Dave Grohl used to drum in Nirvana. Since Kurt Cobain's suicide, Grohl has been reluctant to do any interviews. He has been even reluctant to talk about his own band, Foo Fighters. On the eve of Foo Fighters' tour of Australia as part of summersault, Grohl agreed to talk with JJJ's Richard Kingsmill.

JJJ: We're really looking forward to seeing you out here again and especially now with Foo Fighters. Are you looking forward to it?

Dave: Yeah! I really love Australia. The first time Nirvana came down in January, 1992, we were there for a few weeks and I had never been there before. I was just blown away because it was the best of both worlds. It almost had a European feel to it, but it was a little too friendly and sunny and beautiful to be considered European.

JJJ: And a little bit more casual?

Dave: Of course. So we had a blast and then my wife and I actually came down just for a vacation earlier this year. I love it down there. And especially at this time of the year...well in January. For us that's the greatest.

JJJ: I forgot that you were out here when Pearl Jam was out here...

Dave: That was just kind of a fluke. We had Foo Fighters just about ready to go on our first tour opening for mike watt and we were to be gone for a little over a month. I had all these frequent flier miles so I thought I might as well have a little vacation before the tour. Pearl Jam was on tour down there and we have a good friend of ours doing the tour accounting for them and another friend of ours is their tour masseuse or witchdoctor or whatever. So we thought we would just fly down, book ourselves into the same hotel and surprise them.

I thought it was so great because we got to go and see some of the Pearl Jam shows and I was so excited just to be a spectator and have all the fun of someone who doesn't have to go up on stage and play. Because I get so incredibly nervous before I play. Whether it's drums or guitar, I get really, really nervous and so I was looking forward to going down and hanging out and seeing friends and having something to drink and watching the show. The first night I got there, we went to the show and they asked me if I would play a song with them...and then it was like vacation was over.

JJJ: You felt like you couldn't say no?

Dave: Well Jack, their drummer, he had been having problems with his wrists. Plus I know Eddie (Vedder) a little bit. They are acquaintances I suppose, and so of course I would feel terrible if I said, "oh no I can't do that". So I did it and it was actually fun. And it had been the first time I had played drums in front of an audience for quite a while and it was a big fucking audience too. So it was twice as scary.

I was amazed at how much of a performance those guys really put on. They would go up there for almost 2 hours and it was pretty incredible. The reaction from the people, that's what amazed me. I had never seen an audience go so completely mad like they did for the shows I saw. There were kids just pouring down the sides of the seats to get onto the floor. It was amazing. It was really crazy.

JJJ: Even comparing them with some of the scenes you must have seen at the height of Nirvana?

Dave: By the time we started playing places the size of Pearl Jam, we never saw...I mean sometimes the audience, if there were chairs on the floor, they would throw the chairs up and they would pass them back and it was completely insane and that was great. But most of the insanity that we saw was way before we ever got to the point of playing places that held 10,000 people. Usually when you play somewhere that holds 500 people, that's when things are even more insane. It's just like a little contained riot. Pearl Jam was like the first arena rock riot I had ever experienced and I imagined it being like the who concert in 1979 in Cleveland, Ohio, when all the people got trampled. It was just crazy. It was nuts.

JJJ: It surprises me that given your experience and how long you have been doing this sort of stuff that you still get that nervous before going on stage too.

Dave: I don't know what it is. It just scares the shit out of me. I just get really, really, really fucking scared and I don't know what to do about it. With Foo Fighters, I'm starting to feel a lot more comfortable. But still just getting up knowing that you have that responsibility for the next hour and 15 minutes to entertain these people, that's what's buried back in the rear of my brain. I just know that I have a responsibility. And I don't handle responsibility very well.

JJJ: (laughing) that's why you're in rock and roll.

Dave: Exactly.

JJJ: Is it a lot harder being the front person than it was just being the drummer...and I don't mean `just the drummer' as if it's a put down.

Dave: It is so much different. Drumming is such a cool thing because not only are you 100% physically into the music, but you are also hidden behind these big tubs. You almost feel like you are in your own little world. You're just sitting there beating the shit out of something and it's pretty great.

But being a guitar player, it's cool too because you get to jump around. And you get to jump around so much that you are 100% into it physically, but it is different to drumming. I really enjoy it (being out front). I really love being able to turn around and see Pat (Smear, guitarist) play. And then turn around and see William (Goldsmith, drummer), and to feel the drums from the front of the drum set. I mean it's just so much different in every way that there is really no comparison. It's just cool to do both, I suppose.

JJJ: You're not too critical of William's drumming are you?

Dave: When I first started playing with different people, I went into it with the attitude that I'm not going to hand someone this tape that I just recorded and say, "learn all these drum parts backwards". I want them perfect but there is no way I'm going to go to someone and say that because the record is just the way I would have done it. I tried to find a drummer that had enough feeling to go and put himself into it. William can do everything that I can do. I say, "just learn the arrangement of the song and then I don't give a fuck what you do with it after that". He is an amazing drummer. When I saw him play with sunnyday real estate, and then heard that they were breaking up, it was like I had won the lottery. He is a fucking awesome drummer...and awesome drummers are hard to find. And I found him within a month of really looking and it was just amazing. He is like the big fish in the pond.

JJJ: How was it getting the three of them feeling like they were actual Foo Fighters given they didn't play on the record at all.

Dave: I don't think it was really too bad at all. I think everyone has put their own 2 cents in and it took maybe until halfway through the first tour to actually start feeling like, "wow, wait a minute, we are really in a band here!". We had only been a band for 4 months. We have only been a band since january really. So now we are writing tons of material and we are just anxious to move on. We just wanna play new songs. We have been so busy that we haven't had a chance to sit down and record much stuff and we're just looking forward to getting past this phase and just moving on.

JJJ: I want to talk to you a bit about the recording of the album, but first what about your singing. I know that initially you were quite intimidated with the prospect of getting up in front of people and singing. How has that worked out for you?

Dave: It's great. It's really fun and I've got to the point where the band were all having so much fun whenever we got up to play that we didn't really give a shit. I used to be so overly critical about everything...about my vocals, about my guitar playing, and we just don't give a fuck anymore. It's this liberating feeling where we just go up and have a blast. It's been so much fun honestly...I don't really know what else to say other than it's just been fucking fun!

JJJ: The reaction that the album has got and all the positive feedback that you must have felt by now...did that help the process as well?

Dave: Not really. We didn't pay attention to much of that stuff. We just wanted to get out and start playing again. Pat and I hadn't really done anything since Nirvana. Nate (Mendel, bassist) and William weren't really sure what was going to happen to them when sunny day real estate broke up. So when we started playing together, the only thing that was on our mind was we were excited to be playing again. It felt really good and we were trying our hardest to get the band as tight as possible.

The anticipation for the album and the attention it got was really great and incredibly flattering, but when you've got tours booked and you've got songs written, you're thinking about travelling and moving on and writing more material. You don't really spend too much time thinking about all the adulation really.

JJJ: Let's talk about the making of the record. You did it a year ago now over just a week. When you think back on that week you spent in the studio, was it very therapeutic for you?

Dave: Well I started recording like 6 or 7 years ago. I started recording songs by myself where I did the drums first, then the guitars, then the bass, then put the vocals down. At first it was just an experiment (but) then after I realised, "wow I can actually do this and make it sound like a band", then I just kept on trying to write the better song. Out of the 35 or 40 songs that I had written in the past 7 years and recorded, these were the ones that I thought were the strongest and the best. It's like a challenge. I keep on challenging myself...trying to write a catchier chorus or trying to write a weirder verse.

When I went in to record the Foo Fighters record, it was the same feeling as it always had been. But it was therapeutic. I felt like, "oh, I gotta do something, I've got to get off my ass and get this together". In the months before I recorded the record, I spent a lot of time getting it together and figuring out the sequence of the album. Then recorded it in the sequence that it is on the album and I just got everything together so that the one week I had in the studio I could get it finished. And we (Grohl and producer Barrett Jones) did.

JJJ: One thing I've always wondered about when people do all the recording on their own is that if you start with the drums, are you humming in your head the rest of the song to make sure that you have just as much drums there as you need.

Dave: You can do it either two ways. You can play the drums and hum it in your head, and if the song is written, then you'll know when it's time to go to the verse, and when it's time to go to the chorus. Or you can make it up on the drums and then just pray that you remember it when it comes to putting the guitar stuff over it.

It's always pretty simple, especially when you are doing it by yourself. I was literally running from the drums to the guitars to the bass, just to see how fast I could get it done and I was getting a song done every 45 minutes.

JJJ: It sounds like you were a kid in toy shop?

Dave: It's so much fun. I've been doing that here at home on an 8 track downstairs in my basement. I have come up with about 13 new songs.

JJJ: How do those new songs compare to the stuff on the album?

Dave: They're kind of different. I think one of the great things about moving from this record to the next will be that it's going to be the band and it's going to have, not an entirely different sound, but it's going to sound different enough that the two won't sound cloned. I hate it when bands put out an album after their last and they sound exactly the same. Things really have to vary. The next album is going to have just enough subtle differences to really make it sound like a progression.

JJJ: That was the case with the 4 Nirvana albums, wasn't it? They were each completely different?

Dave: Yeah, well I mean the production on bleach was just so weird. I could never decide if it was great or if it was terrible, it was so bizarre. You could hear the drum sound from that record and name the tune in 2 seconds.

Then nevermind was the polished rock record...and in utero was the wonderful steve albini/jesus lizard record. So, yeah, I thought it was a pretty excellent progression. Instead of staying along the same lines or using the same producer for every album, you want to kind of mix it up a little bit.

JJJ: And then there was the unplugged show in New York...

Dave: Well, we were really scared shitless about doing the unplugged thing. To actually get up there and perform a whole set of acoustic songs, we really had to sit down and think, "what are we going to do?". (how do we) take songs like come as you are and making them acoustic. About a girl was pretty simple, but we didn't want to do your typical unplugged show, which was just sit up there with acoustic guitars and a smaller drum set and play your rock songs just as would if you had your electric guitar strapped on. We wanted to make it a little different, maybe a little loungier. That's why we threw in the david bowie song and we really tried to make it as quiet and soft and not rock as possible. So that was a challenge. And that is why we didn't...I mean, there was no way we were going to do smells like teen spirit on acoustic guitars. It just wouldn't have worked. It would have been pretty silly.

JJJ: So you put a lot of preparation into that performance?

Dave: Not really. We had I think 2 rehearsals. We talked about it a lot and when it came to the rehearsals, we sat down and attempted to pull it off in a rehearsal space and weren't really satisfied. And that was the day before the show! We thought, "oh great...we're going to go out there and make Fools of ourselves". But we got up and did it, and for some reason, it turned out ok. So it was kinda nice `cause it was the show that wasn't supposed to work (laughs). We were really looking forward to it sucking hard. And then it turned out ok so we were pleasantly surprised.

JJJ: It was interesting to watch Kurt's reaction to the whole thing. It went from him looking a little uneasy at the beginning, and then by half way through it looked like he had got fully into the swing of it. Was he very nervous beforehand?

Dave: Everybody was! It was fucking terrifying! Here I am used to playing huge drums as hard as possible, as hard as I can hit them, and then here I am with these little tiny brushes and this really, really small drum set. I had to concentrate the whole time to make sure that I'm not going to over power anybody else. Yeah everyone was just terrified. Well I was! I am assuming everyone else was.

JJJ: Did you play either Krist or Kurt any of your demos during Nirvana?

Dave: Sometimes. There was one song that we actually attempted to do that I had written and it just never worked out. We tried it at soundchecks in Europe in 1991 and we kinda did it every once in a while, and then we just sort of forgot about it. But yeah, they were pretty supportive. I would just say, "hey look what I did in my basement today", and they said, "oh wow, that's cool". It wasn't any big deal at all.

JJJ: But you felt pretty much that Nirvana was Kurt's vehicle and you would concentrate on your stuff some other day when you had the chance of doing it on your own.

Dave: I didn't really even think about it that much. There were maybe 4 people in the world that had heard the tapes. I wouldn't give them out to people, and I was almost embarrassed to let people hear them just because I was singing. That was strange enough for me that I tried to keep it within my wife, my family and the guy who recorded it, my friend Barrett.

I didn't make a big deal out of it at all, it was just sort of like making a model aeroplane. It was sort of a hobby.

JJJ: The big deal seemed to come when you got tapes printed up when you finished the album.

Dave: Yeah, I fucked up. I made too many fucking copies. I just wasn't thinking. I went, "oh wow, I'll go down and make copies for my friends". I was going to release it on my own label, do it on vinyl, not put my name on it, just put it out for fun. And then eventually get into a band where I could play guitar and sing and play some of these songs. I thought it would be great. But it just spread like wildfire. It got all over the place and I had record companies calling me at home. Then after 4 or 5 record companies called, I called john silver, our manager, and said, "hey John, man, I might need some help at this, this is getting kinda crazy". And from there we just figured it out.

JJJ: So you really wanted it to be that low key at the beginning?

Dave: I was really worried it was going to be such a big fucking deal, just like I didn't want. I didn't want everyone flipping out over my solo project. It would have made me puke, I just didn't want anything to do with this solo persona. I wanted to just put it out totally anonymously. If someone picked up the album and said,"oh god this band is really great!", Ultimately that is the most flattering thing.

JJJ: The name Foo Fighters refers to what pilots in world war ii called ufo's. And the label you've released the album under is called roswell, the name of the site of the supposed ufo crash in 1947. Have you always been fascinated with UFO's?

Dave: Yeah, I've always been into the mystery of the unidentified flying object. I always thought it was really fascinating and kinda romantic in a weird way. Just the thought that there is something other than this tiny little planet in this huge universe. And to every kid, ufo's are like a dream come true. There are these little craft that come out of the sky and they glide and float and they come down and every kid wanted their own spaceship. You wished you could get in it and fly above your school and look down at your friends. I used to sit on my lawn and wish I could see a ufo and that it would land, and that little aliens would come out. And as I got older I just started reading more about it.

It's like an escape. When you're being pushed down by everything around you, you can fantasize about a ufo coming from somewhere you have never been and from somewhere you have never seen or heard of...or never knew there was. It's just pretty cool. I like it a lot.

JJJ: Is it like that feeling you have when you're a kid that you know it would scare the shit out of you if it happened, but you would really like it to happen to you anyway?

Dave: Oh yeah!......sometimes I will sit on my porch and I will stare at a star and wait for it to move. And I've met maybe 4 or 5 people who have seen really bizarre things happen in the sky. I have dreams about it.

I have crazy dreams about the evolution of man and the coming of a new dimension. Yeah, I'm sure that if something ever happened to me it would scare the fucking shit out of me. But it is one to think about.

JJJ: So in your dreams do you actually dream of the little men, the people inside the spaceships?

Dave: Not really. I did have a dream once that my wife and I were on this hillside and it was at dusk. All of a sudden the sky exploded and it was the coming of this new age where the extraterrestrials were making themselves known and they were showing these propaganda films in the sky. They were projecting these films into the sky and everyone was just in awe and sat down and watched and it was explaining the evolution of man. And it was this bellowing voice saying, "the evolution of man!!!". And I woke up like, "jesus christ!". It was so vivid and crazy...it was just like I had gotten home from a great movie. I woke up and said, "Good God, time I wrote a script!"

JJJ: What about a song, did you write a song about it?

Dave: Maybe...you will have to figure that one out for yourself.

JJJ: Is it on the album? At least give me that much of a clue.

Dave: In a way it kind of is. The lyrics are pretty vague and strange and I think I am the only person who can figure them out. Because I hate to make myself too known. You can read a million things into every one of those songs, so it's kinda fun to see what people get out of them...compared to what I was actually trying to convey.

JJJ: Well, I've listened to it a lot, and I really like the song, but I'm buggered if I can figure out what This Is A Call is all about. I just have no clue.

Dave: This is a call is about a lot of things. The chorus says, "this is a call to all my past resignations". And it is just basically thanking and paying respects to everybody that I have ever been close to... Whether it was friends, or previous bands.

JJJ: What have the fingernails got to do with it!!??

Dave: Absolutely nothing.

JJJ: (laughing) hence I shouldn't have been trying to read too much into it.

Dave: It's just a little puzzle that gets you nowhere. It's a labyrinth and you come to a dead end and you are extremely disappointed. Maybe you shouldn't tell anyone that.

JJJ: Well, I won't say anything, if you don't.

Dave: Ok.

JJJ: What about Big Me, that's an instantly likeable song. As people have pointed out, it's very reminiscent of the Beatles.

Dave: Yeah, I agree.

JJJ: Do you like that one?

Dave: Yes I like it very much. That was a song I wrote for my wife. I didn't think that she would be too happy if I wrote a song like Weenie Beenie about her, so I wrote a little love pop song called Big Me. It's just a cuddly little love song.

JJJ: And did it work? Does she like it?

Dave: Oh, she's in tears every time we play it.

JJJ: The other track that I wanted to talk to you about is I'll stick around. I believe that was one of the more recent tracks written for the album?

Dave: That's true.

JJJ: I figure it might have had something to do with Kurt's death. Does it?

Dave: Well, when you feel like you've been deprived or you've lost something, you just want to move on. You just want to be here to prove that you're not gonna let whatever it is bring you down. So in a way it could be about that, but more than anything it's a song about feeling like you're lost but you're not gonna quit.

JJJ: And that is pretty much the attitude and the state of mind that you were in for that period of time just before Foo Fighters was down on tape?

Dave: Obviously we all felt like we had lost something extremely important and special when we lost Nirvana. But it was the kind of thing where you looked back on it and you thought, "those were some of the greatest times of my life and that changed my life forever and it was the time that I wouldn't trade anything in the world for". But it doesn't mean that I can never have that kind of great feeling again, and so I'll forever be searching for something that was as special and invigorating. And I am sure I will find it again. I am not about to give up. Life is too short to think that just because you have had it once, you can never have it again. I want it twice... So it's that kind of feeling.

JJJ: And you feel that you are pretty much on the right track to finding that with Foo Fighters so far?

Dave: I don't know. To try to make that kind of forecast is silly. I am having a blast doing what I'm doing, and it is something that I have never done before and so that's almost good enough. I am trying something that I never thought I would really do, and it feels like the first band I have ever been in. It's a great feeling.

JJJ: I believe a postcard from a Seattle band called Seven Year Bitch was something that helped see the process through for you.

Dave: Yeah, that's true. I'm forever in debt to them for that. I got it at the time when I really didn't feel like I could do something like I'm doing now, and that was one of the things that inspired me to get off my ass and get into the studio. Hence the excitement when I got in there, I think.

JJJ: They had lost a member as well, but what did the postcard actually say to you?

Dave: Basically it said we know what you're going through, we went through it too, we know that you're feeling like you never want to play music again, but that will change. And it did.

I've been touring in bands since I was 17 years old and there is not much else that I know as well as playing music. It's like kicking a nasty habit, I just don't think I would be able to do it. And that is when I realised there is no way I am going to be able to stop doing what I've done for 10 years. I can't stop...plus I knew it was good for me to keep going, just to keep moving.

JJJ: How's Krist (Novoselic) these days and what's he up to?

Dave: Krist has got six million pokers in the fire.

He's doing JAMPAC, which is an organisation he started with a man named Richard white. They are fighting the censorship laws in washington state. They're raising money to fund politicians so they can fight the erotic music bill.

The state was trying to pass a bill to outlaw child pornography, which everyone was for. Everybody wanted to see that done, but they started tacking things onto the side of it and it trickled down to music. That kind of scared the whole music community and so basically Krist is raising money to fund politicians to fight this bill.

JJJ: The whole censorship issue just seems to never go away in the states. Here it comes and goes and people argue the validity of it at certain points and then they stop worrying about it. Over there it just seems to get bigger and bigger and bigger.

Dave: Yeah, especially for a city like Seattle where the music industry is almost as crucial to the city as boeing used to be. Microsoft is now the big business in Seattle, but most people, when you mention Seattle, they think of the music community. And to see such an important city as far as that goes brought down by something like a censorship bill, it's kinda frightening. And for somewhere as liberal as Seattle too, to see that happen here, it's sort of surprising and everybody wants to do away with it as soon as possible.

Krist is also in a band called sweet 75 and it's a 3 piece. Krist is playing guitar, there is a girl named eva who plays bass and sings, and a drummer named bill. They are actually playing tomorrow night so I'll get to go down and see them play. They are going on tour in november in the states.

JJJ: Have they recorded anything yet?

Dave: They have done some demos and I know that they are talking to a record label about releasing a record, but I don't know when that is going to happen.

JJJ: Have you heard any of the stuff yet?

Dave: I have heard the stuff and I think it is really cool. I like it a lot. When I hear it I just picture Krist because of the kind of music he listens to. He is one of a kind, a real character. I have never met anyone like him. I think everyone will be surprised...surprised in that it's not going to sound anything like they imagined.

JJJ: When the Foo Fighters were first forming we heard that Krist was going to team up with you in the band.

Dave: Yeah, we thought about it. We had jammed together, but when it came to actually making Foo Fighters a band, I'm just not sure that Krist wanted to start up and be a bass player right away again. It just fizzled and we forgot about it and by that time I had started jamming with Nate and William and they were almost like a package deal, since they had been in Sunny Day Real Estate. There weren't any harsh feelings or anything at all. I think we were both really happy to do our own things.