Since joining Nirvana in the early '90s, multi-instrumentalist Dave
Grohl has spent much of his life in the rock and roll limelight. And it's only
natural that he's made some enemies throughout his decades-long career.
After Kurt Cobain's death ended Nirvana, Dave Grohl recorded the first Foo Fighters album,
playing almost every instrument on every song. The hit record
launched the next chapter of Grohl's career, and he assembled a real band,
hiring former Sunny Day Real Estate bassist Nate Mendel and drummer William Goldsmith.
The latter would quit Foo Fighters just after the release of the band's sophomore record,
The Colour and the Shape, because making it was a
horrible experience for Goldsmith. He reflected to the Miami News,
"Dave had me do 96 takes of one song, and I had to do thirteen hours' worth
of takes on another one. It just seemed that everything I did wasn't good enough for him."
Goldsmith suspected that personnel at Capitol Records and producer Gil Norton
wanted Grohl to lay down the drum tracks himself, as he'd established
himself as one of the best percussionists in rock while in Nirvana. And in the end,
Grohl did wind up replacing nearly all of Goldsmith's laborious drum
work with his own on the 1997 record, without informing the musician. Goldsmith broke down
his feelings about this creative decision while speaking with The Daily Mail, saying,
"For me, to have that done to you and to continue playing live would have been damaging to my
soul. [...] He was a bit like the kid who is popular but is mean and everyone likes them."
About a year after the 2020 instatement of government-mandated rules against
public gatherings designed to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus,
rock bands started to tour again. Foo Fighters didn't want their concerts
to become a place where people might catch a potentially deadly strain of the coronavirus,
so they instituted a vaccination policy at their performance. This mandate required fans
entering their show at Madison Square Garden in New York City to provide written proof that
they'd received a full slate fo COVID-19 vaccination doses before coming inside.
This decree enraged John Joseph, lead singer of the anti-establishment punk
band the Cro-Mags. In an interview for The Void with Christina podcast,
Joseph recalled that Grohl used to play in a band called Scream that had supported the
Cro-Mags on bills. Given their history, Joseph was shocked by Grohl's decision regarding the vaccine.
"Now he's with the Flu Pfizers, the Flu Fighters,
and it's like, 'We're oh — we're playing vaccinated only shows.'"
Joseph's anger was clear in his rant, and he literally called BS on Foo Fighters' decision
before questioning Grohl's sanity and the vaccine mandate in general.
For better or worse, Foo Fighters are a mainstream, major-label, industry darling
rock band. That constitutes a major shift in attitude from frontman and founder Dave
Grohl's previous projects like grunge and punk purveyors Nirvana and the hardcore outfit Scream.
Having gained so much notoriety, Grohl has had opportunities to produce HBO
documentaries and record with the likes of classic rock legends Rick Springfield,
John Fogerty, Paul McCartney, and Joe Walsh. Unsurprisingly,
many of Grohl's more alternative peers aren't so impressed by his commercially appealing resume.
For example, Brent Hinds, lead guitarist of the tough, loud,
and experimental metal band Mastodon made his feelings about Grohl's career choices
plain in a May 2014 Instagram post. Along with a photo of Grohl smiling
wide and making a "ta-da" gesture in front of a soundboard, Hinds contributed the caption,
"Making rock n roll safer with every red carpet all star jam."
Hinds quickly deleted the post, but outlets like Stereogum caught and
amplified the rocker-on-rocker burn, cementing it permanently into alternative music history.
In 2019, Foo Fighters headlined the Reading Festival in the United Kingdom. During their set,
they paid tribute to britpop legends Oasis, who split up in
2009 after an altercation between the forever embattled brothers, Liam and Noel Gallagher.
After drummer Taylor Hawkins, whose drum kit had the brothers' faces on it, predicted Oasis would
get back together soon, Dave Grohl followed with an offer to start a petition for their reunion.
Grohl is an Oasis fan, but he's gone on record saying that if he had to pick one
of the two Gallaghers, he'd select Liam. In an interview with QMRQ, Grohl even admitted,
"All the kids want to be him. I loved Oasis, but nobody wants to be Noel, do they?"
An Oasis reunion isn't likely, as Noel and Liam Gallagher don't get along and
don't speak. A few days after the Reading Festival, Noel Gallagher showed just how
offended he was by Grohl's suggestion that he make music with his brother
again that he insulted the musician during a concert in California with his new band,
High Flying Birds. Gallagher asked the crowd if there were Oasis fans among them, before stating,
"Is anyone gonna sign the petition Dave Grohl wants to get together to get us back
together? I'd like to start a petition to get the Foo Fighters to split up."
He went on to curse a bit more about Grohl,
throwing some final insults before beginning to play.
Oderus Urungus led the charge for many years for the comic-horror heavy metal band GWAR,
a group famous for their elaborate suits and proclaiming themselves to be extraterrestrial
monsters. In real life, that GWAR member and founder was the late Dave Brockie,
who in 2013 gave an interview to Artisan News Service in full-GWAR
regalia but broke character to rail against the entertainment industry.
One of the targets in his anti-mainstream tirade was none other than Grohl. After
acknowledging that he may have offended the music industry at the 1993 Grammy
Awards when he called a nomination for GWAR "a meaningless accolade," Brockie
doubled down on the problematic nature of the award ceremony.
"Let me tell you something: those f---ing celebrities giving each
other awards is the last thing they need."
After calling out the wastefulness of the "privileged elite" taking home costly gift
bags at awards shows, he turned his attention to the Foo Fighters' vocalist. While his speech
here got somewhat incoherent, the larger implications of Brockie's statements and
gestures was that Grohl was bound to an almost sexual level of servitude to the music industry.
To Brockie's credit, it wasn't just Grohl he was shading, as he also suggested that
Green Day vocalist Billie Joe Armstrong was fit to perform similar favors for industry execs as well.
Many historical ties link the Melvins and Nirvana. The punk band even allowed
one of its most famous fans, Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, to produce their 1993 album Houdini,
until leader Buzz Osborne fired him over drug-related unreliability.
The Melvins and Nirvana played shows together throughout Nirvana's entire history, and both
of the surviving members of Nirvana expressed interest in appearing on the Melvins' 2016 album,
Basses Loaded. Bassist Krist Novoselic would record some tracks, but Grohl
bailed. Osborne seemed somewhat perplexed by this decision, as he told Rolling Stone,
"Dave Grohl had said that he wanted to do all that
stuff with us. He wanted to do Nirvana songs with the Melvins."
Instead, Grohl got sidetracked with higher-profile gigs — namely
performing and recording with Paul McCartney and playing at the Academy
Awards — and ultimately ditched the recording sessions altogether. As Osborne recalled,
"He just never showed up. Blew it off, totally. And it was his idea! I didn't appreciate that,
you know?. One thing I'm not doing is [...] waiting for Dave Grohl to
call me. When he totally blows you off like that, it's f---ed."
Heavy rock band L7 formed in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s. In the early '90s,
they were benefiting from the era's fixation on alternative rock, and their attitude-loaded
singles like "Pretend We're Dead" and "Andres" earned significant radio airplay.
The members of L7 and Nirvana frequently ran into each other,
as L7 bassist Jennifer Finch had once played in a band with Hole frontwoman and Cobain's wife,
Courtney Love. Finch and Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl were also a couple for a short while,
and it's not something that the L7 bassist looks back on with much fondness.
When L7 decided to record their 1992 album Bricks Are Heavy,
they hired producer Butch Vig. At the time, Vig's last big record, Nirvana's Nevermind,
had reached the public and was gaining wide renown. As a result of Nirvana's newfound
notoriety, Grohl's image was plastered around the world like never before. In the documentary L7:
Pretend We're Dead, Finch reflected on this era and the effect that it had on her.
"Everywhere I go, everywhere I turn, I see this f---ing face. Frankly I'm sick of it."
It seems that after over 30 years of Grohl being an international celebrity,
Finch has had enough. She chose to leave the past in the past and wouldn't watch the
Grohl-heavy Nirvana documentary Montage of Heck. As she told The Big Takeover in 2015,
"I have my own memories of those times, and those memories are at a
point where they are fading. I don't want someone else's ingrained into my brain."
Dave Grohl started up a romantic relationship in the late 1990s
with one of the most influential and accomplished winter sports athletes of
the time, snowboarder Tina Basich. She won titles at the X Games and the U.S. Open,
and she was the first woman to successfully accomplish a competition backside 720. When
she met Grohl, however, she lost focus. As she told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
"I really changed my priorities when I started dating Dave,
because I was really in love with him. And that really changed my snowboarding."
In 1999, Basich broke a leg, which prevented her from snowboarding for months. While she was
recovering from that devastating injury, she learned that Grohl had been dating two other
women in secret and stopped answering her calls for over a month before finally ending their
relationship. Basich reflected on this time period in her memoir, Pretty Good for a Girl, writing,
"Breakups suck. But Rockstar exits are the worst. All I got was a five-minute
phone call from him, after five weeks of me calling and trying to
get ahold of him because I just had to know if these rumors were true."
The split had been so profoundly painful for Basich that she couldn't even write
about it at first. As she told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
"It was really hard for me. I rewrote my book five times
and not until the fifth rewrite did Dave Grohl make the book."