In the chaos that followed Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994, Dave Grohl contributed to a recording session that was to inadvertently shape his next move. It was May 29, a week before Grohl’s MTV performance with the Backbeat Band, and both he and Nirvana guitarist Pat Smear had agreed to contribute to an album by long-time friend Mike Watt. For the album, Ball Hog or Tugboat, which was released in February 1995, Grohl played drums on “Big Train” and “Against The 70s” while Smear supplied vocals to “Forever” and “One Reporter’s Opinion.”

During the session, however, Grohl gave Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder a copy of the two-track demo he had made at Robert Lang’s Studio at the same time as Nirvana’s “You Know You’re Right” was recorded. This didn’t necessarily mark the beginning of Grohl’s solo career. Even at this stage he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to make music anymore. Drumming for other people in one-off projects was one thing, but pouring the emotional energy required for making music with a band was another thing entirely. Indeed, he even contemplated joining Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers band as a full-time member.

“I was this close to joining,” he says. “It was so much fun. I was really scared. I was most afraid that they had watched Unplugged and decided to get me from seeing that. But when we rehearsed, they treated me like I was in the band. It was such an honor. But I figured that I was twenty-six years old and didn’t want to become a drummer for hire at that age.”

The final boost his spirit needed came from an unlikely source. Seattle band 7 Year Bitch had also lost a member of their band. In a postcard to Grohl, they urged him not to give up. “After Kurt’s death, I was about as confused as I’ve ever been. To continue almost seemed in vain. I was always going to be ‘that guy from Kurt Cobain’s band’ and I knew that. I wasn’t even sure if I had the desire to make music anymore.

“That fucking letter [from 7 Year Bitch] saved my life, because as much as I missed Kurt, and as much as I felt so lost, I knew that there was only one thing that I was truly cut out to do and that was music. I know that sounds so incredibly corny, but I honestly felt that. I decided to do what I had always wanted to do since the first time I’d recorded a song all by myself. I was going to book a week in a twenty four track studio, choose the best stuff I’d ever written out of the thirty-to-forty songs that had piled up, and really concentrate on them in a real studio.”

So Grohl and producer Barrett Jones started to trawl through the tapes he’d demo-ed over the last few years and came up with a final list of fifteen. The next step was to book time in Robert Lang’s Studio.

The sessions took place between October 17 and 23, 1994. By this stage Grohl was so used to the recording process whereby he played everything, that he was able to work extremely quickly, recording them in the same order that they would eventually appear on the finished album. The first track “This Is A Call” took a mere forty-five minutes to record.

Foo Fighters’ demo tape [photo: Dave Grohl’s Twitter]

“It became this little game,” he said at the time. “I was running from room to room, still sweating and shaking from playing drums and I’d pick up the guitar and put down a track, do the bass, maybe do another guitar part, have a sip of coffee and then go in and do the next song. We were done with the music in the first two days.”

“He’d do a whole song in about forty minutes,” said Afghan Whigs’ Greg Dulli. “I was completely fascinated by it. He could do it because he has perfect time. He’d lay down a perfect drumbeat and work off that. He’d play drums, run out and play bass, and then put two guitar layers over the top and sing it. I was just watching him record, and he asked me if I wanted to play. I didn’t even get out of my chair. He just handed me a guitar.”

“The first four hours was spent getting sounds,” wrote Grohl in 1995. “This was a cinch for Barrett, whom I’d asked to produce since he was the one person in the world I felt comfortable singing in front of. By five o’clock we were ready to record… Over the past six years, Barrett and I had perfected our own method of recording. Start with drums, listen to playback while humming tune in head to make sure arrangement is correct, put down two or three guitar tracks — mind you, all amplifiers and everything are ready to go before recording begins — do bass track and move on to next songs, saving vocals for last.”

Interestingly, of the songs recorded, three had actually been written in period since Cobain’s death. These were “This Is A Call,” “Oh George” and “I’ll Stick Around.” “This Is A Call” was written on a mini-electric guitar while Grohl was on his honeymoon in Dublin. He’d married long time girlfriend, photographer Jennifer Youngblood, in 1993.

With the recording and a rough mix done, Grohl duped up one hundred copies of the completed demo and started circulating them among friends and industry people. The demo went under the name Foo Fighters. This was the only information apart from song titles.

“I just wanted to release this tape that I had done on my label, with no names on it, and then get an independent distributor and send it out to the world, maybe 10,000 or 20,000 copies so people would think, ‘God, who is this band Foo Fighters? I’ve never heard of them before.’ I just wanted it to be this real anonymous release.”

Grohl’s ambitions for this collection of songs may have been minimal but the demos quickly became the industry’s worst kept secret. Bootlegs started to appear on the market and major labels started sniffing around to sign the drummer up. Says Grohl: “My first mistake: my trip to the duplication lab downtown for one hundred copies. My next mistake was my blind generosity. That fucking tape spread like the Ebola virus, leaving me with an answering machine tape full of record company jive.”

However, Grohl was still not happy to launch himself onto the world with a full-blown solo career. He decided to put a band together for the project. He had also made a decision that would help him to put the past in its place. He vacated the drummer’s seat for the first time since those Freak Baby days. Grohl was to be singer and guitarist in the new band.

Thanks to bassist Krist Novoselic’s involvement in the initial Nirvana-era Bob Lang recordings, rumors started to circulate that the two would be reunited on this project. Both had remained close since their Nirvana days—their friendship had been cemented on that last Nirvana tour when Grohl and Novoselic had opted to travel on one tour bus while Cobain and Love travelled in a separate tour bus with Pat Smear.

To add to the rumor of Novoselic and Grohl working together, the duo had actually recorded some material at The Laundry Room. “He (Novoselic) was like, ‘Man, d’you wanna jam?’ It seemed to really spark something in me. So we got together in Barrett’s studio and wrote maybe four of five of these jams, no vocals, just bass and drums. It was really cool, we wanted to get in the van and go on tour, doing this bass and drums thing. But Krist was really busy with things like Bosnian Relief Organization, and he has a farm now out in the middle of nowhere in Washington. So he’s actually really busy.”

The first person Grohl approached to join the band was Seattle local Nate Mendel, whose band Sunny Day Real Estate had recently split following one album on Sub Pop. Grohl had first met Mendel at a Thanksgiving Party held at the former’s house. Mendel’s girlfriend was a good friend of Grohl’s wife and the two hit it off immediately.

The next piece in the Foo Fighters band jigsaw slotted into place with the arrival of Pat Smear. Such was Grohl’s admiration for Smear — and insecurity at his own recordings — that it had taken him ages to give Smear a copy of the demo. Indeed, Grohl had been such a fan of Smear’s guitar playing that he had memorized almost every word spoken by the guitarist in the early 1980s LA punk documentary, The Decline Of The Western Civilization — and this was long before he’d become the fourth member of Nirvana.

“I called Pat up a couple weeks after I gave him the tape,” Grohl said in 1996. “Way before we had a tour booked, probably before we had even played with each other. I asked him what he was doing. He said he was working on his guitars.”

The conversation, according to Grohl had gone: “Working on guitars.” “For what?” “For a tour.” “Whose?” “Ours.” Smear was on board.

“After you’ve been in the coolest band ever,” Smear explained, “what do you do? I sat on the couch with the remote control in my hand for a year. I didn’t know if I ever wanted to be in a band again. I was just working on solo stuff. Dave and I had kept in touch and I had heard about his tape, but I didn’t know what to expect. When I heard the tape, I flipped. Dave gave it to me at a club and I went home. After I listened to it, I went back to the club. But I didn’t want to ask to join the band. I waited for him to ask me.”

Now all Grohl needed was someone to take the unenviable position of sitting in the drummer’s seat. Enter William Goldsmith, Mendel’s band mate from Sunny Real Estate. Grohl subsequently got his wife to pass two copies of Foo Fighters’ tape onto Goldsmith and Mendel. It wasn’t made clear what Grohl was intending. There was some mention of recording, or simply working together, but no suggestion of becoming members of a band.

“We listened to the tape and we liked it a lot, but we didn’t know what would happen next,” Goldsmith explained. “Then I was in DC that week after our last tour and he called. It was a great phone call. He was like, ‘Oh, so your band’s in the shitter.’ I told him ‘yes’. He said, ‘All right. Let’s play.’”

Grohl had seen the bassist and drummer in action twice with Sunny Day Real Estate and had been impressed by their energy as much as their ability. This energy was important to Grohl’s game plan, as he explained in 1996: “My main concern wasn’t finding someone who could do everything exactly as it was on the tape, but someone who had really good energy. There’s not very many of them. When I saw Will play, I was really amazed. So I called Nate and Will and… we started playing. After the second or third time in William [Goldsmith]’s basement, we had the songs down.”

With the final addition of the Sunny Real Estate rhythm section, Grohl felt he had the right band to publicly launch Foo Fighters. The band decided to perform for the first time at a private keg party in a friend’s house. The band even provided the kegs of beer.

Foo Fighters, 1995 (Nate Mendel, Dave Grohl, William Goldsmith, Pat Smear)

Despite the band’s activities, rumors still circulated that Novoselic would be joining as well. Eventually Grohl put paid to these rumors: “For Krist and I, it would have felt really natural and really great, but for everyone else, it would have been weird and it would have left me in a really bad position. Then it really would have been under the microscope.”