discovery of the Foo Fighters would be no different from anyone else of my generation who had any clue as to who Nirvana had been. Which, surely, was just about everyone growing up in the 1990’s. The passing of Cobain, while sad, was not ground shattering for anyone who had followed his work and career to that point, nor was the fact that Nirvana also folded at that moment. And I’m sure I hadn’t been the only one to wonder what might happen to Krist, Pat and Dave now that that era was over. So once it was announced that ‘the drummer from Nirvana’ was putting out his own album, it was one that had to be immediately tracked down. Even if the name of the band and the album, Foo Fighters, sounded more like it should have been on The X Files (which was at the height of its popularity at the time) than an album or band name.
At the time I was living with two of my best mates in Carlingford in the western suburbs of Sydney, in the desolate year of 1995. But it was an exciting time when I got the CD and brought it home for our first communal listen. And it is fair to say that it got us in from the start. Those two powerhouse opening tracks broke in the album perfectly, and from there we were hooked. It became an album that was often played when we were home when we weren’t watching The X Files and Melrose Place, and it is fair to say that the Foo Fighters were a hit. On New Years Eve that year, both of these mates were at Macquarie University to see a gig headlines by the Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth, with Foo Fighters playing a 12 song set before them, the band’s first tour of Australia, and one they have never stopped talking about. No. I wasn’t there. That’s another story.
Having listened to this album upwards of a dozen times again over the past week, I still understand why there was the hype about this album on its release. When it came to critically reviewing it for this episode, I can also see why there are other people out there who aren’t exactly in love with what it offers. It’s one person, doing all the writing and all of the recording. If there had been a critical eye and ear of other bandmates present, and their appearance on instruments for the album, perhaps it would be tighter and better. But also, maybe not. It still needs to be stated, even though it is obvious, that this ‘album’ is more or less a collected works of demo songs written over a period of several years, thrust together to be collated for a debut album of a band that didn’t exist until it came time to release the album. Even though Grohl wanted this to be a band and not a solo project – something I admire and agree with – there i no getting past the fact that for this album at least, there is just the one operative in places. There is no distinct style of a band, it is several genre platforms utilised depending on what mood the writer had been in at the time. And as much fun and as enjoyable as this album is, there is absolutely no denying that the follow up sophomore effort is leaps and bounds better than this. In every conceivable way. But don’t let all of that talk you out of enjoying this album. Because 30 years later it still has plenty of cracking moments on it.
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