There’s no telling when or how a band is going to click. Everything sounds good on paper when talking about artists making a record together, but if none of their hearts are in it, all the fans will get is something that’s technically great but has zero sonic flavour. And for someone who has been with as many artists as Dave Grohl has, he knows not to take that feeling for granted whenever it shows its face.
Because when putting together Foo Fighters, Grohl knew that getting that chemistry wasn’t so easy. It might have been fun for him putting together an album by himself for fun on his debut, but if he was going to put an entire band behind them, he needed to make sure they felt the songs in their bones before making a new record, and it was clear that he and William Goldsmith hit a wall the minute that The Colour and the Shape.
Then again, Grohl was working at far too high a bar for Goldsmith to measure up to. Not only was Grohl one of the greatest drummers in the world, but expecting his replacement to be as good as him, expecting any musician to get that same kind of energy as Nirvana did when they first formed would have been impossible. Grohl was the alt-rock equivalent of John Bonham, and there was no way that anyone could match his playing and Kurt Cobain’s writing.
Even when the Foos did fall into place with Taylor Hawkins, though, Grohl always found himself chasing that electricity that came with Nirvana. He thrived off being a frontman, but his first love will always be playing the drums. Getting the chance to play with a band as badass as Queens of the Stone Age may have been his first time back on his throne, but getting a member of Led Zeppelin in on the action was too good not to work.
The prototype for Them Crooked Vultures may have started when In Your Honor came out with Josh Homme and John Paul Jones sitting in, but Grohl felt that them clicking into place had the same vibe as Nirvana, saying, “Within one minute [Nirvana] knew that this was the right thing to do. It doesn’t happen often; there are only a few times in life when things lock in perfectly. It happened with Them Crooked Vultures as well. When things just settle in so comfortably, you immediately know that it is meant to be.”
It may have been the idea of getting into a power trio again, but it’s hard to go wrong when having three of the most advanced writers of their time. Grohl may have been in the backseat most of the time, but if Homme came up with a riff or Jones broke out the keyboards on a tune, he always knew when the time called for him to break out Bonham grooves or when he needed to be laying back a bit.
And that’s really the key to why Them Crooked Vultures functioned so well. As much as people liked to hear their retro brand of rock, all of them do a great job of listening to each other whenever they make a track, whether that’s the strange harmonic things that Homme came up with on ‘Mind Eraser No Chaser’ or the off-kilter rhythm that Jonesy came up with on the riff to ‘Gunman’.
Most supergroups like this only come together because they know their fans will eat it up, but this is one of the few supergroups that honestly feels like a couple of friends getting together for a few jam sessions. Are they good enough to be on the level of the Traveling Wilburys? Well, that’s an entirely different conversation, but if it managed to give Grohl flashbacks of those glory days in 1991, that was as good a sign as any to keep things rolling.