In which the Foo Fighters survive near-death, head-turning distractions and studio bust-ups before rediscovering their spark and delivering one of their biggest-ever hits…
As the Foo Fighters prepared to make their fourth studio album, life in the band was full of complications.
After recording a series of demos in drummer Taylor Hawkins’ garage-studio at his home in California’s Topanga Canyon – where working song titles included Tears For Beers, Tom Petty, and Knucklehead – in the summer of 2001 the quartet travelled to the UK for a date at the V Festival in Chelmsford, as well as an intimate booking at the Kentish Town Forum. Following these shows, while staying at the Royal Garden Hotel, in Kensington, the band’s drummer suffered an overdose that left him in a coma for the next 10 days.
A statement released to the press was somewhat disingenuous. ‘Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins was hospitalised yesterday after having apparently over-indulged following festivities following the [V Festival]… [he] is reported to be in a stable condition. Foo Fighters’ remaining UK and European dates… including a support slot with U2 at Dublin’s Slane Castle, have been cancelled.’
“That was the first time in my life that I ever considered quitting playing music,” said Dave Grohl. “Because it had got to the point where I wondered if music just equalled death. Really? Because I’m in it for the fucking music, but I don’t want to do it if everyone is just going to die all the time. It just didn’t seem worth it.”
As the drummer began his process of recuperation, at a band meeting Dave told him “whenever you’re ready, Taylor, you let us know and we can start working”. This process duly began in the autumn of 2001. Under the guidance of producers Adam Kasper and Nick Raskulinecz, each day the Foo Fighters convened at Conway Recording Studios in Los Angeles and worked on the 20 rough ideas that Dave Grohl hoped would become fully fledged songs. Each day their efforts counted for naught.
“Nothing was being accomplished,” he said. “The songs lacked any sort of life, they were just weird carbon-copy versions of songs they were meant to be. It’s hard to explain. And then someone would come in and record half a track and go, ‘Okay, I’ve got to see my acupuncturist, I’ll be back later,’ and meanwhile we’re paying $4,000 a day for this room…”
Matters were not helped by the fact that during this time Dave Grohl effectively joined another band. Dave had been a fan of Josh Homme since the pair first met following a Kyuss show at the Off Ramp club in Seattle in 1992. A decade later, his band Queens Of The Stone Age were looking for a drummer for a concert at the Troubadour club in Los Angeles. Dave agreed to fill the vacancy, and would go on to record the drum parts for the group’s third album, Songs For The Deaf.
“At night I’d rehearse in a closet with Queens and I’d be in the best band in the world,” he remembered. “And then I’d come back to the Foo Fighters’ studio and be totally dismayed by the apathy and lack of any sort of passion.” At the time that Kerrang! visited Conway Studios in March of 2002 for a preview of the Foos’ far-from-completed fourth album, tensions in the band were running riot. As Dave and Taylor posed for the photographs that would grace the magazine’s front cover, moments earlier the band had been ensconced in an argument that had potentially taken them to the point of fracture.
“I remember getting into a fight in the control room, with the Kerrang! people outside,” Dave said. “And I said, ‘Okay, do you want me to go and tell those guys that we’re going to break up right fucking now? Because I will. We can if you want.’ And then the room was kinda silent.”
Come the summer, during preparations for the Foos’ appearance at the Coachella Music And Arts Festival, matters were still out of hand. In the midst of what Dave describes as “a big blow out”, guitarist Chris Shiflett suggested that the band talk out their problems. Even so, according to the frontman “there was finger-pointing and yelling and, honestly, I thought that [Coachella] would be the last show.”
“I was being an asshole,” was how Taylor Hawkins described the situation. “It was mainly Dave and I shouting. I felt that Dave was elsewhere at the time. We had a huge argument, but it did clear the air. That was when Dave let everyone know, ‘I’m leading this band.’”
“I always knew that Dave was going to go back to Foo Fighters,” said Josh Homme in 2009. “I was always trying to intimate that this wasn’t something that the other guys needed to worry about, but that’s kinda impossible. Band people, and I mean this in a very blanket way, are very easily rattled… it’s easy to get your confidence rattled.”
They needn’t have worried. As torturous and expensive as the recording sessions for One By One would prove to be, upon the album’s release on October 22, 2002 the Foo Fighters’ fourth album debuted in the Top 10 in the album charts of no fewer than 13 countries. Although far from the quartet’s finest hour – and even the members themselves would quickly tire of much of its material – the album does at least include the single All My Life, a song so enduring that the band would be lynched if ever they failed to include it in their setlist.
But the truest criticism of One By One is that rather too much of it is mediocre and unremarkable. Although at the time Dave Grohl talked up the album, it wasn’t too long after the record’s release that he admitted that the collection contained, in his opinion, no more than four good songs.
“We rushed into it and we rushed out of it,” he admitted. “Too many of the songs on that record just weren’t good enough. It was just a question of getting it done and getting it out… I don’t consider it to be our proudest moment.”
This article originally appeared in a March 2020 issue of Kerrang!
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