On the weekend of August 18/19, 2001, Foo Fighters and Red Hot Chili Peppers co-headlined the UK’s V festivals, playing to crowds of 50,000 music fans at Weston Park in Staffordshire, and Hylands Park in Chelmsford, Essex. Both bands were flying high on the success of the shows, but on the morning of August 20, Foo Fighters came crashing down to earth, when Dave Grohl was informed that drummer Taylor Hawkins had been taken to a London hospital following a drug overdose. The following day, a press statement declared that Hawkins had “overindulged”, but was now in a stable condition.
Twenty-five years on, the specifics of the incident referred to within the band as “Taylor’s little nap” still remain cloudy. In the 2011 Foo Fighters documentary Back and Forth, guitarist Chris Shiflett suggested that Hawkins had taken heroin – “Our soundman at the time was like, ‘Taylor fucked up, he’s going to die, he’s fucking dead'” – while Hawkins himself blamed an addiction to painkillers, cutting off further queries by saying, “Just fucking painkillers, okay?” Further muddying the waters, Dave Grohl suggested that the drummer was in a coma for “10 or 12 days”, while Hawkins insisted it was around 48 hours.
Whatever the truth of the matter, it was sufficiently grave to cause Grohl to briefly consider breaking up the band.
“That was the first time in my life that I ever considered quitting playing music,’ he told me in 2009, “because it had got to the point where I wondered if music just equalled death… 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.”
And yet, by the autumn of 2001, Foo Fighters were back in business, working on a new record, almost as if nothing had happened, as if the trauma of the episode could be managed for all concerned simply by the quartet immersing themselves in music once more.
In an attempt to erase and rewind this troubling chapter of their history, the group attempted to tap back into more innocent, idyllic times, specifically the good vibes of their recording sessions for 1999’s There Is Nothing Left To Lose at Dave Grohl’s home in Virginia. This time around, however, working with producer Adam Kasper and recording engineer Nick Raskulinecz, the quartet struggled to recapture the same degree of creativity. Though Grohl had no shortage of song ideas – at least 20 – constructing fully-formed songs proved taxing, and frustration set in. As the new year dawned, the fruitless Virginia sessions were wound down, and operations shifted back to Los Angeles, specifically to Conway Studios, a state-of-the-art facility on Melrose Avenue.
It had got to the point where I wondered if music just equalled death
Dave Grohl
If Dave Grohl, or his management, imagined that the change of scenery, and the boost given by the LA-based musicians returning to home soil, would serve as a catalyst for inspiration, they were mistaken.
“Nothing was being accomplished,” Grohl recalled when we discussed the matter six years later. “The songs lacked any sort of life, they were just weird carbon-copy versions of songs that 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 gotta go see my acupuncturist, I’ll be back later’. Meanwhile we’re paying $4,000 a day for this room.”
“Honestly what happened is that we started working too soon on the record,” he reflected. “We just weren’t ready to do it. We started in on it again before we were ready, before Taylor was ready, before the songs were ready: we felt obligated, in a way. That’s kinda the difference between the first album and the fourth album. In a way they were both made for the same reason – the first album, unconsciously – but the fourth album was a conscious attempt at healing the band. And it didn’t work. It had the opposite effect.’
“We were almost forcing ourselves to make that record,” Taylor Hawkins added. “And it just wasn’t right. I just wanted to stay busy… but looking back, I probably could have used three or four months to get my head together.”
Relationships within the Foo Fighters camp were hardly improved by Dave Grohl’s decision to help out his old friend Josh Homme by playing drums on sessions for the third Queens Of The Stone Age record. Not least because it made Grohl aware that the album he was making with his own band was very much a poor relation by comparison.
“At night I’d go rehearse in a closet with Queens and I’d be in the best band in the world,” he admitted. “And then I’d come back to Foo Fighters studio and be totally dismayed by the apathy and lack of any sort of passion. So things started getting tense.”
Things came to a head in the spring of 2022, when Foo Fighters invited representatives of the world’s biggest music magazines to Conway Studios for advance listens to what they imagined would be their fourth album. While Kerrang! writer Ian Winwood was being given a preview of new songs, the long-simmering tensions in the studio exploded.
“I remember getting into a fight in the control room with the Kerrang! people outside,’ Grohl recalled. “It wasn’t even a fight, just people making little jabs and little comments here and there. 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.”
“I remember getting a promotional schedule for that album, looking at it and thinking, Wait a minute, I don’t even like this music, how am I supposed to promote it? How can I tell anyone I’m proud of this when I’m just not? And to be honest, the last thing in the world the band wanted to do was [for us] to be in the same room as each other.”
And so, having already spent around one million dollars on the making of the fourth Foo Fighters album, Dave Grohl took the bold executive decision to take what had been recorded to date and bin it, while he went off to join QOTSA on tour. As much as this put noses out of joint, his bandmates would come to recognise that the time. out saved their band.
“It took about four months to do those Million Dollar Demos, and that’s far too long for a rock record,” Taylor Hawkins noted. “Unless you’re doing A Night at the Opera.”
In May 2002, with their friendship repaired and heads clear, Dave Grohl and Hawkins would take another stab at the record back in Virginia, and put together an 11-track album in just 13 days. Almost everything the band had recorded in Los Angeles was rearranged, set aside for release as a B-side, or simply discarded, and the duo also wrote new songs – Low, Times Like These and Disenchanted Lullaby among them. Finally, they had a record they considered worthy of release.
Much later, after his band’s fourth album, One By One, was voted Best Rock Album at the 2004 Grammy Awards, Grohl would confess that, in his opinion, it featured “only 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… it wasn’t our proudest moment”,
By then, however, Foo Fighters were flying high once more, disaster averted.