During a recent live conversation, Dave Grohl compared recording the first Foo Fighters album to an ‘exorcism’ after Kurt Cobain’s tragic death. Alternative Nation transcribed his touching comments.
“The first Foo Fighters record wasn’t supposed to be a record. It was kind of an experiment- or almost like an exorcism. Like I hadn’t done anything after Kurt had died. And I finally was like, I have to go record something. And so I went to a studio down the road from my house. I booked six days, which was for me, an eternity and just blasted out fourteen songs where I played all the instruments and I didn’t want people to know it was me. So I thought I would call it the Foo Fighters because it’s plural, it sounds so stupid.
I thought people would think, ‘The Foo Fighters. Who are they?’ And I made a hundred cassettes and I handed it out to a bunch of people and then record companies started calling saying, ‘Hey. we want to put out your record.’ And I was like what, that tape I did? That’s not even an album.
And my lawyer called and said no, no, no- because I paid for it; six days in the studio and she said, here’s what you should do. Start your own label and you own this and you can license it to someone and they’ll manufacture it or distribute it or whatever for a certain amount of time and then you’ll get it back. And I was like, okay.”
