A NEW BEGINNING

(Interview version)

January 1998: Maximum Guitar

Maximum Guitar: You're doing quite a bit of guitar playing on stage now. What gear do you bring with you on the road?

Dave Grohl: I have a couple of Les Pauls, an SG, an RD Standard, an Explorer, plus a Gibson Trini Lopez that I don't really bring out on tour. I think I only have six or seven guitars total, and when the Foo Fighters first started I only had two: a Les Paul and an SG.

Max: And those two had been collecting dust in your Nirvana period?

Dave: I got the Les Paul in '91. It's a Custom. I really don't know that much about guitars. I know what I like, though. I love the RD because it gets this low-end rumble that you can't get anywhere else.

Max: Do all your guitars have humbucking pickups?

Dave: Yeah. It's because I don't even know what the difference is. I can probably hear the difference, but which one makes which sound, I don't know.

Max: Most of Kurt Cobain's guitars had single coils, as if he were going for a noisier sound.

Dave: Yeah. You see, I lean more toward the humbucker Gibson kind of meaaty low-end thing. Something like an RD going through a Mesa Dual Rectifier, it's a bunch of noise. And I like noise a lot. But I'm not a tech-heard or vintage guy at all. I have a crappy Galante Italian thrift store guitars at home and I think as vintage as I get is my Trini Lopez or old Silverstone.

Max: What are you playing through on stage?

Dave: I've got the Mes Heartbreaker amp, which is new, and I don't know anyting about it other than that it's got a nice clean sound. Also the Dual Rectifier I've used for a couple of years now. I started off using a Marshall JCM-900 and I loved it. And now I'm doing the Mesa thing and I like the Dual Rectifier because it has this hair-dryer distortion to it. When you plug something like the RD into it, you can make the bootom off it, and then there's this razor blade riding on the top. I think it's great, and it's very concise. You can hear all the hits, all the notes. It's almost percussive, which is probably why I like it.

Max: As much as you appreciate percussion, do you still consider yourself primarily a guitar player?

Dave: Well, I started playing guitar when I was 11. It started with a Beatles songbook. Actually, there was this acoustic guitar hanging around the house, because my father played the flue and my mother was in singing groups in the Fifties. My father was kind of this jazz beatnik. A frreak. And so my mother bought him this acoustic when I was about two. My father's from the school that if you want to be a musician, you have to practice eight hours a day, and he didn't have the time to practice the guitar eight hours a day, so he just decided he wouldn't play it. It sat around the house for years and I started picking it up to play "Smoke on the Water" and whatnot. Finally, my mom got me lessons, but rather than teach me chords and the foundations of writing songs on your own, they had me reading sheet music crap. So I said forget it, and my mom got me a Beatles book with chord charts. And if there was nothing to do on a Saturday afternoon, I'd just go through every Beatles song from A to Z. From there, I was joining neighborhood bands at 11 or 12, and playing in punk rock bands by the time I was 13 or 14. The whole while I was playing guitar. But my guitar playing sort of got to the point and leveled off. I don't feel like I've improved as a guitar player in the last six years. I just find new, weird chords. I can't play any faster. I don't understand scales or know much about them. I just know these weird chords I find, and they probably have names anyway. I know your basic majors and minors, and I hear a note I can tell you waht it is. I don't have perfect pitch, but I can recognize notes. I certainly can't sing perfectly on key.

Max: Maybe not, but Franz said you really have a knack for getting around the neck and going where you need to go for transitions. He says that you can just "slide in" at will.

Dave: I don't know what it is. When I was young and started to figure out these chords, I'd listen to songs on the radio and figure'em out immediately. when you're 11 or 12 and in the neighborhood band, you're playing Rolling Stones songs and "Back in Black." And I was the one that always had to figure out how the bass part went and how the solo went, although I couldn't do it.

Max: But you always considered yourself comfortable with a guitar?

Dave: Oh, definitely. Although I don't know the technical side of guitar playing, I love sitting on the couch with a cup of coffee in front of the TV. I can play for hours. And it's nice because, after playing drums for so long, guitar was an escape. Because when you're beatin the shit out of drums for or five hours a day, you want to sit down and make music; you want to something elegant, gentle, beautiful and pretty. Drums are not the prettiest of instruments.

Max: And now with two sets up there, is that your escape from having to be guitar guy?

Dave: Totally! It's a constan back and forth. [intenially whines] I don't know what I want to be, I'm having this incrdible indentity crisis. [laughs]

Max: What kind of player were you looking for to replace Pat?

Dave: To begin with, I think there's no real rhythm or lead guitarist in this band. We're watching each other's backs in a way. To me, Malclm Young is the greatest guitar player in the world. I love Jimmy Page and Warrem Haynes, but Malcolm is the key. Without him, Angus would be fucking bouncing around the stage to what? A guitar solo? malcolm is the foundation, and what this band needs is two guitar players backing each other up. When one goes off in another direction, the other one has to hold the ladder. And it's important that the two, whhen playing togehter, are right on time and making this wall of sound.

Max: Would you say this is a rhythmic band?

Dave: I think so, because there's no free jam, freak-out sort of shit. Also, it's pop music--as much as it might sound like noisy, screaming punk rock or classic rock, they're still just pop songs. And it's important when you're making pop songs to keep it simple so people understand. We could all go out and be in cock-sucking progressive rock bands if we wanted to, but we don't.

Max: But how do you stop "simple" from becoming "one-trick-pony"?

Dave: You just have to be creative. You have to be clever. You have to slip things in that sound simple but are a pain in the ass to do.

Max: And you had more of a chance to do that on the second album because of the longer recording process?

Dave: Yeah, we had a lot of time to figure out how to make things more difficult. It was so funny. When we started practicing these songs after recording the album, I hadn't played any of these songs standing up before; I'd been sitting on my ass on a stool in the control room for a month. On the first album, there are maybe two or three guitar tracks on each song and most of the time they're doing the same thing. So when you get together and show someone how to do those songs, it's simple. ON this album, there's eight or nine tracks on each song.

Max: How do you go about writing songs?

Dave: Usually I'll come up with a basic idea and go to my home eight-track and put down the drums, the bass and the guitar. It's like verse-chorus-verse. I do that for reference, so I can come up with a vocal melody. Or I'll have a basic vocal meloday that needs elbaoration. Then I playit for everyone and say, "Look guys, here's this idea I have." Then we play it in soundcheck, and the more we get into it, the more you come up with ideas that enhance ertain things. Like, I might have a basic vocal melody and then I'll find the guitar part that brings that whole things to life. And that's why you end up with nine guitar tracks on every song, because your spending 12 hours in the control room saying, "Give me a minute, I jusst want to accent that one line."

Max: Do you lay down the basic tracks alone?

Dave: If I do it by myself, then I just start off with the drums. You sing in your head, and if you were to hear some of the tapes, you could [isolate] the overhead microphone tracks and you could hear me humming or screaming along. For this album, we did most of the stuff to a click track, so on this album I just played the click and sang along in my head---I almost think that's the best way to do it. If you're doing it to a click, and I enjoy playing drums to a click, it's just you and the click and the songs in your heads. You know where you are in the songs and it's awesome. From there you just put stuff down to that.

Max: Do you find a guitar sound and then start cutting song to song, or do you focus on one song at a time?

Dave: We were trying to focus on a different guitar sound for each song, buut it turned out that every individual guitar track ended up getting manipulated one way or another with different mikes, different mic plcaements, different settings, etc. We had so many fucking guitars in that studio, but use the Marshall and the [Les Paul] gold top a lot anyway.

Max: Speaking of studio sound, what did you learn from your session with Puffy Combs?

Dave: I'm not sure I learned anything at all, other than that it's two entirely different scenarios. AT one point I sat in front of this drum sequencing sample thing and kyboard andd I was joking with the engineer. I said, "So this is all you really need to make a record anymore, isn't it?" He says, "Yeah." I had to ask him if he was serious. Then he started listing off all the albums and these singles you've seen on MTV that were made wit just this one keyboard and this one Tascam drum-sequencing, sampler kind of thing.

Max: So why did he need you?

Dave: Because they wanted rock man, real rock. I put drums down, I put guitars down, distorted basses, wah pedals, whammy pedals and delay pedals and all this other shit.

Max: The real thing.

Dave: The real thing indeed. It was fun.

Max: But a one-time deal?

Dave: Yeah, I didn't join Puffy's band.

Max: I understand you got to play with Krist NOvoselic again recently at the Bumpershott festival in Seattle.

Dave: It was kind of a surprise.

Max: Was it weird?

Dave: No, it was great---exactly how it should have been. I think everybody expected us to be together back on stage one day with Bob Dylan or fucking Neil Young or something like that. And instead, me and Pat go out playing "Purple Rain," joking around. We were getting the audience to sway back and forth and sing. Then I throw down the guitar and get up to the drum, and then Krist runs out to grab the bass. We played "Purple Rain" for like five minutes. It was just hilarous.

Max: How often do you find yourself considering people's post-Nirvana expectations.

Dave: I really could give a shit. Not really often at all. I don't feel like I have to be in the biggest band in the world, because I feel like I was for a minute. I don't do this for that; I do it for all of us. We're this happy little tour circus family, and it's fun. There's a lot more expectations and pressure that comes from within the band. Like with this record, we did actually feel like we had something to prove, but it was to ourselves---that's the biggest motivation. It's just that we hadn't been in the sutdio yet, maybe just once or twice for a day at a time, and we'd been looking toward to making this album for a year and a half. So we really wanted to make it great.

Max: And now that starts again with a new band.

Dave: Right. Now it's the same thing; we'll be touring for probably the next year, and we'll be writing songs. We've already worked on one or two new songs, and by the time we get the end of touring again we'll be ready to go in the studio and get excited all over again. NOw we've got Taylor, one of the most amazing drummers, I've ever seen, and Franz. Franz is a great songwriter and Taylor plays piano and writes as well. So the next albums' going to be this fucking freakout. Who knows what's going to happen? Maybe I'll be playing drums, Taylor will be singing, and Franz will be piano and accordion. It's going to be nuts.