The story of Foo Fighters

A punk kid from Virginia

Dave Grohl was born in Warren, Ohio, on the fourteenth of January 1969, and grew up in Springfield, Virginia, raised mostly by his mother Virginia, a teacher, after his parents divorced when he was seven. He taught himself guitar at twelve after getting bored with lessons, and taught himself drums too, playing along to Rush and punk records. At thirteen, a summer with his cousin Tracey in Evanston, Illinois, changed everything. She took him to see the Chicago punk band Naked Raygun, and he came home a punk. As a high school class vice president he even sneaked bits of Circle Jerks and Bad Brains songs over the school intercom before the morning announcements.[1]

At seventeen Grohl auditioned for the Washington hardcore band Scream. He lied about his age, got the job, and dropped out of high school to tour the world with them. Over four years he made records with Scream and toured Europe and North America, and in Toronto he once drummed for Iggy Pop at a record release party. Then in 1990 Scream fell apart mid tour when their bassist left. Stranded, Grohl called his friend Buzz Osborne of the Melvins, who told him a Seattle band called Nirvana needed a drummer and gave him the numbers of Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic. Grohl flew up to audition and was in. The next year Nevermind made them the biggest band in the world.[1] [2]

Inside Nirvana, Grohl was writing songs of his own, but he was too intimidated by Cobain's writing to share many of them. He recorded demos quietly with his producer friend Barrett Jones, and in 1992 a small Washington label called Simple Machines put some of them out on a cassette called Pocketwatch. He used the fake name Late!, because he thought it would be funny to tell everyone, sorry, we're Late. A few of his ideas did slip into Nirvana. Cobain heard him working on a song that became Marigold, a Nirvana B side, and Grohl came up with the riff for Scentless Apprentice on In Utero.[1] [2]

In January 1994, at Robert Lang Studios in Seattle, Nirvana booked three days to work on demos. Cobain did not turn up for most of the session, so Novoselic and Grohl worked on Grohl's songs, including future Foo Fighters tracks like Big Me and February Stars. Cobain arrived on the third day, and the band recorded You Know You're Right, their last studio recording. On the fifth of April 1994 Kurt Cobain died by suicide at his home in Seattle, and Nirvana was over. Grohl later said he could not even listen to music for a while, because every time he sat at a drum kit it reminded him of the band he had lost.[1] [2] [3]

A one man band called Foo Fighters

Offers came in fast after Nirvana ended. There were press rumours that Grohl would join Pearl Jam, and in November 1994 he played drums with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on Saturday Night Live and was asked to join them for good. He said no. As he put it later, everyone expected him to become a drummer in someone else's band for the rest of his life, so he decided to do what nobody expected. In October 1994 he went back to Robert Lang Studios, the same studio where Nirvana had made its last recording, with Barrett Jones at the desk.[1] [2] [3]

Over roughly a week Grohl recorded fifteen songs, playing every instrument and singing every part himself. He did about four songs a day, running from the drums to the guitar to the bass, still sweaty, grabbing sips of coffee between takes. The only other musician on the whole record was Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs, who dropped by to watch and ended up playing a guitar part on X Static. Grohl wrote most of the lyrics in the twenty minutes before he sang them, and he later said the gibberish was partly deliberate, because there was simply too much to say after Kurt's death.[1] [2]

Grohl wanted to stay anonymous, so he called the project Foo Fighters, a Second World War term pilots used for unidentified flying objects. He hoped people would assume it was a whole band. He later called it the stupidest band name in the world, and said he would have chosen something else if he had known it would become a career. He had a hundred cassettes made and handed them to friends and even to fans who told him Nirvana was their favourite band. In January 1995 Eddie Vedder played two of the songs on his pirate radio broadcast. Record labels came calling, and Grohl signed with Capitol, where Nirvana's old champion Gary Gersh was now president.[1] [2] [3]

Grohl did not want this to look like a solo career, so he built a band. He thought about asking Krist Novoselic, but decided it would put too much pressure on everyone. Instead he hired bassist Nate Mendel and drummer William Goldsmith from the Seattle band Sunny Day Real Estate, which was breaking up, and Pat Smear, the former Germs guitarist who had toured with Nirvana. The Foo Fighters played their first show on the twenty third of February 1995 at the Jambalaya Club in Arcata, California. On the third of March they played in Portland at a benefit for the investigation into the rape and murder of Gits singer Mia Zapata.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The album Foo Fighters came out in the summer of 1995 on Grohl's own Capitol imprint, Roswell Records, named after the famous New Mexico UFO story. It went top five in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and sold a million copies in America. Critics could not help comparing it to Nirvana, but they liked it. Singles like This Is a Call, I'll Stick Around and Big Me kept the band on the road for nearly a hundred shows that year. The Big Me video, a spoof of Mentos sweet commercials, became an MTV favourite, and fans started pelting the band with Mentos whenever they played it. Grohl said the little sweets hurt like pebbles.[1] [2] [3]

The Colour and the Shape and a revolving door

In November 1996 the band went to Bear Creek Studio, a converted barn outside Seattle, with the British producer Gil Norton, known for his work with the Pixies. Grohl's marriage to the photographer Jennifer Youngblood was falling apart, and the new songs were full of it. The sessions went badly, and Grohl scrapped nearly everything. Home in Virginia over Christmas, sleeping on a friend's floor in a sleeping bag, he wrote Everlong in about forty five minutes. It was inspired by his new romance with Louise Post of Veruca Salt, and later she sang on it, her parts recorded down a telephone line from Chicago.[1] [2] [3]

In February 1997 the band regrouped at Grandmaster Recorders in Hollywood and re recorded most of the album with Grohl himself on drums. William Goldsmith was not told. He had already endured sessions where, by his own account, Grohl had him do ninety six takes of one song. He learned from Nate Mendel that his parts were being replaced, and only a couple of his tracks survived. Hurt and feeling betrayed, Goldsmith quit. Years later Grohl admitted part of him was not finished playing drums, and said he wished he had handled it differently.[1] [2] [3]

Looking for a new drummer, Grohl phoned Taylor Hawkins, who was touring with Alanis Morissette, to ask if he knew anyone. To his surprise, Hawkins suggested himself. Morissette was a far bigger act at the time, but Hawkins said he wanted to be in a rock band, not behind a solo star. He was announced on the eighteenth of March 1997, and The Colour and the Shape came out on the twentieth of May. Grohl said its running order felt like a therapy session, moving from panic to peace. Monkey Wrench, Everlong and My Hero all became rock radio staples, and it remains their biggest seller in the United States.[1] [2]

Pat Smear was burned out. He had spent his life on tour, and the tension around Grohl's divorce did not help, since Jennifer Youngblood was a close friend of his. He agreed to stay only until a replacement was found. On the fourth of September 1997, at the MTV Video Music Awards pre show at Radio City Music Hall, Smear played part of the set, then announced he was leaving and handed over to Franz Stahl, Grohl's old guitarist friend from Scream. Stahl had flown in from a tour of Japan just two days earlier and had one day of rehearsal.[1] [2] [3]

Stahl's stay was short. He played on soundtrack songs for The X Files and Godzilla, and appeared in the My Hero video even though he had not played on the track. But when the band gathered in Virginia in 1998 to write the next album, Grohl felt Stahl was heading in a different direction, and he fired a friend he had known since childhood. It hurt. Shortly afterwards Nate Mendel called to say he was quitting to rejoin Sunny Day Real Estate, then changed his mind the very next day. For a moment the Foo Fighters were down to just three people.[1] [2] [3]

The basement, a coma and the million dollar demos

Grohl had spent a year and a half in Los Angeles partying hard, and he was sick of it. He bought a house in Alexandria, Virginia, and turned its basement into a studio, with sleeping bags on the walls for soundproofing. He called it Studio 606. As a trio, Grohl, Mendel and Hawkins spent the spring of 1999 eating chili, drinking beer and recording whenever they felt like it, with the windows open until you could hear birds through the microphones. Grohl still calls There Is Nothing Left to Lose his favourite Foo Fighters album. It came out on the second of November 1999.[1] [2]

Before the album was even out, their champion at Capitol, Gary Gersh, was pushed out of the label. Their contract had a key man clause tied to him, so the band walked, taking Roswell to RCA in one of the biggest signings of 1999. Learn to Fly became their first song on the Billboard Hot 100, and its video, a spoof of disaster movies with Jack Black and Kyle Gass of Tenacious D, won the band its first Grammy. The album won Best Rock Album too. For a second guitarist they auditioned thirty five players and chose Chris Shiflett of the punk band No Use for a Name.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

There was controversy too. In January 2000 Nate Mendel organised a Los Angeles benefit concert for Alive and Well, a group that denied HIV causes AIDS, and for a time the band's website promoted it. The head of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy, Sandra Thurman, called it extraordinarily irresponsible. Mendel said he was not a medical professional but believed patients deserved all the information. The links were quietly taken down by March 2003. On happier ground, in March 2001 Grohl and Hawkins inducted their heroes Queen into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Hawkins drummed Tie Your Mother Down alongside Roger Taylor.[1] [2]

Then came the darkest year. Taylor Hawkins had been partying heavily, and in August 2001, in London after a festival show, he overdosed on heroin and lay in a coma for two weeks. Grohl sat by his hospital bed until he woke, and said later he was ready to quit music. Hawkins called it a turning point, and later said he was sober. The band limped on, spending four months and more than a million dollars recording in Los Angeles, but the songs sounded clean, tame and lifeless. Hawkins called them million dollar demos. Arguments broke out, and their manager John Silva doubted anyone would want to buy it.[1] [2] [3]

Grohl went off to drum for Queens of the Stone Age on Songs for the Deaf and then toured with them, and even Hawkins thought it looked like the end. The band met again to play Coachella in April, where rehearsals turned into huge fights, especially between Grohl and Hawkins. But the show went well, and they decided to stay together. Grohl and Hawkins re recorded the core of the album in about twelve days in the Virginia basement. One by One came out in October 2002, and All My Life knocked Nirvana's You Know You're Right off the top of the modern rock chart, so Grohl replaced himself at number one.[1] [2] [3]

In Your Honor and the arena years

In 2004 Grohl heard that George W. Bush's campaign was using Times Like These at rallies, so he went out and played it for John Kerry's campaign instead. Those rallies fed straight into the next record, including Best of You, a song about breaking free from whatever holds you down. The band built a new Studio 606 in a warehouse in Northridge, Los Angeles, and even helped hammer in the insulation. In Your Honor, released on the fourteenth of June 2005, was a double album, one disc loud and one acoustic. John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin played on it, and Grohl called that the second greatest thing that ever happened to him, after his marriage to Jordyn Blum.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The acoustic side brought new faces. Pat Smear came back as a touring guitarist, and Rami Jaffee of the Wallflowers joined on keyboards, along with the violinist Petra Haden. On the seventeenth of June 2006 the band played their biggest headline show of their own yet, at London's Hyde Park, where Motörhead's Lemmy sang a song from Grohl's metal side project Probot, and Brian May and Roger Taylor of Queen walked on for We Will Rock You. In 2006 one of two miners trapped by a collapse at Beaconsfield in Tasmania asked for an iPod loaded with In Your Honor. Grohl later met him for a drink, and wrote an instrumental in his honour.[1] [2] [3]

For Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace they went back to Gil Norton, who questioned every idea. During a ten day break in April 2007, Grohl decided the record needed one more fast song and finished a sketch called Silver Heart. It became The Pretender, written in about a day, and it sat at number one on the American modern rock chart for a record breaking run. The album came out on the twenty fifth of September 2007 and won the band another Best Rock Album Grammy. Around then Smear confirmed he was touring with them again.[1] [2] [3]

On the seventh of June 2008, during two huge nights at Wembley Stadium, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin joined them on stage. Grohl drummed on Rock and Roll with Hawkins singing, and they swapped for Ramble On. As the legends walked off, Grohl told the crowd it was the greatest day of his whole life. Then the band took a long break from touring. A Greatest Hits album came out in November 2009, and Grohl said it felt too early, almost like an obituary. He spent 2009 instead drumming in a new supergroup, Them Crooked Vultures, with Josh Homme and John Paul Jones.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The garage record and the highways

For album seven, Grohl wanted something raw. He called in Butch Vig, who had produced Nevermind, and told him they would record in the garage of his house in Encino with no computers at all, just analogue tape. Vig thought it was a joke. Recording began on the sixth of September 2010 and ran eleven weeks, one song a week. Vig had to relearn editing tape with a razor blade, and his first cut took twenty minutes. Krist Novoselic came by to play bass and accordion on I Should Have Known, and Hüsker Dü's Bob Mould sang on Dear Rosemary. Pat Smear was back as a full member.[1] [2] [3]

Wasting Light came out on the twelfth of April 2011 and became the band's first number one album in America. Its closing song, Walk, grew out of watching his daughter Violet learn to walk, and Grohl said it was also about the morning after Kurt died, and not wanting anyone else to feel that trapped. At the Grammys in February 2012 they won five of the six awards they were up for, losing only Album of the Year to Adele. A documentary, Back and Forth, told their whole story, with past members interviewed. In 2011 they also mocked anti gay protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church from the back of a flatbed truck.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Grohl now had a taste for filmmaking. In 2013 he directed Sound City, a documentary about the Los Angeles studio where Nevermind was made, after buying its famous mixing desk. Then he went bigger. For Sonic Highways, released on the tenth of November 2014, the band wrote and recorded eight songs in eight American cities, from Chicago to New Orleans, each with local legends, and Grohl directed an HBO series about it. The lyrics came from his interviews in each town. Fans in Richmond, Virginia, even crowdfunded a show online, and the band obliged.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twentieth of May 2015 the Foo Fighters were the last musical act ever on David Letterman's Late Show, playing Everlong, the song he said meant so much to him after his heart surgery in 2000. Weeks later, on the twelfth of June in Gothenburg, Sweden, Grohl fell off the stage in the second song and broke his leg. He came back and finished the show sitting down while a medic tended to his leg, then needed six metal pins. They cancelled Glastonbury, but Grohl designed a giant throne, rebranded the American shows the Broken Leg Tour, and played Washington on the fourth of July to forty eight thousand people.[1] [2]

That summer a thousand Italian musicians gathered in Cesena to play Learn to Fly together and beg the band to visit. The video went viral, Grohl answered in broken Italian, and in November the Foo Fighters played Cesena. Then the Paris attacks of November 2015 cut their tour short. On the twenty third of November they gave away a free EP, Saint Cecilia, recorded at a hotel in Austin, and dedicated it to the victims. It was the first release to credit Rami Jaffee as an official member. Grohl announced an indefinite break, and breakup rumours spread until a spoof video in 2016 insisted, for the millionth time, they were not breaking up.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Concrete, gold and a haunted house

The break was partly about Grohl's leg. He later said he still could not walk properly and faced long daily physical therapy, so he vowed to stay away from music for a year. Six months to the day, he broke his own rule and started writing Run. He rented a place in Ojai with a case of wine and wrote for five days. To produce, he picked Greg Kurstin, a pop producer behind hits for Sia and Halsey who had never made a heavy rock record. Concrete and Gold came out on the fifteenth of September 2017 and went straight to number one in America.[1] [2]

Recording at EastWest Studios in Hollywood brought surprise guests. Justin Timberlake sang on Make It Right, Shawn Stockman of Boyz II Men added harmonies, and Paul McCartney played drums on Sunday Rain, a song sung by Taylor Hawkins. It was also the first full album with Rami Jaffee as a member, making them a six piece. The band headlined Glastonbury in 2017, opening with Times Like These and dedicating it to Florence Welch, who had sung it in their place when Grohl broke his leg. They also launched their own festival, Cal Jam, which in 2018 included a Nirvana reunion.[1] [2] [3]

For the tenth album they rented an old 1940s house in Encino. Grohl later claimed strange things happened there, and the whole idea turned into a horror comedy film. The record, Medicine at Midnight, was finished by February 2020, but then the pandemic hit and they shelved it. In the meantime Grohl became an internet sensation for an online drum battle with a ten year old drummer named Nandi Bushell, which he cheerfully lost. Medicine at Midnight finally came out on the fifth of February 2021, a bright, danceable record that Grohl compared to David Bowie's Let's Dance.[1] [2]

In January 2021 the band played the celebration for Joe Biden's inauguration. That October they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in their first year of eligibility, and Grohl became a two time inductee, having gone in with Nirvana in 2014. The same month he published a memoir, The Storyteller. They put out an album of Bee Gees covers under the name the Dee Gees, and in August 2021 Nandi Bushell joined them on stage in Los Angeles to play Everlong. In February 2022 their film Studio 666 opened, with Grohl possessed by a demon and killing off his bandmates one by one. Reviews were mixed.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Losing Taylor Hawkins

In March 2022 the band was touring South America. On the twentieth of March they played Lollapalooza Argentina in Buenos Aires, where Hawkins sang Queen's Somebody to Love, and they closed with Everlong. At the end Hawkins threw his sticks into the crowd, put his arm around Grohl and took a bow, beaming. Five days later, on the twenty fifth of March, the band was in Bogotá, Colombia, to headline the Estéreo Picnic festival. That evening Hawkins complained of chest pains in his room at the Four Seasons Casa Medina hotel. Emergency workers tried to revive him, but he was declared dead there. He was fifty years old.[1] [2] [3]

The band announced his death that night, writing that his musical spirit and infectious laughter would live on with them forever. Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee said he had spoken to Hawkins by phone in his hotel room only hours earlier. The next day Colombian authorities said a preliminary test had found ten substances in his body, including opioids, benzodiazepines, antidepressants and cannabis, but they did not say whether the drugs caused his death. At the festival, the Foo Fighters' stage became a candlelight vigil. On the twenty ninth of March the band cancelled every remaining show.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Hawkins had been far more than a drummer. He sang, wrote on every album from There Is Nothing Left to Lose to Medicine at Midnight, and led his own band, the Coattail Riders. Grohl had once said, what would we be without Taylor Hawkins. Nine days after his death the band won three Grammys for Medicine at Midnight. In June Grohl made his first public appearance since, joining Paul McCartney at Glastonbury. Then more grief. In August 2022 Grohl's mother Virginia, the teacher who had raised him, died too. As of 2026, Hawkins' official cause of death has never been made public.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In September 2022 the band and the Hawkins family held two huge tribute concerts, at Wembley Stadium in London on the third and at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles on the twenty seventh. Hawkins' heroes turned up for him. Queen, Rush, Stewart Copeland of the Police, Paul McCartney and dozens more took turns, and Josh Freese played drums at both shows. The most shattering moment came at Wembley, when Hawkins' sixteen year old son Shane sat behind his father's kit and powered through My Hero. He snapped a stick and kept going. Clips were watched millions of times, and he later won a drumming award for it.[1] [2] [3]

A different band

In December 2022 the band said they would carry on, but as a different band. They recorded But Here We Are with Greg Kurstin, with Grohl playing every drum part himself. Released on the second of June 2023, it was dedicated to Hawkins and to Grohl's mother, and it moved from rage and sorrow toward acceptance. On one song, Show Me How, Grohl harmonises with his daughter Violet. Critics called it one of their best. In a playful livestream in May 2023 they unveiled Josh Freese, a veteran of Guns N' Roses, Nine Inch Nails and Devo, as their new drummer.[1] [2] [3]

That summer they slipped onto the Glastonbury bill under a fake name, the ChurnUps, their first set there since 2017. In August 2024 Donald Trump's campaign played My Hero at a rally in Arizona without permission, and the band said any royalties would go to Kamala Harris' campaign. Then in September 2024 Grohl posted that he had fathered a baby daughter outside his marriage to Jordyn Blum, and that he was working to regain his family's trust and forgiveness. The band pulled out of a festival headline slot in Connecticut later that month.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In May 2025 Josh Freese announced that the band had called to say they were going a different direction with their drummer. He said no reason was given, and that in forty years he had never been let go from a band. His replacement was Ilan Rubin, a Nine Inch Nails veteran who had once been the youngest musician ever to play a Woodstock stage. In an unusual swap, Freese went back to Nine Inch Nails. Rubin's first Foo Fighters show was a surprise gig at the nine hundred capacity Fremont Theater in San Luis Obispo on the thirteenth of September 2025, where Grohl told the crowd it was official, you can stamp the passport.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Their twelfth album, Your Favorite Toy, came out on the twenty fourth of April 2026, recorded largely at home and co produced with Oliver Roman. Grohl had demoed more than fifty songs before noticing ten in a row that sounded like the punk records he grew up on. The result is fast and loud. One song, Of All People, came from bumping into a drug dealer he had known in 1990s Seattle, and another, Unconditional, sounds like an apology he declined to explain. Nate Mendel told the BBC that Hawkins is still with them, and that his widow was on the road with the band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Three decades on, a project meant to be anonymous became one of the most successful rock bands of its era. As of 2026 the Foo Fighters have won fifteen Grammys, including Best Rock Album five times, and Dave Grohl is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice. One Pitchfork critic likened them to Tom Petty, a steady hit machine playing working class rock. And the band that was born out of losing Kurt Cobain has now had to survive losing Taylor Hawkins too. As Grohl told the BBC in 2026, whenever they go through something difficult, they go through it together.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Foo Fighters

Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins. Hawkins volunteered himself for the drum stool in 1997 and quickly became Grohl's best friend and on stage foil. Grohl sat by his bed during his 2001 overdose coma and wrote On the Mend about it. They fought hard during the One by One crisis but stayed together, and Grohl said the band would be a completely different thing without him. After Hawkins died in 2022, Grohl played the drums on the next album himself.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dave Grohl and Kurt Cobain. Grohl joined Nirvana in 1990 and was in awe of Cobain's songs, so much so that he kept most of his own to himself. Cobain did work with him on Marigold, and Grohl said Cobain kissed him after hearing the demo of Alone and Easy Target. Cobain's suicide in 1994 led directly to the Foo Fighters, and Grohl said Kurt taught him the beauty of stripped down music.[1] [2] [3]

Dave Grohl and William Goldsmith. Grohl recruited Goldsmith from Sunny Day Real Estate in 1994, then replaced nearly all of his drum parts on The Colour and the Shape without telling him. Goldsmith quit feeling betrayed and later spoke bitterly of endless takes. Grohl came to admit he had not been ready to stop drumming and wished he had handled it better. Goldsmith went on to reunite Sunny Day Real Estate, whose later sessions stalled at Grohl's own Studio 606.[1] [2] [3]

Dave Grohl and Pat Smear. Smear, the Germs guitarist, joined Nirvana on tour in 1993 at Cobain's invitation, then followed Grohl into the Foo Fighters. He quit on live television in 1997, drifted back as a touring player in 2005, and became a full member again for Wasting Light in 2011. Together with Krist Novoselic, they are the surviving Nirvana line up that still reunites on stage.[1] [2]

Dave Grohl and Franz Stahl. Stahl was Grohl's guitarist in Scream when Grohl was a teenage runaway drummer. Grohl brought him into the Foo Fighters to replace Pat Smear in 1997, then fired him in 1998 when the songwriting did not click, a decision Grohl found painful because they had been friends since childhood. Stahl still called his time in the band the best two years of his life.[1] [2]

Dave Grohl and Nate Mendel. Mendel is the longest serving Foo Fighter after Grohl, on every album since The Colour and the Shape. He nearly quit in 1998 to rejoin Sunny Day Real Estate, then changed his mind a day later. He admitted clashing with Grohl during the One by One sessions, but reshaped his busy punk bass style to serve Grohl's songs. After Hawkins died, he wondered aloud whether they could go on.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dave Grohl and Jennifer Youngblood. Grohl married the photographer Jennifer Youngblood in 1994, and she shot the cover of the first Foo Fighters album. They separated in December 1996 and divorced in 1997, and Grohl admitted his infidelity. The break up fed straight into The Colour and the Shape, including Monkey Wrench, and helped drive a wedge with Pat Smear, who was her close friend.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dave Grohl and Jordyn Blum. Grohl met Jordyn Blum at a bar in West Hollywood and married her in 2003. She was a major inspiration for the love songs on One by One, and they have three daughters, including the singer Violet Grohl. In September 2024 Grohl revealed he had fathered a child outside the marriage and said he was trying to regain his family's trust.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Taylor Hawkins and Roger Taylor. Hawkins saw Queen at ten, his first concert, and decided on the spot he wanted to be their drummer. Roger Taylor became his mentor and friend. Taylor talked him out of joining Guns N' Roses in 2000, played on his solo projects, drummed with him when the Foos inducted Queen into the Hall of Fame, and played at both of his tribute concerts.[1] [2] [3]

Dave Grohl and Butch Vig. Vig produced Nirvana's Nevermind, so hiring him for the Foo Fighters closed a circle. He produced two new songs for their 2009 Greatest Hits, then the all analogue Wasting Light in Grohl's garage, which he first assumed was a joke, and Sonic Highways across eight cities. Wasting Light gave the band its first American number one album.[1] [2] [3]

Dave Grohl and Josh Homme. Grohl drummed on Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf in 2002 while his own band was falling apart, and the tour helped him fall back in love with the Foo Fighters. He returned to drum on their 2013 album, and in 2009 formed Them Crooked Vultures with Homme and John Paul Jones. Homme played at both Taylor Hawkins tribute concerts.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Foo Fighters and David Letterman. The band made its network television debut on Letterman's show in August 1995. In 2000 Letterman revealed Everlong was his favourite song, saying it meant a great deal to him after his heart surgery that year. On his final Late Show in May 2015, he introduced them as his favourite band playing his favourite song, and they postponed a tour to be there.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Foo Fighters

• Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs is the only other musician on the entire first Foo Fighters album. Dulli dropped by Robert Lang Studios to watch Grohl record, and Grohl handed him a guitar. He played one part on X Static. Everything else on the record is Grohl alone.[1] [2]
• Grohl originally planned to press just a hundred copies of the first Foo Fighters recordings. He had a hundred cassettes duplicated in Seattle and handed them out, even to kids who told him Nirvana was their favourite band. The tape spread through the industry and sparked a label bidding war.[1]
• Eddie Vedder gave Foo Fighters songs their first ever radio play, on his own pirate broadcast. On the eighth of January 1995 Vedder premiered two songs during his Self Pollution radio broadcast, months before the album came out. Later that spring Grohl and Vedder both played in Mike Watt's backing band on tour.[1]
• Grohl's 1992 cassette Pocketwatch came out under the name Late!, so he could joke, sorry, we're Late. The label offered to reissue it on CD as demand exploded, but Grohl refused. He joked that he wanted to drive the price of the cassette up to three thousand dollars.[1]
• The Colour and the Shape was named after a striped bowling pin. Their tour manager bought a red and white bowling pin in a thrift store and said he liked the colour and the shape of it. The band spelled colour the British way as a nod to their producer Gil Norton.[1]
• In the song Up in Arms, Grohl slyly changes a lyric to sing Gil instead of girl. The line cannot forget you girl becomes cannot forget you Gil, a tribute to producer Gil Norton, who pushed the band through countless takes on The Colour and the Shape.[1]
• Louise Post's backing vocals on Everlong were recorded over a telephone line. Post was in Chicago during the sessions, so the studio used two phone lines, one for her to hear the track and one to record her. Grohl sang his harmonies through a deliberately dull microphone so the two voices matched.[1]
• Everlong passed one billion Spotify streams on Nate Mendel's fifty fifth birthday. The milestone came on the second of December 2023. Everlong was also the last song Taylor Hawkins ever played live, at Lollapalooza Argentina in March 2022.[1] [2]
• In the Everlong video, Taylor Hawkins plays Dave Grohl's wife. Michel Gondry directed the video as a dreamlike Evil Dead spoof. Hawkins appears in drag as Grohl's partner, and in one dream sequence Grohl plays Sid Vicious to Hawkins' Nancy Spungen.[1]
• The Monkey Wrench video was the first to feature Taylor Hawkins, even though Grohl played the drums on the record. Hawkins joined just as The Colour and the Shape was finished, so he mimed Grohl's drum part. The elevator music in the video is a Moog version of Big Me.[1] [2]
• Chris Shiflett heard Guns N' Roses were auditioning guitarists, and asked for a Foo Fighters audition instead. Grohl liked that Shiflett came from the punk underground. Years earlier Shiflett had even opened for Grohl's old band Scream, playing bass in a group called Rat Pack.[1]
• Guns N' Roses tried to hire Taylor Hawkins in 2000, and Queen's Roger Taylor talked him out of it. The offer was to replace Josh Freese. Hawkins seriously considered it before his mentor convinced him to stay. Twenty three years later Freese ended up replacing Hawkins in the Foo Fighters.[1] [2]
• Josh Freese was once warned off joining a band like the Foo Fighters. When Freese hesitated about joining Guns N' Roses in 1997, Paul Westerberg of the Replacements told him to do it, asking whether he would rather join something obvious like the Foo Fighters. In 2023 he did.[1]
• Between October 2002 and March 2003, Grohl held the top of the American modern rock chart for seventeen of eighteen weeks with three bands. Nirvana's You Know You're Right, then the Foo Fighters' All My Life, then Queens of the Stone Age's No One Knows, with Grohl drumming, took turns at number one.[1]
• Times Like These opens in an unusual seven four time signature. The intro shifts between bars of eight and seven beats, and the chorus groups its bars in threes. The lyric I'm a new day rising nods to Grohl's heroes Hüsker Dü.[1]
• A trapped Tasmanian miner asked rescuers for an iPod loaded with In Your Honor. After the 2006 Beaconsfield mine collapse, Grohl sent a note of support and later met the miner for a drink in Sydney. He wrote the instrumental Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners, recorded with guitarist Kaki King.[1] [2]
• Prince covered Best of You at the 2007 Super Bowl halftime show. Hawkins was surprised, because Prince had objected when the band wanted to release a cover of his song Darling Nikki a few years earlier.[1]
• The band stopped playing Big Me for years because fans kept throwing Mentos at them. The video's Mentos spoof made the sweets a live ritual, and Grohl said they hurt like pebbles. They only brought it back after Weezer started playing it on their joint Foozer tour.[1]
• The Learn to Fly video features Jack Black and Kyle Gass, and it won the band its very first Grammy. Tenacious D play cleaners who spike an airliner's coffee. The video won Best Short Form Music Video in 2001, and Grohl later played the devil in the Tenacious D film.[1] [2]
• One of Grohl's young daughters ruined a tape Butch Vig needed during the Wasting Light sessions. Vig was editing tape with a razor blade and gave up on the method partly because a spare, more editable tape sent from his studio was mostly destroyed by one of Grohl's girls.[1]
• A thousand Italian musicians played Learn to Fly together to lure the band to their town. The Rockin' 1000 video from Cesena drew over thirty million views in weeks. Grohl replied in Italian, and in November 2015 the band played a twenty seven song show there.[1] [2]
• Grohl lent his broken leg throne to Axl Rose in 2016. After Rose broke his foot, Grohl let him borrow the elevated throne he designed in 2015. He lent it again in 2021 to a Seattle metal musician who had been shot in the leg.[1]
• The Foo Fighters twice trolled protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church. In 2011 in Kansas City they played a mocking song from the back of a flatbed truck, and in 2015 they rickrolled the protesters with Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up.[1] [2]
• Grohl has been the musical guest on Saturday Night Live more than any other musician. He has appeared fifteen times, with Nirvana, the Foo Fighters, Them Crooked Vultures, Tom Petty and Mick Jagger.[1]
• Dave Grohl cannot read music. He is entirely self taught on both guitar and drums and plays by ear. When he wrote the first album he assigned drum patterns to guitar strings to build rhythmic riffs.[1] [2]
• Grohl was once taken to hospital with chest pains caused by too much coffee. He has described himself as a coffee addict. He has also said he gave up cannabis and LSD at twenty and never used cocaine or heroin.[1] [2]
• Pat Smear was hand picked by Prince to appear as an extra in the Raspberry Beret video. Before Nirvana, Smear took bit parts in television and film, including Blade Runner. In the Germs, his first drummer was Belinda Carlisle, later of the Go Go's, using the name Dottie Danger.[1]
• Rami Jaffee joined the Wallflowers after hearing about them in a late night queue at Canter's Deli in Los Angeles. His first Foo Fighters session came in 1998, playing keyboards on A320 for the Godzilla soundtrack, seven years before he began touring with them.[1]
• Ilan Rubin entered Guinness World Records at eleven as the youngest musician to play a Woodstock stage. His band opened Woodstock '99 on the emerging artist stage. In 2020 he also became the youngest living Rock Hall inductee, as a member of Nine Inch Nails.[1]
• Taylor Hawkins played Iggy Pop in a movie. He made his acting debut as Iggy in the 2013 film CBGB. Grohl had drummed for the real Iggy Pop at a Toronto party in 1987.[1] [2]
• Hawkins finished a song the Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson had left incomplete in 1977. He wrote and sang new lyrics for Holy Man, and Brian May and Roger Taylor of Queen added their parts. It was released for Record Store Day in 2019.[1] [2]
• The Dream Widow EP from Studio 666 was released on the same day Taylor Hawkins died. Grohl made the thrash metal record for the film's fictional cursed band. It came out on the twenty fifth of March 2022, the day Hawkins was found dead in Bogotá.[1] [2]
• Walk, the song that won two Grammys in 2012, began with Grohl watching his daughter Violet learn to walk. The song had been meant for Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace. Pat Smear called it the opposite of Nirvana's I Hate Myself and Want to Die.[1]
• Paul McCartney played drums on the Foo Fighters song Sunday Rain, which Taylor Hawkins sang. McCartney happened to be working at EastWest Studios during the Concrete and Gold sessions. Justin Timberlake dropped in the same way to sing on Make It Right.[1]
• These days the Foo Fighters often build Lego sets in the dressing room before shows. In a 2026 BBC interview Mendel admitted the habit, and Grohl said he had built the Eiffel Tower, the White House and several Harry Potter castles. He called it meditative.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.