Please sir, can I have some more Grohl?
I just noticed that my interview with Dave Grohl has found a home on a couple of blogs, with this one especially taking him to task for supporting John Kerry. I'm sort of surprised that this is a revelation to some folks since he campaigned for the guy, but whatever. I'd like to stress that I have no interest other than the journalistic variety in whichever way Dave Grohl voted. In fact, a few of my higher-ups at Spin didn't want me to use this part of the interview because they considered the election old news, but the morning of the interview, there was a squib in the Washington Post's gossip column saying Grohl had dedicated the album to Kerry, and I felt like I had to ask about it. And the quotes were good.
Anyway, because of space constraints the piece didn't contain all Grohl had to say about Kerry; here's a bit more of the transcript.
Anyway, because of space constraints the piece didn't contain all Grohl had to say about Kerry; here's a bit more of the transcript.
I’ve read the title of your new album is a tribute to John Kerry.
I think they might have sort of took that out of context a little bit. Basically, people have been asking about lyrics, asking about the title of the record. The album’s called In Your Honor. A few of the songs were written when I came home from the campaign trail with Kerry, where every day we would go to four or five small towns, and he would speak at rallies, but before he got up to speak, I would go play acoustic music for the audience. And the audiences weren’t Foo Fighters audiences. I don’t think anyone knew I was on that campaign at all. So the front row was World War II veterans and teacher unions and, you know, blue collar workers. But it was great because I’d go up and play a song like “Learn to Fly” or “My Hero,” “Everlong,” and it made sense somehow. It made sense to them, it made sense to me, and I was paying tribute to something I really believed in. I came back from that, was so inspired by the people and the real emotion and the feeling of a small community all coming together for an honorable reason, and it was overwhelming. It was thankless in a way. You’re just sort of devoting yourself to something that you truly believed in. And that’s where the title came from. The album’s not a political record. It’s not American Idiot. It’s basically, they’re general emotions that can apply to what was happening then.
Were you crushed after the election?
Fuck yes. I wanted to riot. I wanted to fucking start a war.
Some people didn’t come out of their houses for a couple days.
Yeah, but you know what? That was the other thing. Rather than write an angry, Rage Against the Machine record, you had to give a sense of hope and release and faith. Which is exactly what John Kerry was doing. There was no gloom and doom on that campaign trail. It was all about bettering yourself or bettering the country. There was a message of hope. It was scrawled over, fucking, banners, and it felt good. It really felt good. Just to get that feeling for once. And the depth of—I dunno, it just felt good to feel good again. And he could do that. He could have done it for four years; he would do it every day for half an hour at a time. And people felt it. And when we pulled away from those towns, people looked like, “You know what? Everything’s gonna be all right.” And we got fucked.
Still, that message of hope never really made it out, never really translated with Kerry.
Yeah, also that experience, it was so different watching—the difference between watching a debate and being at a small rally in a town center in Iowa, feeling it and experiencing it with the people and with the candidate—the difference was huge. It was real. It wasn’t a sales pitch. It was genuine, and it came across, and it was contagious. So it was real. And, you know I watched the debates and fucking laughed my ass off. It was some of the best entertainment since the Chappelle Show season.
Kerry was widely judged as winning all three of those debates, but he still lost the election.
The country’s so divided, it’s insane. There’s a whole lot of America out there that you and I don’t know. And, yeah, it didn’t work.
A lot of voters said Kerry’s millionaire celebrity supporters were a turnoff. That he had the support of wealthy rock stars and actors, but not the support of “real people.”
Which amazed me because those are the people he’s fighting for. That was the thing. The people that he had fought for when he was young, and the people that he was fighting for now, were the people who just didn’t get it. It’s like holding your hand out to someone as they slip under the fucking current. It just didn’t work. But I still have faith and hope that things can get better.
You’re not thinking of leaving America.
No, I would never do that. Uh-uh. But I’ll still go to Texas.
Foo Fighters are a popular band. I’m sure you have Republican fans.
Yeah, absolutely, and some people—one of the reasons I went out and did that with the Kerry campaign, I was personally offended that George Bush was using one of our songs at his campaign rally.
Which one?
“Times Like These.” So were trying to think of a way to get him to stop. “Fuck, man, I’m gonna send the president a cease-and-desist order.” And then, I thought, “Well, there’s loopholes, I don’t know that that’s really gonna work,” and then I thought, “Okay, I’ll just charge him a licensing fee so that every time he uses that he has to forward it to the Kerry campaign.” Then I thought, “That’d be kind of funny but there’s no fucking way that’s ever gonna work.” So I thought, “I’ll just go and play these songs in an environment where I think they belong.” I didn’t really feel that my song went along with what George Bush was telling people. It didn’t make sense. And I was pissed, because I wrote that fucking song. I know what I’m singing about, I know what I meant, and it basically mirrored what John Kerry’s campaign was trying to represent. I thought, “this is where that shit belongs.” So that’s why I went out and did it. It was personal. I didn’t want it to have anything to do with the Foo Fighters, which I know is a lot to ask, but it was really personal. Just as I would have walked into a booth to vote, I can walk onto a stage and do that. And I know it probably turned a lot of people off, and politics turns our fans off. I know our fans are turned off to politics when we talk about it. And I usually never talk about it. I’ve voted in every election since I was 18. And it’s always been personal, because I didn’t feel it had anything to do with our music. And still, I feel like they’re separate. But if I’m asked on a personal level what I think, I’ll fucking spill, that’s fine.
A lot of artists who play on, say, the stadium level, avoid that.
I’m sure they do. A lot of artists are really career-conscious. A lot of artists are really ambitious and worried that they were to do something like that, put their balls out on the line, it would mean they would lose some fans or not sell as many records or not sell as many tickets in, fucking Oklahoma or whatever.
It’s a market-share consideration.
It’s inhuman is what it is. I think it’s bullshit. So, I’ve waited a long time to do something about that, but I thought it was time to get up and do it. Just as you’d expect everyone to get out and vote. Everybody had a voice at the time; everybody still has a voice. We can talk about it till I’m blue in the face.
posted by Andrew Beaujon at 14:52
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