(Credits: Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Sun 22 March 2026 22:00, UK
Dave Grohl didn’t get into the music business looking to be the biggest artist in the world.
Not many hardcore punk drummers end up becoming one of the legends of rock and roll, but when looking through Grohl’s career, the fact that he was able to adapt to every single setback is what makes him one of the rock stars that you’re always going to want to root for. He’s not exactly a saint behind the scenes by any stretch, but he could tell when he was looking at a piece of musical history standing right in front of him.
But if you’re talking about Grohl’s taste in music, it goes far beyond listening to AC/DC riffs and Led Zeppelin drum solos. He was already being taught from the minute he heard The Beatles’ greatest hits for the first time, but as soon as he heard how heavy music could get, he wanted the chance to make the kind of songs that would leave everyone stunned by the time that the riffs ended.
Punk was his higher calling, but he wasn’t going to get behind anything that didn’t have a decent melody behind it. Some of the greatest artists in the world are the ones that get the hook lodged in your head well before the song is over, and no amount of nu-metal screaming was ever going to satisfy what Grohl was looking for. And when looking through his record collection, there are more than a few artists that deserved to be American icons.
He did have a great deal of respect for the true American artists like Johnny Cash, but from his perspective, there was no reason to think that Tom Petty couldn’t be in that company as well. Petty was the face of heartland rock, and even if he might not have written the most complicated songs in the world, he refused to take no for an answer when he tried to fulfil his dreams, from going against his record company on Damn the Torpedoes to making sure to keep his record prices low on Hard Promises.
That was the kind of punk-rock attitude Grohl could get behind, but he did feel like there was a place where everyone could find common ground. A song is the one thing that can bring people together the most, and he felt that there was no way that anyone could have the same wit and relatability that John Fogerty had when he started strumming away on those early CCR songs. So to have someone like that want to write songs with you had to have been a head trip.
Grohl had been used to working with legends, but Fogerty felt like witnessing a piece of America walking into his house, saying, “His trademark voice, so raw and soulful, was right in front of my face, but so powerful it sounded like it was coming straight out of a stadium PA. It was such a beautiful moment that made me realise why is considered such an American treasure: because he is real.”
That’s also what made CCR so relatable when they were first notching up hits back in the day. They didn’t dress like rockstars when they were making a lot of their hits, but that didn’t matter as long as they were pumping out the songs that people wanted to hear. You could be a hippy, a veteran, or just a casual pop fan, and yet all of those demographics could appreciate a song like ‘Proud Mary’ or ‘Bad Moon Rising’.
Fogerty didn’t get to become one of the biggest rockstars in the world by trying to play the game, and even to this day, he was always trying to make records that he wanted to hear. It didn’t fit neatly into any one demographic, but since CCR never fit into a neat box to begin with, nothing was stopping him from keeping on chooglin’ throughout every single generation to see where his muse took him.
