Day After Day #230: X-Static

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

X-Static (1995)

There are people who enjoy being in the spotlight and there are others who would rather avoid it. When Nirvana was on top of the world for that short stretch from 1992-1994, Kurt Cobain alternately hated and loved the attention; at least that's how it seemed from the outside. Of course, he was dealing with a lot of stuff at the time, so when he committed suicide in April '94, it was shocking but it was entirely surprising. 

Meanwhile, Dave Grohl was in the background, a lanky goofball who was more than happy to let Cobain get all the attention while he pounded the shit out of the drums. He had previously been the drummer for DC punk act Scream, joining the band when he was 17. Grohl replaced Chad Channing in Nirvana after Scream broke up in 1990 and soon the band recorded their second album, Nevermind, and well, you know what happened after that.

There were hints that Grohl could do more than just be an amazing drummer. In the summer of 1991, he went to WGNS Studios and recorded four songs, playing all the instruments. He combined them with six songs he had recorded in late 1990 and gave them to Jenny Toomey, co-founder of the cassette label Simple Machines. He didn't go by his own name, instead going with the name Late! and the album was called Pocketwatch and released in 1992. The album flew under the radar at first, but as Nevermind blew up, people started to find Pocketwatch. 

A few of the songs turned up in different versions later. "Color Pictures of a Marigold" was re-recorded with Nirvana bandmate Krist Novoselic and released as "Marigold" on the B-side of Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box" single. The song "Winnebago" showed up as a re-recorded B-side during the first Foo Fighters release. And "Friend of a Friend" was re-recorded for the Foo album In Your Honor in 2005. I acquired a bootleg CD of the Pocketwatch album around 1999 and quite enjoy it. It's raw and tuneful; you can hear echoes of Nirvana but also the roots of what would emerge in a few years.

After Cobain's suicide, Grohl wasn't sure what he wanted to do next. The first performance he did was playing with the Backbeat Band at the MTV Video Music Awards in June 1994. Backbeat was a 1994 movie about the early days of the Beatles in Germany and the soundtrack was recorded in March 1993, featuring an indie rock all-star cast including Grohl, Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum, Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Don Fleming of Gumball and Mike Mills of R.E.M. They played some of the covers the Beatles played in the Hamburg clubs such as "Money," "Long Tall Sally" and then added on "Helter Skelter" at the end of the show.  

Not long afterward, punk legend Mike Watt invited Grohl to play drums on Watt's album Ball-Hog or Tugboat?, which featured another collection of indie icons including Moore, Pirner, Henry Rollins, Evan Dando and Frank Black. Grohl enjoyed playing on the album and decided to work on his own project with producer Barrett Jones, who worked on Pocketwatch. He booked six days at a studio in Seattle, singing all the vocals and playing all the instruments. The only outside musician on the album was Dulli, who was in the studio watching the recording when Grohl asked him to play on the song "X-Static."

Grohl was invited to play drums with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on Saturday Night Live in November 1994; he turned down an invite to become the band's permanent drummer. He was reportedly considered as a possible replacement for Dave Abbruzzese in Pearl Jam and played on a few songs with them in Australia in early 1995, but the band decided to go with Jack Irons and Grohl decided to focus on his solo career.

Grohl originally planned to remain anonymous and release the album under the name Foo Fighters to give the impression it was a full band, much like Stewart Copeland did with his Klark Kent project years earlier. Grohl planned to keep it a low-key release, pressing 100 LPs and 100 cassette tapes of the session; he handed the tapes out to friends for feedback. Eddie Vedder played two songs from the tape in January 1995 on the Pearl Jam Self-Pollution Radio broadcast. Eventually, the tapes circulated through the music industry and labels grew interested, with Capitol Records signing a deal with Grohl.

Nine of the songs on the album were written before or during Grohl's time in Nirvana, recorded on home demos. The songs written after Cobain's death were "This is a Call," "I'll Stick Around," "X-Static" and "Wattershed." There was plenty of the loud-soft-loud dynamics popularized by the Pixies and Nirvana, a bunch of punk-pop rippers that ranged from hardcore punk to sweet pop confections. 

For the full band, Grohl recruited bassist Nate Mendel and drummer WiIliam Goldsmith of Sunny Day Real Estate (which had recently split up) and former Nirvana touring guitarist Pat Smear. In the spring of 1995, the Foo Fighters went on their first tour opening for Mike Watt and also (except for Mendel and along with Eddie Vedder, whose band Hovercraft was the first opening act) serving as Watt's backing band. I was lucky enough to catch this tour in Boston in late April at the old Avalon club on Landsdowne Street; promoters were asked not to use Grohl or Vedder's names to promote the show, but word had gotten out anyway. The Foo Fighters played songs from their forthcoming album, which none of us had heard anything from yet, and we were blown away. The album came out in July and the Foos returned to Avalon as headliners in August, a show that I also saw.

The first single was "This is a Call" and it was an immediate hit. There was a hunger for anything Nirvana-adjacent and the first Foos album certainly fell into that category, but there was also a strong pop sensibility that helped it stand on its own. The album spawned a few more rock radio and video hits in "I'll Stick Around" and "Big Me." Some critics complained that it was too unpolished, but I liked the raw power of it. People read a lot into the lyrics, even though many of them were written years earlier or off the cuff.

"X-Static" is a quieter song, with droning guitars and Grohl's rhythmic pounding drums, picking up in intensity even as it maintains a steady chug. 

"Leading everything along/Never far from being wrong/Nevermind these things at all/It's nothing/Couldn't find a way to you/Seems that's all I ever do/Turning up in black and blue/Rewarded/All the static that we are left."

Grohl has said he didn't put a lot of thought into the lyrics on this album, but later would find meaning in them.

"Take it back for them to keep/Fallen into something deep/Not that I had made that leap/Anointed/All the static we are left/Where have all the wishes gone/Now that all of that is done/Wish I would've felt I've won/For once."

When the band played it live, which wasn't often after that first tour, they would play it even quieter and slowed down.

The Foos toured into the spring of 1996 and then went back into the studio with producer Gil Norton (Pixies) to work on the second album. After the band laid down rough mixes, Grohl took them to Los Angeles to finish his vocals and guitar parts; while there, he replaced most of Goldsmith's drum tracks with his own, angering Goldsmith, who then left the group. Taylor Hawkins (who was drumming for Alanis Morissette and who I also saw in 1995) joined the Foos in time for the 1997 tour of The Colour and the Shape. The album was an even bigger hit, with "Monkey Wrench," "Everlong" and "My Hero" becoming radio staples. I saw the band twice on this tour, in Boston and Portland, mainly because Rocket from the Crypt was opening the shows. 

Since 1997, I haven't seen the band again. I've liked a few of the subsequent albums (One by One, Wasting Light), but I've found a lot of their music has become uninteresting to me. Meanwhile, Grohl has become the face of rock music, even as rock music has become an afterthought, dwarfed in popularity by country, pop and hip hop. The Foo Fighters are reliable purveyors of meat-and-potatoes rock, the .38 Special of alt-rock. They play huge venues like ballparks and arenas, sell a decent amount of albums and merch, and you can find Grohl popping up everywhere from the Muppet Show to talk shows to being a talking head in 97% of the music documentaries made since 2000. 

I don't begrudge the guy his success. He seems like a nice guy (but don't tell that to William Goldsmith) and I appreciate his work ethic, but I'm just not interested in his music anymore. But throw on those first two Foo albums or the other two I mentioned and I can dig it; it's just that a lot of their recent music has become very generic. It's okay, I've got plenty of other stuff to check out.