(Credits: Andrew Stuart)
Thu 18 December 2025 19:30, UK
Anyone who has ever played rock music for the past few years would kill to be where Dave Grohl is.
Beyond being one of the greatest entertainers of his generation, Grohl is the kind of person that wanted to jam with every single person that he could whenever he had the chance, and judging by the fact that his phone has everyone from Paul McCartney to Josh Homme to Trent Reznor in it, it’s safe to say that he has become one of the best friends of nearly every rockstar imaginable. But there are often a few people who manage to slip through the cracks, even for someone like Grohl.
Then again, playing with some of his heroes from back in the day was definitely a long shot. The thought of him even working with Paul McCartney would have been unthinkable when he was playing with his first punk rock outfits, but when he eventually began working with fellow legends, the thought of him playing with John Bonham would have been impossible when he was banging away on his pillows.
After all, there are always going to be limits on where anyone could go with their songwriting. Most people would have considered themselves lucky if they said a few words to someone like Lemmy or Prince, let alone been able to get onstage or in the studio with them, but with Grohl, the well went a lot further than simply being a fan of rock and roll. He was practically a historian, and all roads for him led back to Little Richard.
Which isn’t all that surprising for someone with a rap sheet as long as Grohl’s. By all accounts, Richard was the first real punk-rocker of his day, and while he never saw the same spoils as the likes of Elvis Presley from around the same time, you can hear the power of his shriek in everyone from Paul McCartney to Lemmy to Robert Plant whenever they opened their mouths to sing.
But even if he had a few run-ins with Little Richard over the years, Grohl regretted not getting the chance to work with him for the longest time, saying, “We were doing a cover of ‘Long Tall Sally’ and somebody said, ‘You know, if we want we could probably give Little Richard a call and get him to come down and jam with us.’ He was living in a hotel just up the street from the studio, so we decided to give him a call. And he said he wanted $10,000 just to come down and jam with us. So we were all like, ‘Well, I’ll put in $2,000…’ but in the end we just decided, ‘Nah, fuck it.’ And I wish we’d have done it.”
And, really, Backbeat would have been the best showcase for working with Richard at that time. Sure, the film itself was a celebration of The Beatles’ legacy, but since the Fab Four’s gigs at the Cavern Club was the punk style of the early 1960s, hearing Grohl tear it up behind the drumkit with Richard leading the charge on anything from ‘Long Tall Sally’ to ‘Keep A-Knockin” would have been the greatest shot of adrenaline anyone could ask for.
That kind of rush wasn’t lost on McCartney, either. While he thanked Richard for the inspiration when The Beatles were first coming up, he felt that voice was what really opened him up to the world, and it was practically an out-of-body experience whenever he reached up into that higher register to do his own version of ‘Long Tall Sally’ or openly steal from him on tunes like ‘I’m Down’.
Then again, not everyone needs to work with Little Richard to know what the man was all about. From his days as a preacher to getting behind the piano, everything was about having passion and conviction in his delivery, and as long as someone had a song in their heart, hearing Grohl sing or scream the same way his punk rock brethren would wasn’t all that different from how Richard approached all his classics.
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