News The one song Dave Grohl never understood: “It’s fucking insane”
Dave Grohl has made a living out of being able to play anything that a musician throws at him. Even though he has made most of his greatest material as the leader of Foo Fighters and the drummer for Nirvana, Grohl has been able to collaborate with any artist that strikes his fancy, playing alongside Nine Inch Nails while adding his signature flair to jam sessions with artists like Prince and Paul McCartney. Of all his collaborations, however, Grohl admitted that one song still tripped him up when playing it live.
Towards the start of the 2000s, Grohl was already looking to move away from being only the frontman of Foo Fighters. After taking a hiatus following the tour for There is Nothing Left to Lose, Grohl turned in time in Queens of the Stone Age, working alongside Josh Homme to assemble the concept record Songs for the Deaf.
While Grohl’s work on the album would create a division between him and the rest of the band when he returned, it also began a fruitful creative friendship with Homme, who would appear on the song ‘Razor’ on their album In Your Honour. By the time both bands took breaks from each other, Grohl and Homme would rekindle their musical flame with the help of Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones.
Creating the supergroup Them Crooked Vultures, much of the trio’s namesake album came from different jam sessions between their main gigs. While Grohl would lend his skills to amazing slices of hard rock like ‘New Fang’ and ‘Dead End Friends’, one of the darker songs on the record ended up messing with his head.
As the record reaches its finale, ‘Reptiles’ became one of the more difficult songs for the band to nail down in the studio. Featuring many different drum grooves playing in syncopation with one another, Grohl remembered the song being a nightmare when he sat behind the kit to record it for the first time.
Looking back on his time in the studio, Grohl recalled his growing frustration over not playing the tempo correctly, saying, “I only started understanding that song three weeks ago. It’s fucking insane. Josh said he wanted me to hear all the different beats playing on one stereo and so I sat there as the guinea pig, with headphones on. Man, I was so pissed off that day. I was mad. I was in the worst fucking mood because I didn’t get the song – but I do now”.
Grohl wasn’t the only one having trouble putting together the final piece of the track. When writing the song, Homme would discuss how difficult it was to internalise the different sections, which often featured guitar parts playing in sharp contrast with each other throughout the song.
The recording wouldn’t even be the last time Grohl suffered while making the record. Midway through making a new Foo Fighters record as well as the Them Crooked Vultures, Grohl would end up going to the hospital due to chest pains, where he would be diagnosed with drinking too much coffee to get him through the sessions. Even though Grohl may have had a lot of creative angles to work on throughout this era of the band, there was never a creative challenge that he couldn’t handle.
