Dave Grohl has reflected on how to make the self-titled debut album by Foo Fighters, 25 years after its release.
The band’s leader recorded an initial version of the album almost entirely “for fun” before the record labels expressed interest in releasing it.
Speaking to Matt Wilkinson on Apple Music’s Beats 1, Grohl recalled the process of making the album. “I really recorded everything in sequence,” he said. “I was very, very excited to do this. I mean, it was almost like a school project. I was preparing, I had graphics.
She continued to reveal her favorite song from the album during those sessions, saying she was ‘Exhausted’.
“I really loved the song ‘Exhausted,'” he explained. That one came later than many others. The sound of the guitar, which is so crazy and muffled, was made with this amp that Barrett [Jones, co-producer] he had bought a can of gasoline in London. It was this red plastic gasoline can, the kind you would use if your car ran out of gas, with this little speaker.
“Maybe it was an eight-inch speaker and there is a battery. You put batteries. And if the batteries were depleted enough, it sounded like this apocalyptic distortion that was so cool, and that’s the sound of the song and the record. “
Grohl initially only made 100 cassette copies of the album and said he would hand them over to his friends when he stumbled upon them. “There was a boy who lived in the city who had a radio show, but also, I think, he worked for a record label,” he said. “And he called and left a message on my answering machine and said, ‘Hey, I played this for the record company and I think they want to get it out.'”
“And I thought, ‘Well, shit, it’s just a demonstration,'” Grohl said. “But that’s when the alarms went off where I said, ‘Oh man, maybe it should be a record. Maybe I should release it. So I sent one to my manager, John. I’m like,’ Yeah, a record company wants take out this tape that I did. ‘He says,’ Send it to me. ‘So I sent it to him and he said,’ What do you want to do? ‘
Elsewhere, Grohl revealed to whom he would dedicate the Foo Fighters debut album if he were to rewrite his notes for today. “It should be a lot of people, but I would dedicate it to Krist [Novoselic, Nirvana bassist] and Kurt [Cobain], “he said.” I have children [so] I can’t say it’s the most important event in my entire life, but it’s safe to say that we wouldn’t be here right now talking about this if it wasn’t for my time in Nirvana.
“I learned many lessons from Kurt, I learned many lessons from Krist. It was a great honor to be in that band and it was very devastating when it ended. But we have that catalog of music that we made together and that experience changed not only us, but much of the world in which we live. So I think that was probably the most formative period of my life. “
Meanwhile, Grohl also mulled over how to write some of Foo Fighters’ early songs, such as their debut single ‘This Is A Call,’ acted as an “exorcism” of the pain he felt when Cobain died.
