The only Foo Fighters song that Dave Grohl had difficulty playing
(Source: Far Out / Andrew Stuart)
Is there an instrument Dave Grohl hasn’t mastered yet? He’d be the first to say he doesn’t know much about music theory, but it takes a master’s touch to coax a melody out of almost any instrument you can get your hands on, and Grohl somehow makes it look easy. When it came to finalizing the details, however, Grohl said putting together the song “I Should Have Known” was a nightmare. Wasting light.
In theory, producing such an album should have been one of the easiest things in the world. The Foo Fighters had traveled the world and played some of the biggest shows of their career, and now all they had to do was make an album that would return them to their 1990s roots.
This meant taking everything down and returning to Grohl’s garage. The only problem was getting the entire record onto tape, which meant that every time they played a song, they got a perfect performance from start to finish. While Taylor Hawkins was physically struggling during the documentary, she was photographed by the band. Back and forth With songs like “These Days,” Grohl knew that “I Should Have Known” had to be something special to make it sound right.
Because when you look at what the song is about, there’s some connective tissue left over from his time in Nirvana. Aside from the rather moody breakdown, Grohl spends most of the track taking stock of his life and remembering all the days he should have known something was going to go wrong. Nothing is explicitly said about Kurt Cobain, but there are several tracks that tie in with Grohl’s time in Seattle’s biggest rock band.
When it came time to play the song’s opening riff, Grohl recalled messing it up one time too many for his liking, saying, “There were moments of frustration where I remember wanting to smash a damn guitar. On the opening riff of ‘I Should Have Known,’ I was really trying to make it sound great, and usually I don’t want things to sound perfect, but sometimes you want things to be just right.”
This is still a Foo Fighters song, skin to bone, but the real meat of the piece came when Krist Novoselic showed up to play bass. Considering his goofy demeanor during Nirvana’s heyday, it’s easy to forget how important his bass playing was to their sound, especially on this song, where he sounds like a monster bubbling out of the ocean on the final chorus of the piece.
If you strip away the rest of the band members, you could actually consider this a glorified Nirvana reunion song, as Grohl and Pat Smear both play on the final track. Although Cobain could never be replaced, his spirit is easily felt in the piece, complete with the same kind of angst he was able to express so well in the early 1990s.
This is not to say that Foo Fighters are continuing what Nirvana was meant to do. That group would remain in the past forever, but it’s nice to have songs like “I Should Have Known” to reflect on what you could have done differently and also remember all the good times.
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