Foo Fighters

• 1. Introduction

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  The Foo Fighters began in October 1994, when Dave Grohl walked into Robert Lang Studios with 15 songs of his own. He played every instrument and sang every vocal. The single exception was a guitar part on "X-Static," played by Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs. In under a week, Grohl had an album's worth of material on tape. He copied the sessions onto cassettes and handed them to friends, hoping for honest feedback. Nothing about that moment suggested a long career. Grohl wanted to stay anonymous. Yet that private tape became a band that would win Grammy Awards, outlast its own near-collapse, and keep going through a devastating loss. Why did Grohl choose such an odd name? Who joined him, and why did so many drummers and guitarists come and go? What pulled the group back from the edge of breaking up? And how did the band keep going after tragedy? The answers begin with a drummer who had just lost his band.

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• 2. From Demo Tape To Band

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  In 1990, Dave Grohl joined the grunge band Nirvana as its drummer. On tour he carried a guitar and wrote songs, but he was too intimidated to share them. He was in awe of the songs written by frontman Kurt Cobain. In 1992, Grohl released an album of demos called Pocketwatch under the pseudonym Late!

  Nirvana ended in April 1994, after the death of Kurt Cobain. Offers came in. Press rumors said Grohl might join Pearl Jam, and he nearly accepted a drummer's job with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Grohl later explained his choice. He said: "I was supposed to just join another band and be a drummer the rest of my life. I thought that I would rather do what no one expected me to do."

  The name Foo Fighters came from a World War II term for unidentified flying objects. Grohl hoped to release the recordings in a limited run, and he wanted listeners to assume several people had made the music. Years later he joked that if he had seen this as a career, he would have picked a different name. He called it the stupidest band name in the world. Instead of staying hidden, the tape circulated through the music industry, and record labels grew interested.

  Grohl then needed a band to support the album. He first spoke with Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, who decided against joining. Grohl said working together would have felt "really natural," but also "weird" for the others, and it would have put more pressure on him. He recruited bassist Nate Mendel and drummer William Goldsmith instead. Both came from the recently disbanded Seattle emo group Sunny Day Real Estate. Pat Smear, who had toured with Nirvana as a second guitarist, completed the lineup. Grohl licensed the album to Capitol Records and released it on his own new label, Roswell Records.

  The band made its live debut on the 23rd of February 1995, at the Jambalaya Club in Arcata, California. Shows followed at Satyricon in Portland on the 3rd of March and the Velvet Elvis in Seattle on the 4th. The Portland show was part of a benefit for the investigation into the rape and murder of Mia Zapata, singer of the Gits. Grohl refused interviews and large venues. The first major tour came in the spring of 1995, opening for Mike Watt. The first single, "This Is a Call," arrived in June, and the album Foo Fighters followed the next month. Later singles included "I'll Stick Around," "For All the Cows," and "Big Me." In August, the band made its first appearance at the Reading Festival in England. Reading would call them back again and again, but the lineup that played there in 1995 would not hold.

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• 3. A Revolving Lineup

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  In the spring of 1996, the band entered Bear Creek Studio in Woodinville, Washington, with producer Gil Norton. Grohl had written every song, but the rest of the band shaped the arrangements. With the sessions nearly complete, Grohl carried rough mixes to Los Angeles to finish his own vocal and guitar parts. There he realized he was unhappy with the drumming. He replaced most of Goldsmith's drum tracks with his own. Grohl hoped Goldsmith would still tour, but Goldsmith felt betrayed and quit.

  Taylor Hawkins, then the touring drummer for Alanis Morissette, got a call from Grohl asking for a recommendation. Grohl was surprised when Hawkins volunteered himself. Hawkins debuted with the band in time for The Colour and the Shape in May 1997. The album produced the singles "Monkey Wrench," "Everlong," and "My Hero."

  Smear left in 1997, citing exhaustion and burnout. His replacement was Franz Stahl, who had played with Grohl in Scream, the band Grohl drummed for before Nirvana. Stahl appeared on two soundtrack recordings: a new version of "Walking After You" for The X-Files, and "A320" for Godzilla. A B-side from the "My Hero" single, "Dear Lover," turned up in the horror film Scream 2. The 1998 tour reached the main stage at Glastonbury Festival.

  Later in 1998, the band traveled to Grohl's home state of Virginia to write a third album. Grohl and Stahl could not work together as songwriters. Grohl told Kerrang! in 1999 that the three of them seemed to be moving in one direction while Franz was not. Firing Stahl distressed Grohl, because the two had been friends since childhood. Soon after, Mendel phoned to say he was quitting to rejoin Sunny Day Real Estate. By the next day, he had changed his mind.

  The remaining trio of Grohl, Mendel, and Hawkins spent several months recording There Is Nothing Left to Lose in Grohl's home studio. Its single "Learn to Fly" became the band's first to reach the US Billboard Hot 100. Before the album came out, Capitol Records president Gary Gersh was forced out of the label. Because of Grohl's history with Gersh, the band's contract held a "key man clause" that let them leave when Gersh did. They left Capitol and signed with RCA, which later acquired the rights to the Capitol albums.

  To fill the empty guitar seat, the band auditioned several players and chose Chris Shiflett, who had performed with Me First and the Gimme Gimmes and with the California punk band No Use for a Name. He started as a touring guitarist. He was a full member by the time the fourth album was recorded, and that album nearly never came out.

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• 4. Almost Breaking Up

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  Near the end of 2001, the band gathered to record its fourth album. After four months in a Los Angeles studio, the record "just didn't sound right." The band doubted it would sell, and infighting made matters worse. Grohl stepped away to help Queens of the Stone Age finish their 2002 album Songs for the Deaf. When both bands began touring, the Foo Fighters were on the verge of breaking up entirely.

  The turning point came at the Coachella Festival. Grohl reunited with Hawkins, Shiflett, and Mendel, and they alternated days with Queens of the Stone Age. Hawkins and Grohl talked about returning to the album. After a very satisfying performance the following day, the band agreed to stay together. The next month, they re-recorded nearly the whole album in a ten-day stretch at Grohl's home studio in Alexandria, Virginia.

  The band calls the abandoned first version Million Dollar Demos. It has never been released in full, though seven of its tracks leaked online in 2012 and 2015. The rebuilt album, One by One, came out in October 2002. Its singles were "All My Life," "Times Like These," "Low," and "Have It All." The tour included a headline slot at the 2002 Reading and Leeds Festivals.

  After a year and a half on the road, Grohl did not want to rush the next record. He first meant to write acoustic songs alone, but the project grew to include the whole band. They moved to Los Angeles and built a studio called Studio 606 West. Grohl insisted that In Your Honor be split into two discs: one of rock songs, the other all acoustic. It was released in June 2005, with singles including "Best of You" and "DOA."

  In September and October 2005, the band toured with Weezer on a run billed as the Foozer Tour. In the summer of 2006, they added a short acoustic tour. Smear returned, along with Petra Haden on violin and backing vocals, Drew Hester on percussion, and Rami Jaffee of the Wallflowers on keyboard and piano. The setlists leaned on the acoustic half of the album, but also dug up lesser-known songs. One was "Marigold," a Pocketwatch-era song best known as a Nirvana B-side. In November 2006, the band released its first live CD, Skin and Bones, with fifteen performances from a three-night stint in Los Angeles. Jaffee, who sat in on that tour, would eventually become a full member.

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• 5. Garages, Cities, And Jokes

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  In August 2010, the band began recording its seventh album with producer Butch Vig, who had already produced two new tracks for the Greatest Hits album. The sessions happened in Dave Grohl's garage, using only analog equipment. The recording went to tape and used no computers, not even for mixing or mastering. Vig told MTV that it stayed entirely analog until post-mastering. Photos on Grohl's Twitter feed showed Smear in the room, and a press release in December confirmed he had played on every track. He was an official member again.

  Wasting Light debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, a first for the band. Alongside it came a rockumentary called Back and Forth, directed by Academy Award winner James Moll. It premiered at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, on the 15th of March 2011, and reached DVD three months later. For Record Store Day, on the 16th of April 2011, the band issued a limited-edition vinyl of covers called Medium Rare, and its promotion drew praise for originality. At the Grammy Awards in February 2012, the band was nominated in six categories and won five. Only Adele beat them, in the Album of the Year category.

  Sonic Highways took a stranger route. Grohl directed an HBO television series by the same name to mark the band's 20th anniversary. Eight songs were written and recorded in eight studios in eight different American cities, and the video captured the history and feel of each town. The album arrived on the 10th of November 2014. On the 23rd of November 2015, after a month-long countdown clock on their website, the band surprise-released a free EP called Saint Cecilia. Grohl announced an indefinite hiatus alongside it.

  Rumors of a breakup grew, and in March 2016 the band answered with a mockumentary video. It showed Grohl leaving to make electronic music, with Nick Lachey, formerly of 98 Degrees, taking over as singer. The video ended by insisting that the band was not breaking up and that nobody was going solo.

  The ninth album, Concrete and Gold, was produced by Greg Kurstin and released on the 15th of September 2017. Justin Timberlake sang on "Make It Right," and Shawn Stockman of Boyz II Men added backing vocals to the title track. Paul McCartney played drums on "Sunday Rain." The tour supporting the record included a headline slot at Glastonbury Festival in 2017 and stretched into October 2018.

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• 6. Guests And Mishaps

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  Around 2001, the Foo Fighters built a friendship with the English band Queen, whom Grohl and Hawkins in particular adored. That March, Grohl and Hawkins inducted Queen into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They joined the band to play the 1976 classic "Tie Your Mother Down," with Hawkins on drums beside Roger Taylor. Brian May added a guitar track to the Foo Fighters' cover of Pink Floyd's "Have a Cigar," which appeared on the soundtrack to Mission: Impossible 2. In 2002 he also played on "Tired of You" and the outtake "Knucklehead."

  On the 17th of June 2006, the band played its largest non-festival headlining concert to date, at London's Hyde Park. Lemmy of Motörhead joined to sing "Shake Your Blood," a song from Grohl's Probot album. As a surprise, May and Taylor appeared to play part of "We Will Rock You" as a lead-in to "Tie Your Mother Down."

  On the 7th of June 2008, at Wembley Stadium in London, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin took the stage. They played "Rock and Roll," with Grohl on drums and Hawkins singing. Then they played "Ramble On," sung by Grohl with Hawkins on drums. As Page and Jones left before a final encore of "Best of You," an ecstatic Grohl shouted that this was the greatest day of his whole entire life.

  Some of the stranger shows were quieter in scale. In September 2011, before a show in Kansas City, the band performed a parody song in front of a protest by the Westboro Baptist Church. It mocked the church's opposition to homosexuality, and the band wore the faux-trucker outfits from their Hot Buns promotional video. In June 2014, the band agreed to a Richmond, Virginia, show entirely crowd-funded by fans on the website Tilt.com. It happened on the 17th of September before 1,500 fans, with 23 songs over two and a half hours. That same month, they played three shows under the alias The Holy Shits.

  On the 20th of May 2015, the Foo Fighters were the final musical act on Late Show with David Letterman, as he ended a 33-year career in late-night television. They played "Everlong," which Letterman said had significant meaning for him after his open-heart surgery in 2000. He introduced them as "my favorite band, playing my favorite song." The band postponed part of an international tour to make the appearance.

  On the 12th of June, Grohl fell from the stage in Gothenburg, Sweden, during the second song of the set, and broke his leg. The band kept playing while he received medical attention, and he returned to finish the last two hours from a chair. He was flown to London for surgery that required six metal pins, and the remaining European dates were canceled. For the 4th of July show at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., Grohl sat on a custom-built moving throne that he claimed to have designed himself while on painkillers. A crowd of 48,000 watched, and the North American run became the Broken Leg Tour.

  In July, one thousand Italian fans gathered in Cesena, Italy, to perform "Learn to Fly" together and ask the band to come play there. The video went viral and impressed Grohl. The band showed up in Cesena on the 3rd of November.

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• 7. Sound, Stance, And Honors

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  Critics have called the Foo Fighters alternative rock, post-grunge, hard rock, power pop, and pop rock. Their early work was described as grunge, and comparisons to Nirvana came quickly. Grohl accepted Cobain's influence. He said: "Through Kurt, I saw the beauty of minimalism and the importance of music that's stripped down." He also credited Nirvana's habit of shifting between quiet verses and loud choruses. He said the Nirvana members liked the Knack, the Bay City Rollers, the Beatles, and ABBA as much as Flipper and Black Flag.

  Pitchfork writer Matthew Perpetua wrote that the Foo Fighters' story may be less glamorous than Nirvana's, but in some ways harder and more thankless. He called them "excellent at being mainstream" and likened them to Tom Petty, a "consistent hit machine pumping out working-class rock."

  On the first album, Grohl approached the guitar the way he approached the drums, assigning drum parts to different strings. That made songs easy to assemble. He said: "I could hear the song in my head before it was finished." In 1997 he described the band's blend of heavy and tuneful. He said the lure of punk was energy and immediacy, but that they were also "suckers for a beautiful melody." In 2005, Grohl said he loved being in a rock band, but did not know if he wanted to stay in an alternative rock band from the 1990s for the rest of his life.

  For most of its history, the band stayed away from politics. That changed in 2004, when Grohl learned that George W. Bush's campaign was using "Times Like These" at rallies. Grohl said there was no way of stopping the president from playing your songs, so he played it for John Kerry's people instead, where the message would make more sense. He attended several Kerry rallies and sometimes played solo acoustic sets. The whole band joined him for a performance in Arizona during one of the presidential debates. In January 2021, the band performed at the US Presidential Inauguration of Joe Biden. In August 2024, they said they would donate all royalties from "My Hero" to Kamala Harris' presidential campaign, after Donald Trump used the song at a rally without permission.

  Not every public stand aged well. In January 2000, Mendel led a benefit concert in Hollywood for Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives, a group that denies the link between HIV and AIDS. The band's website featured a section on the group. Sandra Thurman, director of the Office of National AIDS Policy, called it "extraordinarily irresponsible behavior." All links and references to the group were gone from the website by March 2003.

  The awards piled up regardless. The Foo Fighters have won 15 Grammy Awards, including Best Rock Album five times. Their first came in 2000 for the "Learn to Fly" music video. Best Hard Rock Performance went to "All My Life," "The Pretender," and "White Limo." In 2007, "The Pretender" held the top of Billboard's Modern Rock chart for a record 19 weeks. The band also took three Kerrang! Awards and won Best Rock Video for "Walk" at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards. In September 2021, they received the first Global Icon Award at that year's MTV Video Music Awards. The next month, they entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in their first year of eligibility, since their debut album was then 25 years old.

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• 8. Loss And Renewal

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  In October 2019, the band said it was recording its tenth album, built on demos by Grohl. A series of EPs called the Foo Files began that November, mostly collecting B-sides and live performances. By February 2020, Grohl said the album was finished. The COVID-19 pandemic then delayed it indefinitely, and Grohl said they had shelved it for now to figure out when it would happen. Medicine at Midnight finally came out on the 5th of February 2021, led by the singles "Shame Shame," "No Son of Mine," and "Waiting on a War."

  On the 17th of July 2021, for Record Store Day, the band released a disco covers album called Hail Satin under the name Dee Gees. It held four Bee Gees covers, Andy Gibb's "Shadow Dancing," and five live versions of Medicine at Midnight tracks. On the 25th of February 2022, they released Studio 666, a comedy horror film directed by BJ McDonnell. The band members play themselves, alongside Will Forte, Whitney Cummings, Jeff Garlin, and Jenna Ortega. Grohl is possessed by a demonic spirit and kills the others while they record in a haunted mansion. The mansion was the same one where the band had recorded Medicine at Midnight. Reviews were mixed, and the film did poorly in its opening week.

  On the 25th of March 2022, Taylor Hawkins died in his room at the Casa Medina hotel in Bogotá, Colombia. No cause of death was given. His last show with the band had been at Lollapalooza Argentina in Buenos Aires on the 20th of March. The Foo Fighters were due at the Estéreo Picnic Festival that night, and the festival stage became a candlelight vigil. A few days later, the band canceled its remaining tour dates. In September, they played tribute concerts at Wembley Stadium in London and the Kia Forum in Los Angeles, with Josh Freese on drums. At Wembley, Hawkins's 16-year-old son Shane played drums on "My Hero."

  In May 2023, a humorous video featuring several celebrity drummers announced Freese as the new drummer. The album But Here We Are came out on the 2nd of June, with the single "Rescued." A press release called it a "brutally honest and emotionally raw response to everything Foo Fighters endured over the last year." The band also made a surprise appearance at Glastonbury Festival 2023.

  Change kept coming. In September 2024, after Grohl announced that he had fathered a child outside his marriage, the band canceled its headline performance at the Soundside Music Festival in Bridgeport, Connecticut. On the 16th of May 2025, Freese announced that he had been fired, with little explanation. To celebrate the 30th anniversary, the band released the single "Today's Song" on the 2nd of July. Then The Hollywood Reporter reported that Ilan Rubin, the former touring drummer of Nine Inch Nails, would join. The first show with Rubin took place on the 13th of September at the Fremont Theater in San Luis Obispo, California. A live EP, Are Playing Where??? Vol. 1, appeared by surprise on Bandcamp on the 3rd of October. On the 23rd of October they released "Asking for a Friend" and announced a tour with Queens of the Stone Age.

  Their twelfth album, Your Favorite Toy, was released on the 24th of April 2026. The next day, they played "Caught in the Echo" and "Child Actor" on Saturday Night Live UK. The Take Cover Tour followed in 2026, and on it, Jason Falkner filled in as a substitute for Pat Smear.

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