Tah and their hit “Whoever You Are”, but
shot to prominence as a producer thanks
to his work with the likes of Adele and
Sia. When Grohl suggested Kurstin to his
bandmates, guitarist Pat Smear looked
puzzled. “He said, ‘Who’s he?’” recounts
Grohl. “And I said, ‘Well, he wrote and
produced “Hello” by Adele.’ And Pat goes,
‘What does Adele sound like?’” Grohl roars
with laughter. “He’d never heard her be-
fore! So I played him ‘Hello’ and he’s like,
‘OK, that’s amazing, but how the fuck does
this apply to what we do?’”
“I just go with whatever Dave says,”
shrugs Hawkins. “I just say, whatever,
you’re the boss. And I don’t think anyone
really knows how to steer the Foo Fighters
better than Dave, and I wouldn’t trust any-
one else at the driver’s wheel. We’re like our
own little Mafi a family. Whatever he’s got
in mind we go out and we fucking do. Give
it everything you’ve got.”
Grohl’s desire to work with Kurstin
had less to do with Adele and Sia than
it did Kurstin’s own indie-pop band,
The Bird and the Bee, with whose 2007
self-titled debut album Grohl became
obsessed. A chance meeting at a res-
taurant in Hawaii around four years
ago – “I ran up to him at his table,
he was having dinner with his fami-
ly, and I said, ‘I don’t want to interrupt
but I am in love with your album and I
think you’re a fucking genius’” – led to
a friendship they’d rekindle whenever
they were in Hawaii at the same time.
During those encounters they’d stand
waste deep in the pool” talking about
usic, be it the Zombies or the Dead
ennedys, the Beatles or Motörhead,
n the process realising they had a lot
of common musical touchstones. A light
went off in Grohl’s head: “I had this idea
that if we could somehow mix The Bird
and the Bee’s sense of harmony and mel-
ody with our fucking chaotic power chord
noise, we’d end up making the album that
I’d always wanted to make.” One night
over dinner, Grohl put this to Kurstin,
who responded thus: “Any time you want
to do anything, I would love to.” And so it
was that the plans for Foo Fighters’ ninth
album, Concrete and Gold, were put into
motion.
“I got especially excited about the idea
when I heard the demos,” says Kurstin via
e-mail. “I didn’t have any pre-conceived
notions. I just knew that Dave wanted to
try something new and we were all going
into it open-minded.”
Grohl had initially planned to take a
year off after the Sonic Highways tour, not
least because he had to focus on rehabili-
tating the leg he broke after falling off stage
in Gothenburg in June, 2015. (The physi-
cal therapy alone demanded several hours’
work a day for almost a year. In a recent in-
terview with BBC’s Zane Lowe, he revealedAs the Sonic Highways world tour
stretched into late 2015, Grohl switched
his thinking, opting instead to pare things
back on its follow-up: “I thought, the
strangest thing for our band right now
would be to go into a studio and book three
months with a producer who’s known for
making pop records and just record like a
band would do, because we haven’t done it
that way for so fucking long. It’d been al-
most a decade since we just walked into a
studio to make a record.”The studio in question was EastWest
Studios, a legendary complex on Sun-
set Boulevard that since the early Sixties
has played home to everyone from Frank
Sinatra, Elvis Presley and the Beach Boys
(who re c orde d Pet Sounds there) to Mi-
chael Jackson (Thriller), Madonna (Like a
Prayer), U2 (Rattle and Hum) and, more
recently, Metallica, Muse and Garbage.
The pop producer was Greg Kurstin,
who fi rst found minor fame in the mid-
Nineties with his alternative band GeggyOctober, 2017 RollingStoneAus.com | Rolling Stone | 55GETTY IMAGES
Faces of the Foos
(1) Grohl on his
“throne” in 2015.
(2) Foo Fighters in
1995, with original
drummer William
Goldsmith (left). (3)
Foos in 1997, the year
Taylor Hawkins
replaced Goldsmith.
(4) At the Grammys in
2001; guitarist Chris
Shiflett (left) joined
the band in 1999.1243