Foo Fighters travel along Sonic Highway
Dave Grohl’s musical map of America begins where it started — for him, at any rate — in Seattle. There, on Oct. 17, 1994, he tells the camera, “I walked into a studio and recorded a bunch of songs by myself. These songs eventually became the Foo Fighters.”
The Foo Fighters frontman is on the ultimate road trip in the new eight-part HBO docuseries Sonic Highways, a look at eight songs recorded in eight cities, on the eve of what will be the band’s eighth album.
It may sound like a gimmick, but anyone familiar with Grohl’s music — first as the drummer of the generation-defining grunge band Nirvana, then as lead guitarist and the singersongwriter who more than anyone else defined Foo Fighters — knows “gimmick” is not part of Grohl’s musical vocabulary.
Grohl is the artist who, in accepting the 2012 Grammy Award for best rock album, for Wasting Light, told the assembled throng that there’s something to be said for the dirt and grit of live performance, that singing against a backdrop of pre-recorded synthesizer tracks is bogus — a thinly disguised jab at bands like Coldplay.
Coldplay had won the 2009 Grammy, for Viva la Vida, but Foo Fighters holds the overall mark with four, beginning with 2001’s aptly titled There is Nothing Left to Lose and continuing through 2004’s One by One and 2008’s Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace.
Sonic Highways is not about Grammys or band rivalries, however, but about music’s source, and — for Grohl, anyway — culturally defining cities, each one of them unique in its own way, that shaped not only who he is as a musician but every other U.S. rock artist who ever held a guitar or set of drum sticks.
Foo Fighters has been at this for exactly 20 years, Grohl says at the outset of Sonic Highways — yes, he directs, too — and the band has toured all over the world.
“But it’s always a day here, a day there. You never get a chance to get a feel for the places that we’re in, or what they have to offer.
“So, for our 20th anniversary, we decided to do something different to make the creative process new again. Something we’ve never done before.”
Sonic Highways opens with a song lyric, Something from Nothing — “I threw it all away because/I had to be what never was” — and takes off from there.
The project started, Grohl says, from his belief that the environment in which one makes a record ultimately influences the end result.
“Not just the studio but the people, and the history. When I listen to our records, I remember everything about the experience. It’s like … I hear memories. I feel like if everyone knew more about the people and the places where this music is made they would feel more connected to it.
“So we set out looking for inspiration from all these great cities. We wanted to talk to musicians, to producers, to studio owners, and find out what inspires them. Because it all comes from somewhere.”
Welcome, in the opener, to Chicago and blues guitarist Buddy Guy, Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh, Cheap Trick axe man Rick Nielsen, record producer Bruce Paviit. Chicago “is large but very working class, rough around the edges” — the middle of the country, the great stopping spot “where I lay my burden down,” philosophically midway between New York and California, but with its own tempo, home to voices as varied as Etta James, Kanye West, the band Chicago, Muddy Waters and legendary swingman Gene Krupa.
“I think that there’s something about a city,” Grohl says, “that influences the way that people play music in that city. It used to be that just throwing your gear in a van was an adventure. But after 20 years you look for ways to change the process and make it more of a challenge.”
Future stops on Sonic Highways’ road tour include Nashville, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Austin, Texas, and for Grohl, the city where it all started, Seattle.
“Cities are changed by the people who go there,” Rolling Stone senior editor David Fricke tells Grohl. “But then the cities change them as well.”
Music and film are different mediums, but Grohl learned almost by accident that they make a comfortable fit. “It gave our band this whole new … reach and audience, where people started to understand us as people,” Grohl said this past summer, in Los Angeles. “I started to realize the power of music and documentary together.
“A lot of the time, music can seem one-dimensional. You hear it in your car. You hear it in an elevator. It’s a sound. It might have a catchy melody. But if you get a little bit deeper into the artist or the song, it creates this emotional connection that comes from substance and depth. It’s no longer just a one-dimensional thing.”
In 2013 Grohl made the film Sound City, his directorial debut. It told the story of Van Nuys, Calif., recording studio Sound City Studios where, in 1991, Nirvana recorded the grunge classic Nevermind.
“The response to Sound City was incredible,” Grohl said. “Sitting on an airplane, old ladies in the grocery store, it didn’t matter if they were a musician or not, people would come up to me and say, ‘Sound City was amazing.’ Everywhere I went. The message of that movie was something a lot more human than, you know, Fleetwood Mac or Rage Against the Machine or Nirvana. It was about being inspired to follow your passion, that anything is possible if you really want to do it.”
Making Sonic Highways exposed Grohl to a whole new range of stories.
“Man, nobody is cooler than Dolly Parton,” he said. “And her story is amazing.”