(Credits: Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Tue 18 November 2025 21:00, UK
Dave Grohl doesn’t seem to be the kind of artist who puts up to many parameters behind the scenes.
He has the potential to play a lot of different styles of music, and if he has the chance to play with a couple of legends, there’s a good chance that he would go out of his way to make sure that he can add his stamp when jamming with everyone from former Beatles to Prince to members of Led Zeppelin. But when it came to people in his wheelhouse, he knew that there were a few that might not have worked all that well.
Then again, looking at the track record that Grohl had back in the day, there was no point in him drawing the line that much. Being a member of Nirvana was enough for him to be a legend for the rest of his life behind the drum kit, and given how much he played like John Bonham behind the scenes, it made sense for anyone to call him up if they needed the kind of thunderous drum sound that they heard on those early Zeppelin records.
And it’s hard to really deny when he’s in the mix as well. Trent Reznor’s collaborations with him on the album With Teeth gave a lot of the songs the teeth they needed to become legendary, and while Tenacious D might be a band known for having some of the most unserious vocals of all time, the actual backing tracks that Grohl laid down have no right being that good given how half of the songs are about sex jokes and Jack Black singing about being in the greatest band in the world.
Among all of Grohl’s collaborations, though, there are more than a few that have stuck over the years. He will always jump at the opportunity to work with Butch Vig on a project, and there’s a good chance that he would never turn down a chance to work with Paul McCartney again if the time called for it, but Queens of the Stone Age has practically felt like his home away from home for years.
Because as much as rock seemed like a tired cliche back in the day, Josh Homme was making everything sound dangerous and cool again on records like Rated R. That was enough to get Grohl paying attention enough to want to jam with Homme on the next record, but when looking at the rest of the hard rock scene, Grohl said he would have had second thoughts if he had to go into the realm of metal.
Despite having a healthy respect for all flavours of rock, he felt that Linkin Park would have been one step over the line for him to join, saying, “I’m not so career minded that I have a plan… I mean, if Linkin Park called me up and asked me to record with them I’d probably say no. But while we were recording with the Foo Fighters and we were getting stuck trying to deliver this thing to a schedule and I just said ‘Fuck it, I’m going to go off and play with Queens Of The Stone Age for a while.’”
That might have stung a little bit for the rap-rock legends given how much Chester Bennington loved Nirvana, but it was simply a difference in the way that they looked at everything. Grohl had built himself up to have one of the biggest second acts that any band has ever seen, so he wasn’t about to throw that whole thing away unless it was for a project that he felt like he could be in for the rest of his life. And given how hands-on Linkin Park were with everyone’s parts, there’s a good chance Grohl didn’t need Mike Shinoda telling him how the drums should sound.
Now that both bands have gone through their fair share of shakeups in the past, who’s to say that Grohl can’t get up onstage and perform with the current version of Linkin Park? I mean, Chris Cornell was on good enough terms with the band to join them onstage to play the song ‘Crawling’ while he was still alive, and with all due respect to Colin Brittain, there’s a good chance Grohl could hold his own if he decided to play with the band on one of their more metallic cuts.
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