MIDNIGHT MADNESS

Foo Fighters’ guitar triumvirate DAVE GROHL, CHRIS SHIFLETT & PAT SMEAR unleash their inner early-Eighties David Bowie (and SRV), bust out the ABBA beats and get decidedly “weird” — just in time for their 10th album, Medicine at Midnight

- RICHARD BIENSTOCK

“IT WAS THE FOO FIGHTERS’ 25TH ANNIVERSARY, SO IT was going to be a big year,” he says. “We thought, it’d be great to make an album, our 10th studio album, and I started planning around that — ‘Let’s circle the planet! Let’s release this documentary thing that we’ve made! Let’s do these van tours! We’ll play the same cities 25 years to the date that we did on our first-ever tour… and in the same van we did the tour in!’ Just all this shit, you know? Basically coming up with this world-domination-celebration thing.”

Spoiler alert: 2020 did not work out the way anyone — Grohl and the Foo Fighters included — had planned. Which is why the singer and guitarist, rather than telling this story to Guitar World from the back of a beat-up van in some far-flung locale (that van tour, scheduled to begin last April, was cancelled as the world went into COVID-19 shutdown) is, like everyone else, at home, talking about his aborted world domination plot over — what else? — Zoom.

And when our narrative is enriched with brand new anecdotes courtesy of Dave’s Foo Fighters coguitarist, Chris Shiflett? That interview takes place over Zoom as well, with Shiflett safely confined in his home.

The final piece of the Foos guitar triumvirate, Pat Smear, meanwhile, is clearly not taking any chances. He speaks with GW via a crackly cellphone connection from the east coast of Canada, where he’s holed up, he reports, “in the snow in a little cabin deep in the woods, with no mail delivery or garbage pickup.”

“He’s turned into a Canadian frontiersman,” Shiflett says with a laugh.

2020, to say the least, was weird.