Story by Anne Erickson
Dave Grohl: ‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong with rock at all’
Dave Grohl fronts what’s likely the biggest rock band on the planet, Foo Fighters, but if you ask Grohl, he says the guys of the Foo are still extremely humble. The singer and former Nirvana drummer says that even with the Foo Fighters’ Grammy honors and No. 1 albums, the gents are just a “really simple band.”
“… We think we suck and we try really hard to make good records and we practice,” he told Billboard of the alternative band. “We don’t feel like the biggest, best band in the world. We just feel like the same five dorks that were touring in a van 17 years ago, that hasn’t changed.”
Grohl also asserted a notion that’s starting to become his trademark: Rock is far from dead. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with rock at all,” he said. “It’s overlooked. And right now, the current musical climate is not unlike it was back in 1991, right before Nirvana [Grohl's former band] got popular. The late ’80s was full of over-produced pop that kids had nothing to grab hold of, they had no way of connecting to this hair metal band singing about … strippers in a limousine on Sunset Boulevard. Who can relate to that? … And then a bunch of bands with dirty kids got on MTV and rock ’n’ roll became huge again. And I feel like that’s about to happen. Something’s got to give.
“It can’t be song contests on television for the rest of our lives. It can’t be the same playlists on every radio station for the rest of our lives. It can’t be music made entirely by computers with people talking over it the rest of our lives. It can’t go that way, it just won’t.” (Photo credit: Steve Gullick.)
