Dave Grohl

In October 1994, Dave Grohl locked himself away for six days at Robert Lang Studios in Seattle. Kurt Cobain had been dead for six months, and the record label was still waiting for calls that were never going to come. Grohl booked the studio under the table, loaded his drum kit into the car and recorded fifteen songs playing every instrument himself.

And he didn't tell anyone it was his voice.

That homemade tape gave birth to Foo Fighters. But reducing him to the hyperactive drummer who survived the grunge tsunami means missing half the picture. Grohl approaches entertainment with a garage punk ethic learned in Washington, D.C., when he slept in rotten vans while playing with Scream. That same do-it-yourself mentality is what he later brought to film sets and editing rooms.

Saving the Analog Sound from the Scrap Heap

In 2011, Grohl learned that Sound City studios were closing their doors in Los Angeles. In that run-down building in Van Nuys, he had recorded Nevermind with Nirvana twenty years earlier, sweating in front of a handcrafted British console, the Neve 8028. He decided to buy the mixing board, take it apart piece by piece and move it to his own Studio 606.

That technical move ended up becoming a feature film. Grohl made his directing debut with the documentary Sound City in 2013, bringing in screenwriter Mark Monroe to structure the testimonies of Trent Reznor, Neil Young and Stevie Nicks. The film grossed more than $400,000 at independent theaters and worked as a fierce defense against the sterile digitization of music.

The project avoided the usual whims of a bored rock star. Grohl kept a firm grip on the pace of the interviews and the film archive. So HBO bought his next production without hesitation.

In 2014, he directed the documentary series Sonic Highways. The concept was grueling: travel to eight cities across the United States, film interviews with local figures, write a song inspired by those conversations and record it live in legendary studios in each stop. He directed all eight episodes while recording his band's album, sleeping barely four hours a day between the shooting schedule and mixing sessions.

The body held on by a miracle.

Bloody Fiction and Two-Inch Tape

After signing on in 2021 for the documentary What Drives Us about the hardships of transportation on youth tours, Grohl wanted to cross over into fiction. He didn't go for prestige drama. He preferred to put together a gory horror comedy inspired by the midnight movies of John Carpenter.

In 2022, Studio 666 hit theaters, directed by BJ McDonnell from a story conceived by the musician himself. The plot trapped the members of Foo Fighters in a sinister mansion where a demonic entity took over the singer to force him to compose an endless track. The shoot relied on practical makeup effects, barrels of fake blood and chainsaws to dismember the band members.

Box office results were unforgiving. The production grossed three million dollars worldwide against a budget that far exceeded that figure. But the goal was never to win festival applause or Academy Awards.

Weeks after that stint in theaters, the death of drummer Taylor Hawkins in March 2022 in Bogotá brought any audiovisual plans to a dead stop. Grohl returned to the refuge of the studio. In 2023, he once again played all the drums for the album But Here We Are, recording the takes on two-inch magnetic tape reels and doing without digital metronomes in front of the recording glass booth.