Coming off his well received documentary “Sound City,” about a classic Los Angeles recording studio, Foo Fighters founder Dave Grohl extends the idea of recording studios as special places by traveling to eight American cities in his new HBO series “Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways.”
At each stop — Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, Nashville, New Orleans, New York, Seattle and Washington, D.C. — he talks to the town’s leading musicians, well-known and not, and takes the themes of those talks and makes them into new songs — which will all appear on the new Foo Fighters album, also called “Sonic Highways,” this November.
It was a complicated process, the former Nirvana drummer told a lively session at the TV Critics summer press tour Thursday.
“There’s a reason why jazz came from New Orleans,” Grohl said. “There’s a reason why country went to Nashville and why the blues went to Chicago. And I get to interview all of these people and talk to them about that. And it goes back a hundred years.”
But he also got to talk to heroes from his home turf of D.C., “unsung heroes that you might not otherwise have ever learned about.”
He mentions its Inner Ear recording studio, ” a tiny place in Arlington, Virginia, just over the bridge,” a place he says, “created the soundtrack to my youth.
“It recorded every punk rock band in Washington, D.C. Its influence is immeasurable. It changed millions of people like me,” Grohl says. “Ian MacKaye from Washington, D.C., started his own record label when he was 18 years old and hand cut and glued singles and mail ordered them. Do you know how many he’s sold at this point? 4 million.”
MacKaye, leader of the band Fugazi and now The Evens, also instilled him some values that have stayed with him in the days of easy downloads. Grohl paraphrased MacKaye, whom he called “an old friend of mine, my real personal hero,” about illegal downloading.
“He said, ‘When I was young, I just wanted someone to hear my song. Now, 30, 40 years later, if you ask me, “Would you rather have someone hear your song or have a dollar?,” I’d pick having someone hear my song.’
When I asked about the origin of the film, Grohl said it went back further than “Sound City” to a documentary of them making their last record in a garage.
The result, he said, “gave our band this whole new, like, reach or audience, where people started to understand us as people. And in that, I started to realize the power of music and documentary together, because a lot of the times, music can seem really one dimensional. You hear it in your car. You hear it in an elevator. It’s a sound. It might have a catchy melody. But if you get a little bit deeper into the artist or the song, it sort of creates this emotional connection that comes from substance and depth. It’s not just a one dimensional thing.
“So when I bought the board from Sound City, I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just make, like, a short film about this studio and this piece of equipment,’ because its history is unbelievable. To me, these recording studios are like they’re hallowed ground. They’re churches. They’re monuments to me. Some people just think they’re rooms with tubes and wires, but history has been made in these shitholes all over the country. So to me, I was like, ‘We’ve got to tell this story because it will humanize the whole process and make it something that people can really connect to.’
“And honestly, it was easy. All I had to do was tell a story, you know. I rounded up six or seven of my best friends who work in film, and we got together and we made this documentary. And the story of Sound City, I’d tell you the same story if we had six whiskeys at the bar. The story would be an hour and 42 minutes long.”
He added that the response he got to “Sound City” was “incredible. Sitting on an airplane, businessmen, and old ladies in the grocery store [saying] “Sound City” was amazing.’ Like, everywhere I went, because it didn’t matter if you were a musician or not.
“The message of that movie was something a lot more human than Fleetwood Mac or Rage Against the Machine or Nirvana,” he said. “It was all about being inspired to follow your passion and that anything is possible really if you really want to do it.”
The eight episode “Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways” starts in November on HBO.