(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 17 March 2026 21:00, UK
There are certain bands that belong on a musical Mount Olympus as far as Dave Grohl is concerned.
Nirvana may have come out of nowhere when Grohl first hit the opening drum break to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, but even he admitted that there was no way that he could have made that drum break were it not for listening to the greatest funk drummers in the world. Every band in his record collection had a story to tell and a lesson to teach, but there were also a few artists that were practically untouchable from the moment that they started.
But let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way: Dave Grohl would have been nowhere were it not for Led Zeppelin. The hard rock genre had just begun after the late 1960s, and when Grohl was a kid, he could remember finding salvation through listening to John Bonham’s drum grooves and crying his eyes out whenever he heard Jimmy Page take a solo during the song ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’. There was virtuosity on parade throughout those records, but not everything needed to be complicated to catch his ear.
Grohl prided himself on having the most eclectic record collection in Virginia, and even though he had a fondness for all stripes of rock and roll, there was nothing that could replace what punk did to him in his teens. He was smitten the first time that his cousin showed him his first hardcore punk show, and if it weren’t for him making some noise in the band Scream, there’s no way that he would have caught the attention of Kurt Cobain when he first got started making records.
But when you’re a kid making underground records, no one thinks that they’re going to be one of the biggest bands in the world. It’s simply not going to happen, but even when the odds were stacked against them at every single opportunity, Grohl’s determination and wholesome attitude towards everything made him one of the biggest musicians in the world two times over. Foo Fighters weren’t meant to become the greatest stadium rock act of all time, but if that was beyond Grohl’s wildest dreams, getting to work with his heroes was a whole different story.
Getting the chance to jam with Page and John Paul Jones at Wembley Stadium is the kind of dream scenario that every kid of Grohl’s generation had fantasised about, but working with Paul McCartney was like seeing a musical god walk into the room. Macca never claimed to be the best musician in the world, but when Grohl started working with him and the remaining members of Nirvana on ‘Cut Me Some Slack’, he felt that there was no way that the band could have screwed up.
Grohl was the first to say that he was fallible on every record, but he felt that working with McCartney managed to make every single musician in the room a little bit better, saying, “You can do no wrong when you’re making music with that guy, because anything goes. You look at Paul and think, ‘Wow, well, he’s obviously brilliant, and he’s a master of melody and has made some incredibly delicate music.’ But he’ll strap on that Cigfiddle guitar through a tiny distorted amp and do a raging slide solo that sounds like a jet airliner.”
And that anything-goes attitude is also what makes McCartney’s solo career one of the most interesting from the rest of his bandmates. John Lennon didn’t have nearly the same amount of time to make his mark as his writing partner did, but when listening to McCartney’s experimental moments on McCartney II of even in his side projects like The Fireman, it makes complete sense why he could make a guitar out of a cigar box sound absolutely perfect when working with the alt-rock icons.
Because, as much as McCartney could sit atop his pile of platinum records and countless musical masterpieces, he’s still not done trying to find that one great song that he hasn’t written yet. Anyone from his generation would have gladly taken the Billy Joel route by now and bowed out gracefully, but McCartney was more than happy to see if there was any more magic left in the tank when he worked with Grohl.