Barrett Jones was just out of high school and still living with his parents in the suburbs outside Washington DC when he met a 14-year-old guitarist named Dave Grohl.
Jones had set up a little studio and was going to record Grohl's band, Freak Baby.
"They were fun but not that great — the drummer was really bad," Jones recalls of that time around 1983.
The band came back a few months later. They had changed their name to Mission Impossible and Dave had moved to drums.
"That was the first time I was blown away by his drumming. At 14, he was just a total maniac — probably the fastest drummer I had ever seen in my life."
We know what became of that 14-year-old drummer: he grew up to play in Nirvana, one of the most famous and influential bands in history.
But a decade after that first meeting as teenagers — after the calamity of Nirvana's tours and amid the sadness and uncertainty following the death of Kurt Cobain — Jones and Grohl took what was by then a long-standing friendship and spent a few days together in a professional studio.
The result, released 25 years ago this week, marked the dawn of another of the most famous and influential bands in history: Foo Fighters.
Trying out for a shot at stardom
Jones and Grohl were best friends in the late '80s when Grohl was playing drums in a band called Scream.
In 1990, Scream was on tour in California when their bass player quit.
"[Dave] calls me and says 'I am stuck here and Scream is pretty much done'," Barrett tells the ABC from his studio in Seattle, where he works as a recording engineer.
"I am like 'Great, come back and we will play in Churn some more', my band."
Instead, Grohl tells Jones his friend Buzz Osborne, of The Melvins, has mentioned a band in Seattle that is getting some hype and is looking for a drummer.
"[He said] basically, 'I am going to blow them away and join the band'.
Jones soon followed Grohl to Seattle and started touring with Nirvana as a monitor and drum technician.
His first outing was a six-date arena tour of California with Pearl Jam, Nirvana and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the latter the headliners.
"It was the first time I had ever seen an arena show where the entire place was jumping up and down," Jones says.
"It was pretty obvious it was Nirvana they were there for at that time."
He would spend two years on the road with Nirvana, quitting the summer before Cobain's death in 1994.
He says things got a little "ridiculous" on the road and that Grohl would relay to him "sad and bad stories about how it was going".
Cobain's well-known battle with heroin addiction, as well as intense press attention and a dispute over royalty splits, negatively impacted Nirvana's later years touring.
Cobain overdosed in a Rome hotel room in March, 1994, before taking his own life a month later at his home in Seattle.
Working begins of demo tapes
After Cobain's death, Jones says, Grohl was distant and they did not speak for a few months.
Grohl has opened up previously about experiencing a period of depression and being unsure he would ever play music again. (Grohl's management did not respond to an interview request.)
"And then he basically came and said, 'Let's go into this big 24-track studio and record all these songs,'" Jones says.
Most of them the pair had previously demoed.
Some were part of a batch of 10 or 15 of Grohl's solo songs they laid down before he joined Nirvana. Others were done while Grohl lived with Jones and Jones' girlfriend in Seattle.
Grohl had released a cassette of his own songs on a small DC indie label in 1991, while he was in Nirvana. But in those pre-internet days, few people took notice, and Grohl — "demur", in Jones' words, and not confident in his talents as a singer — did not publicise it.
Now, Grohl would spend five days in an expensive studio laying down about a dozen songs, partly as a form of therapy.
"He thought it would just be a demo tape that he could send out to people," Jones says. "I went into it saying this was going to be a record."
Building a singer out of a drummer
Five days is not a lot of time if you have to play everything yourself.
Grohl started with the drums. He would play them while singing the song to himself in his head.
"[Then] he would come in and play a couple of guitars, rhythm guitars, maybe a lead. Put a bass down, move onto the next song. Basically he was doing a song an hour that way," Jones says. (One song features Greg Dulli of the Afghan Wigs on bass, but every other sound is made by Grohl.)
It's rare to see an artist with that kind of intuitive ability — to keep perfect time (Grohl played without a click track or metronome) and to have every drum pattern mapped out.
"There's no, 'Oh, let's maybe try it this way, or may let's try this'. It was like, 'Here's the part, this is how it's played', and he gets it right on the first take.
"It's a truly amazing feat."
When it came to recording the vocals, Grohl opted for a difficult studio technique called triple-tracking.
The idea is to lay down multiple takes of the same lyric to make the voice sound rounder and thicker than it actually is.
It's hard to do well. The intonation, the timing, the phrasing — it all needs to be perfect.
Grohl was a natural.
He later said: "I remember that was the first time I ever listened to something I'd done and thought: 'That sounds like a band. That's f**king rad.'"
A raw kernel of what was to come
The recording was passed around the industry. The offers from major labels soon rolled in, despite the band reportedly seeking an "astronomical" deal, and the album was eventually released on July 4, 1995, becoming the first of what are so far nine albums.
Next to bigger productions, mostly those made after 2002's One By One, it's easy to hear Foo Fighters' self-titled debut as a single multi-instrumentalist working quickly on a tight budget.
It's raw. It's unblemished by technical trickery.
In this way, it more closely resembles In Utero, Nirvana's final album, than their mega-hit Nevermind. It sounds less like a commercial construct and, oddly, more like a bunch of people just playing instruments in a room together.
Given Grohl's energy and dynamism as a frontman these days, it's sometimes easy to forget he started at the back of the stage.
Or that Grohl thought his first big stab at life as a singer, laid down hastily a quarter of a century ago in the months following tragedy, might become nothing more than a demo he passed out to friends.
"I was like 28, 29 ... when you are living something you don't really see the historical significance of it," Jones says.
Still, he says, "From the day I met Dave I knew he would be big. You could just tell.
"Every time I recorded with him I always knew these songs were great."
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMibmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIwLTA3LTA1L2Zvby1maWdodGVycy1kYXZlLWdyb2hsLWZyb20tdGhlLWFzaGVzLW9mLW5pcnZhbmEtMjUteWVhcnMtYWdvLzEyNDE2NzA20gEnaHR0cHM6Ly9hbXAuYWJjLm5ldC5hdS9hcnRpY2xlLzEyNDE2NzA2?oc=5
2020-07-04 20:28:46Z
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