Dave Grohl
BottleRock Pulls The Plug On Guns N’ Roses’ Set With Dave Grohl on Stage
BottleRock Napa Valley doesn’t mess around with its 10pm curfew. Guns N’ Roses closed out Saturday night’s festivities with an epic two-and-a-half-hour performance that ended with Dave Grohl joining them onstage to help with guitars and backup vocals on “Paradise City.” All was going well until the clock struck 10 and promoters promptly cut the sound, halfway through the song. But that didn’t stop the band from finishing out the hit in full force, with the crowd screaming the lyrics, rendering the attempt to quiet things down completely useless. A festival goer caught the whole thing on tape, which you can see below. Watch out for the sound cut at the 3:10 mark. [embedded content] As Blabbermouth points out, BottleRock takes its 1opm cutoff so seriously because the festival grounds are in ...
Dave Grohl Describes Going Punk in Excerpt From His Upcoming Memoir
Over the past year, Dave Grohl has been one of the busiest people in all of music. We can list the many, many, many, many things he’s done, including the new Foo Fighters album and tour, but what’s the fun in that? One project that little has emerged from (until now) has been anything to do with his upcoming memoir, The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music. Out in October, it takes the concept of what he was sharing on his Instagram account, Dave’s True Stories, and brings those memories to a wider scope. Today, Grohl shared an excerpt from the book, that pays tribute to his cousin Tracey. Here, he describes Tracey, who he calls his “cousin,” but is the daughter of Grohl’s mother’s longtime friend rather than a blood relative. He gets into it by describing the nature of how they met and wo...
Foo Fighters Troll Westboro Baptist Church by Covering Bee Gees’ ‘You Should Be Dancing’ Outside of Kansas Show
The Dee Gees, A.K.A. the Foo Fighters, busted out some big moves last night ahead of a show in Bonner Springs, Kansas. The Foo Fighters struck the latest blow in their battle against the Westboro Baptist Church (who were protesting their show) by trolling them with a live performance (on a flatbed truck no less!) of the Bee Gees’ “You Should Be Dancing.” As they put on their dancing shoes, singer Dave Grohl said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I got something to say. Because you know what? I love you,” adding, “The way I look at it, I love everybody. That’s what you’re supposed to do.… I deliver all of my love, and you shouldn’t be hating. You should be dancing.” Dave Grohl & The Foo Fighters trolled the Westboro Baptist Church outside their concert in Kansas tonight. PLAYING DISCO. pic....
The Secret Side of Dave Grohl: Our 2005 Foo Fighters Cover Story
This article originally appeared in the August 2005 issue of SPIN. In honor of the Foo Fighters headlining Lollapalooza again tonight, we’re republishing this article. The road to Studio 606, the new multimillion-dollar Foo Fighters headquarters, isn’t paved with gold. Rather, it’s paved with common asphalt, marred by rush-hour traffic, and dotted with all the symbols of suburban sprawl: take-out chicken joints, chain drug stores, a drive-thru Starbucks. On the heels of the band’s 2002 back-from-the-brink-of-breakup album, One by One (like all Foo releases, certified platinum), singer/guitarist Dave Grohl could’ve set down roots anywhere. After all, Foo Fighters are that rarest of breeds—a remarkably consistent, long-lasting rock band—and their global success, not to mention Grohl’s n...
Foo Fighters Release Short Film on Madison Square Garden Concert, The Day The Music Came Back
Foo Fighters and Madison Square Garden Entertainment Corp. teamed up to release The Day The Music Came Back, a short documentary film made of footage from the band’s June 20 post-pandemic return to the stage at the legendary NYC venue. The 10-minute movie captures behind-the-scenes conversations amongst workers and fans on how Madison Square Garden was able to be filled at full capacity again during the fully vaccinated show. Watch The Day The Music Came Back below. [embedded content] The film shows Dave Grohl opening the show with “Times Like These” for the 15,000 fans in attendance. “I’ll tell you something, for the last year I had this reoccurring dream that I would walk on stage and we would look at each other for the first time,” Grohl says in the film. “We’d just look at each other l...
The 100 Greatest Rock Stars Since That Was A Thing
Three of the 100 are in this picture! The Rolling Stones, in 1964, from left to right: Bill Wyman, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Brian Jones. The problem with lists like this is they are invariably bullshit. So our prime objective was to make sure we didn’t do a bullshit list. I’m not saying we did a scientific one either. Because that isn’t possible — actually, it is, if you wanted some compilation of who sold the most records/concert tickets/has the most fans/got the most death threats, etc., and someone could come up with a bunch of very empirical metrics and create a “heat index” or something, and could deliver an actual scientific ranking! But we, um, didn’t do that. In fact we didn’t even, technically, do the “we...
Dave Grohl Admits He Was ‘Ripping Off’ Disco Drummers While Recording Nevermind
Dave Grohl and his mom’s unscripted reality series From Cradle to Stage has given us a lot of insight into famous musicians and their mothers, but during an interview with Pharrell Williams, Grohl dropped a bombshell that will forever change how you listen to Nirvana’s Nevermind. After refuting Pharrell’s comment that he’s a great drummer (“I’m the most basic fucking drummer”), Grohl unleashed the secret that he ripped off disco drummers while recording his parts on the iconic 1991 album. “If you listen to Nevermind… I pulled so much stuff from the Gap Band and Cameo and [Chic’s] Tony Thompson on every one of those songs,” he admitted. “all that… that’s old disco!” The revelation not only blew Pharrell’s mind (and probably yours too), but he also couldn’t believe he didn’t hear t...
Dave Grohl Says He Lifted Drumming Techniques From Early Disco Pioneers During Nirvana Years
Foo Fighters surprised the music world last week after revealing they were working on covering several Bee Gees hits under a new disco alias they’re calling the Dee Gees. As the dust continues to settle, frontman Dave Grohl—who spent four years as the drummer for legendary rock band Nirvana—has added some additional context to the forthcoming music, revealing that he derived inspiration from disco since the early days of his career. As NME notes, Grohl’s illuminating comments came in a new interview with Pharrell Williams. “I can’t read music. I couldn’t then, and I still can’t now. All I wanted to do was be in a line of drummers all playing drums,” Grohl said. “If you listen to Nevermind, the Nirvana record, I pulled so much stuff from The Gap Band, and ...
Foo Fighters Reopen Madison Square Garden With Musical Medicine for the Masses
Lyrics to the Foo Fighters’ opening aural salvo summed up a historic night and extraordinary experience: “It’s times like these you learn to live again.” The setting was Madison Square Garden, the occasion? NYC’s first full capacity arena concert since COVID-19 lockdowns began in March 2020. There was audience speculation about New York-centric guests along the lines of a Billy Joel, and murmurs of why an artist with area ties like KISS or Bruce Springsteen didn’t reopen the World’s Most Famous Arena. That said, it was immediately clear that the Foo Fighters were the perfect choice for New Yorkers to celebrate the city’s reopening with a much-welcomed infusion of communal energy, camaraderie and joy. The group’s consummately crafted arena rock stylings are classic – and now 26 years since ...
Dave Grohl Recalls Nirvana’s Low Expectations for Nevermind
As Nevermind approaches its 30th anniversary, Dave Grohl looks back to when the now-iconic LP came out, admitting that Nirvana had fairly low expectations for the album’s success. They certainly didn’t expect it to become one of the most seminal albums in rock and roll history. In an interview with Uncut, friends, family, and fellow musicians told Nirvana’s members that Nevermind was going to be “fucking huge,” Grohl tells Uncut. “Donita [Sparks] from L7 came by and said we were going to be fucking huge. My old friend Barrett Jones, who I had grown up with in Virginia, who was a musician and a producer himself, heard ‘Lithium’ and said we were going to be fucking huge. He thought ‘Lithium’ should be the first single.” Attempting a balance of appreciation and denial, Grohl thought, “‘W...
Nirvana’s Surviving Members Are Still Making ‘Really Cool’ Music Together, Dave Grohl Says
Though they’ve unofficially jammed before (something Krist Novoselic told us when we last spoke with him), Dave Grohl revealed to Howard Stern that not only does he get together with former Nirvana members Novoselic and Pat Smear to do that, they actually record “really cool” new music. “Krist Novoselic is a pilot, he flies his own plane… he lives up in the Pacific Northwest and whenever he comes down to Los Angeles, you know, we always love to see each other and we’ll have dinner,” Grohl told Stern. If you’re hoping to hear anything new from the musicians who once performed with Kurt Cobain in Nirvana, however, don’t get your hopes up, Grohl said. “And you know if we’re in a studio, we’ll record them. So we’ve recorded some stuff that’s really cool. But we’ve never done anything with it… ...
Rush’s Geddy Lee Tells Dave Grohl What It’s Like Being the Son of Holocaust Survivors in From Cradle to Stage
While Foo Fighters’ frontman Dave Grohl and Rush bassist/singer Geddy Lee would make a great super-group rhythm section, so far they’re only sharing an on-screen conversation with their moms. The chat was part of Grohl’s unscripted reality show From Cradle to Stage with his mom Virginia Hanlon Grohl. The Lee episode is the final show in the six-part series, and it airs on Thursday, June 10 on Paramount+. In it, Geddy Lee — born Gary Lee Weinrib — and his mom, Mary Weinrib, speak about their Jewish family history. “From a very early age, I knew my parents were holocaust survivors,” Lee says in the clip. On a lighter note, Lee’s mother, a petite woman with a blonde bob haircut, talks about seeing her son perform in the early days. When Hanlon Grohl asks Weinrib if she thought her son wo...
