While speaking to his bandmates Dave Grohl and Pat Smear on a recent episode of his podcast “Shred with Shifty,” Foo Fighters guitarist Chris Shiflett recalled a mistake he made shortly after joining the band in 1999.
While discussing how some of the Foos’ earlier songs were written in tunings other than standard, Shiflett said he made what he calls a “massive blunder” during his second show with the band.
“I remember that was my first massive Foo Fighters blunder. It was my second show, at the sound check. I’d never had a guitar tuned to a low A on the E string, and I think I tuned it to A# and then played the whole song that way. I remember at the end of it, I realized, and [Dave said], ‘Hey, come here. Don’t do that again.’ [laughter] ‘Maybe don’t do that ever again,’” Shiflett said.
Shiflett also added that, during his early days with the Foos, Grohl took him guitar shopping because he didn’t have all the equipment he needed to be in the band.
“When I joined the band, you said, ‘Oh, you’re gonna need more than one guitar,’ and you took me shopping. This might [be] day two of being in the Foo Fighters — talk about a dream come true…” Shiflett recalled, speaking to Grohl. “So, we drive over before rehearsal to Voltage… these shops that I had been going to since I was a little kid, being yelled at, ‘Don’t touch that!’ And now, I walk in there, and I’ve got Dave Grohl with me, with his American Express, like, ‘We’re going shopping, get whatever you want.'”
“I was so freaked out. I’ve literally been in the band for 48 hours or something, I couldn’t even think straight, like, ‘I’ll just take that and that.’ And luckily, I got two amazing guitars, but I laugh about it now, it’d be a very different shopping spree today.”
