Following Kurt Cobain’s death, Dave Grohl encountered a make-or-break moment as he struggled to reconnect with music. Fortunately, he soon realised that music was the only way out of his state of mourning and began to reunite with his biggest passion as the frontman of Foo Fighters. With several seminal albums and the Nirvana legacy to buoy him into the new millennium, Grohl began to enjoy a place at the very top of rock ‘n’ roll fame.
As a frequenter of most of the musical calendar’s most prestigious events, including the Grammys, Glastonbury Festival and The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductions, Grohl has now met most of his living heroes. Perhaps the biggest “pinch me” moment came when he met Paul McCartney, since, from a young age, Grohl learned to drum by playing along to Ringo Starr’s beats on his family’s Beatles records until his “hands literally bled”.
Grohl and McCartney first crossed paths in 2002 at the Royal Albert Hall during ‘Concert For George’, a tribute to George Harrison, who had passed away the previous year after a battle with cancer. Dhani Harrison, George’s son, invited the Foo Fighters frontman to perform. Since then, Grohl and McCartney have maintained a strong bond, sharing many memorable moments together in the ensuing years.
Notably, McCartney inducted the Foo Fighters into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021 and joined them on stage for an accompanying performance. The following year, McCartney returned the honour at Glastonbury Festival when he invited Grohl on stage for a rendition of ‘Band on the Run’.
Away from the public eye, Grohl and McCartney have also enjoyed several pleasant evenings together at private functions and casual dinners. On one such occasion, the pair wound up dining with members of the Australian hard rock progenitors AC/DC. “We had this beautiful night. There was this jazz band. It was one of the greatest nights of my entire life,” Grohl reflected in a 2021 interview with Anders Bøtters Tiny TV. Adding, “I’m lucky to say that Paul McCartney is a friend, and I love him very much. As much as he’s a hero of mine, he’s also a very sweet man and a friend.”
Following Cobain’s death, Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic elected not to reunite due to heavy emotions at the time. However, when he formed Foo Fighters, he enlisted Pat Smear, who had performed rhythm guitar with Nirvana in their final year as an unofficial member. The three former Nirvana embers finally reunited in the studio in 2012 to write and record the song ‘Cut Me Some Slack’ for Grohl’s Sound City documentary and its accompanying soundtrack album.
Though sadly, Cobain couldn’t be there for the occasion, Grohl invited his most famous friend to get in on the action. When the group brought the song to the stage soon after at a benefit concert for those affected by Hurricane Sandy, McCartney addressed the crowd.
“Recently, some guys asked me to go and jam with them,” he said. “So I showed up… and in the middle of it, these guys kept saying, ‘We haven’t played together for years, you know?’ The penny finally dropped, I finally understood that I was in the middle of a Nirvana reunion.” The group reunited once again for a performance on Saturday Night Live in December 2012.
The song became critically and commercially successful throughout 2013 and ultimately won ‘Best Rock Song’ at the Grammy Awards in 2014. “I asked Paul to jam with some friends of mine, and he came over to the studio, and we knocked this out in a couple of hours. To me, that’s what Rock and Roll is all about,” Grohl said while accepting the award. McCartney added, “He said to me, come along, and we’ll do a jam on ‘Long Tall Sally.’ I said, No, we’ve been there, we’ve done that. We should just make something up – and this is it.”
For his part, Novoselic remembered having no question in his mind when Grohl invited him to jam with a former Beatle. Still, the prospect of playing with Smear and Grohl for the first time since the last Nirvana show in 1994 was as daunting as it was exciting. “I became seized with thoughts, for I hadn’t played like that with Pat or Dave since the last Nirvana show in 1994. Wow, it was emotionally and musically heavy! Some other things brought me back; there was a Lefty on guitar who was a heck of a songwriter. Anyway, words can’t really describe it, so I returned to the task at hand. A new song was born!”
