Living in a Foo’s Paradise

A puff of cigarette smoke blows out of Dave Grohl’s mouth--which is appropriate, since the words he’s speaking at the moment are in fact a smoke screen.

“What do you mean?” he says, responding flatly to a question about his experiences dating another rock musician. The leader of the Foo Fighters has been linked to Louise Post of the group Veruca Salt.

“Who?” says Grohl, with enough lack of guile to make you think it’s not true.

But Grohl is dating Post. The lanky musician, who with his new Beatles haircut and goatee looks something like a stretched-out Matthew Broderick, simply is not going to acknowledge it. End of topic.

“This is a blackout, don’t let it go to waste,” he sings on “My Poor Brain,” an intense rocker from the Foo Fighters’ new album, “The Colour and the Shape,” due in stores Tuesday. (See review, Page 62).

Indeed, Grohl, 28, makes great use of mental erasers. One of the other chapters in his life that he’s blacked out--at least publicly--is his years with Kurt Cobain as the drummer in Nirvana.

“I have a very selective memory,” Grohl explains, sitting in the garden of West Hollywood’s hideaway of the stars, the Chateau Marmont. “There are things that I wish not to remember, and I don’t.”

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The first Foo Fighters album, 1995’s “Foo Fighters,” was a textbook case of forgetfulness and avoidance. The album was recorded during what by any measure would be dark days for Grohl, just one year after Cobain’s suicide following a roller coaster of elation (the group’s sudden status as the essential rock band of its generation) and trauma (Cobain’s losing struggle with drug addiction).

Grohl and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic--who has a new band, Sweet 75, with an album due this summer--were looked to by Nirvana’s mourning fans for insights and answers about the loss of their tortured hero. But the musicians steadfastly kept their feelings and observations private.

When Grohl recorded the first Foo Fighters album virtually by himself and then assembled his new band (featuring Nirvana auxiliary guitarist Pat Smear), it was a matter of diversion, not catharsis.

“The feeling was still fresh and I really did my best to stay away from any of those issues,” he says. “And if I did touch on any of them, I tried to mask them, disguise them in some way. The first record, there’s so much nonsense. I spent so much time trying to stay away from anything meaningful.”

The new album is quite a different matter. When writing these songs, Grohl found his memory working all too well, and personal pain all too close to the surface.

Once again, though, fans looking for clues to Cobain may be disappointed. That’s not the painful experience that Grohl focused on for the new album; instead, it deals with the breakup last year of his two-year marriage to photographer Jennifer Youngblood.

Grohl admits that some of the lyrics may easily be mistaken as being about Cobain.

“Sure,” he says. “There’s the pain of losing someone in this, which you can relate to Nirvana. There’s the breakup, there’s the turmoil within a relationship. Being in a band is sort of being in a relationship, but with three or four people, which can sometimes be a lot more difficult than just a marriage.”

Only one song, “Hero,” a look at the disappointment that ensues when idols prove to be “ordinary” mortals, directly relates to Cobain. Otherwise, it’s very fresh pain in these songs.

“The whole thing kind of reads like a diary,” Grohl says. “Which is weird, because I’m the last person in the world who would want to open up my journal and let everyone read it.

“But for some reason I feel I can go out and scream my guts out every night--which is something I haven’t done with these songs yet. It was so easy to go play every night on the last couple of tours and sing those songs that were easy to sing. There are a few on this album that I just don’t even want to play, that I don’t even like listening to.”

Particularly difficult for him is the song “Walking After You,” a ballad about being left behind that he says is too emotionally raw for him ever to perform live. But writing it was necessary for survival.

“See,” he says, leaning forward in his chair, “I’ve never been an overly emotional person. I always tried to stay pretty grounded, wanted to make sure that in the face of any serious crisis or trauma I could make it through it.

“I’m not gonna crack,” he says, offhandedly quoting a line from “Lithium,” a key song from Nirvana’s culture-shaking 1991 “Nevermind” album. “I’m gonna make it. And these songs are probably one of the things that helped me get through.”

Two days after the interview, Grohl does get a chance to scream his guts out onstage. In a “surprise” concert at the Alligator Lounge in Santa Monica, he leads Smear, bassist Nate Mendel and drummer Taylor Hawkins (playing his first show with the band after replacing William Goldsmith, who left after the new album was recorded) through a spirited, aggressive, 45-minute set.

The audience is thrilled at the chance to see the band in an intimate setting. After all, “Foo Fighters” sold a more-than-respectable 1 million copies in the U.S. to establish the group as a force in its own right, and the songs “This Is a Call,” “I’ll Stick Around” and “Big Me” became rock radio and MTV favorites. Further evidence of Grohl’s acceptance by Nirvana fans was that “Marigold,” an obscure Nirvana song that he wrote and sang, became a hit at KROQ-FM and other stations around the country last year, even though it was available only as a European B-side.

Most notable is how natural Grohl now seems in the frontman role. When he stepped out from behind the drums for the first Foo Fighters shows, it was a bit of an adjustment both for him and his fans: The spotlight was on him, and there was pressure to somehow carry on for Nirvana. When the Foo Fighters first played in Los Angeles, before the debut album had even been released, Grohl was greeted as he came on stage with roars of affection from the crowd, to which he responded, “Hey, for all you know, we could suck.”

“This is a pathetic excuse, but it’s kind of true--I was just the drummer,” he says during the interview at the Marmont, laughing about the fans’ unrealistic expectations. “I played my role and pulled my weight, and I’d had no intention of going out and being the singer-guitar-player guy in the band.”

It had been that way since Grohl joined the Washington, D.C., punk band the Scream when he was 17. Even during Nirvana’s ride at the top, Grohl was writing and recording songs at his home near Seattle, but with no thoughts about actually being a solo performer or frontman. Now, though, frontman is his role, and he’s taking it seriously.

“Priority No. 1 with this new record was probably [to] sort of introduce ourselves to the people who had listened to the first album,” he says. “The first album and shows didn’t really have much to say other than that we’re capable of being a pop band, you know? But this album is the first things we’ve recorded together.

“I really feel like it’s our first record. It’s got Pat’s personality all over it, Nate’s personality and playing all over it, and lyrics that actually mean something and are pretty revealing.”

Those who have worked with Grohl since the early Nirvana days are not surprised by his emergence.

“In Nirvana, Dave didn’t want the focus,” says Mark Kates, the Geffen Records A&R; executive who continues to work with Grohl and Novoselic on Nirvana-related matters. “He had to learn how to be in front of a band and accept that focus. Certainly making this record he definitely took charge. And there’s been an evolution not just as a frontman but as a writer.”

Gary Gersh, who signed Nirvana at Geffen and signed the Foo Fighters in his current role as president of Capitol Records, agrees.

“For everybody who was fortunate enough to be touched by Kurt personally, that is on your shoulder for everything you do,” says Gersh. “That will always be part of Dave. But he’s turning the Foo Fighters into something that is starting to be very personal and original. His agenda is not to be a Nirvana historian. It’s to move on with his life, which is a formidable task.”

And for his convenient “memory losses” and all the walls he erects around his privacy, Grohl rejects the notion of the reluctant rock star, the distant slacker who acts as if celebrity and adulation are viruses--an image many associate with Cobain.

“In being the reluctant rock star, it seems like you refuse to feel fortunate for what’s happened to you,” Grohl says. “And as much as I refuse to play up to everyone’s rock ‘n’ roll expectations, I still always felt fortunate. I thought, ‘God, I don’t have to work at the gas station. I don’t have to work at the furniture warehouse anymore. This is cool.’ ”