Drum avatar Dave Grohl recalls debuting his new band, UFO sightings and jamming econo.
“This was the first time the Foo Fighters toured. I grew up listening to the Minutemen, so I knew Watt’s music very well. In 1994 I played at some MTV movie awards, with the band from the Backbeat movie – Thurston Moore, Greg Dulli and Mike Mills. [Mike Watt] was backstage and we met and he told me he was putting together a record with a bunch of different musicians. He came up to Seattle and we recorded a couple of songs.This was maybe three or four months after Nirvana ended – the first thing I recorded with anyone after Nirvana. Watt is a pleasure to be with – he’s an inspiring player because he still has so much fire and energy when he plays. It was the perfect way for the Foo Fighters to begin.
The Foo Fighters would play a 35-minute set. Then we’d go offstage, have a couple of beers, and jump up onstage with Mike Watt. It was fucking awesome. All of the musicians from all of the bands were rotating and switching positions within Watt’s band through the night. I would begin the show on guitar, then I would go back to the drums and then our drummer William [Goldsmith] would play the drums and we also had two drumsets on a song or two. The whole thing was a marathon – we did like 28 shows. I got to play guitar on a Blue Öyster Cult cover. It was great.
The best part was the convoy of vans. We were all adapting to Watt’s style of touring. We all got CB radios so we could talk when we were driving, in trucker lingo. Hovercraft had spray painted their van silver and it looked like a fucking UFO – and once, when driving through the South-west, we thought we saw a UFO. People would dress up in drag, posing as a band which we called The Lucky Charms Our van was a red Dodge Ram Van that we called Big Red Delicious. We still have that van – it’s sat on the parking lot of our studio.
Watt always carried a pack of bass strings in his back pocket and I remember at one show he broke a string in the middle of a song. While he was playing the song, he pulled the broken string off of his bass, pulled the replacement string out of his pocket, put the string through the bass and put the string through the bass and tuned it up – all without missing a fucking beat. There was no road crew, just us – loading in the gear, setting up, changing strings… When he sent us thefirst itinerary, it was the most exhaustive calendar I’d ever seen. Somedays we’d be playing two shows in different states! Watt said, ‘Yeah, some states are really close to each other.’ This tour was the beginning of the Foo Fighters and we have never since toured as hard. It was the perfect way to start – we came off that tour with our teeth cut into fucking razors.”