(Credits: Andrew Stuart)
Tue 3 February 2026 15:00, UK
There’s a good chance that Dave Grohl could have worked with anybody if he had more hours in a day.
For all of the ups and downs that have happened with Foo Fighters, Grohl has always found time to put his ego on the shelf and go out with other bands that he loves, whether that’s playing drums with Queens of the Stone Age or making supergroups like Probot or Them Crooked Vultures on the side. The question of whether he actually finds time to sleep is still a mystery, but there were always going to be some musicians where things didn’t seem to work out all that well.
Then again, the fact that he managed to find people that he clicked with, as well as Foo Fighters, is insane considering how much he controlled the music. The first record was him making a bunch of cassette recordings in a studio down the street from his house, so if he was going to build a band around that, he wanted to make sure that everyone was playing to the best of their ability from the moment that they started. Pat Smear from The Germs was a fantastic choice, but there were already problems when it came to William Goldsmith’s drumming.
He was fantastic when working with Nate Mendel in Sunny Day Real Estate, but after he couldn’t cut it in the studio, getting Taylor Hawkins behind the kit was like Grohl finding his musical twin. Hawkins was like a brother to him every single time they performed, but it wasn’t exactly a good omen when Smear decided to quit in the first few rehearsals that Hawkins showed up for.
Smear had had enough of being on the road for years at a time, but Grohl felt like he had an ace in the hole up his sleeve already. After all, Smear had been with him through his days in Nirvana, and since he had been touring with Scream before he even joined Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic, he wanted to return the favour to Franz Stahl when asking him to become a member of Foo Fighters.
At the same time, it probably should have been a little bit more than a cold call to Stahl to get him in the group. Stahl was a fantastic musician when working in his own band, but after not getting off on the right foot with the rest of the band, Grohl had to slowly face the fact that his old buddy was never going to be able to go the distance with the rest of the band.
Even a decade after having to let him go, Grohl remembered how painful it was to have to tell his friend that it was time for him to stop, saying, “My relationship with Franz is a lot different than everybody else’s relationship with Franz. I’d known the guy since I was 18 and we had cut our teeth together. [Now] it was this dear old friend of mine that unfortunately I was asking to leave the band. And that’s not to say that he’s not a fucking great musician, because everyone knows he is.”
Granted, Stahl did understand the situation, but he did have a few reservations about how he was let go. Getting a phone call telling him that he was out of the band with no questions asked had to sting a little bit, but there’s a good chance that he could have never made the third record with them. There is Nothing Left to Lose is defined by Grohl playing all the guitar and coming into his own as a songwriter, and chances are that some of the greatest tunes on that record wouldn’t have worked had Stahl tried to add his mark to everything.
But that’s one lesson that every single musician has to end up learning at one point in their lives. You can have the greatest chops of anyone and be more than capable of doing the job once you hit the road, but if the internal chemistry isn’t there from the start, there’s hardly a chance that you’re going to last.
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