Thanks to Tania

Dave Grohl on Cattle Calls

"We had never auditioned a guitar player before," says Grohl. "The other guitarists that were in the band, Pat Smear and Franz Stahl, were just friends we asked to come play. We had the candidates learn four songs from an audition tape. "Off the Ground" and "Everlong" are pretty basic rockers, but "A320" and "Aurora" have lots of guitar parts going at the same time, so it was interesting to see which parts each guitarist would choose to play.

"Some people just learned one of the three parts, and others expected me to play everything. But Chris [Shiflett] learned all of the parts and figured out -- without me telling him -- which parts worked best in which places, since all the parts can't be played at once. Chris proved that he was good at knowing which spaces to fill and which to leave open -- that got him the gig.

"Now it's clear that Chris can do almost anything. He can be just as dirty and sloppy as Pat, or he can be as precise as Franz. He definitely plays really tight, but because of his hard-core, punk rock background, he also knows when things should be messed up. He really gets into it when he plays, and you can tell when something's building to a climax -- he kind of goes off."

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Enter Chris Shiflett, your new "touring" guitarist. What was he doing before you guys hooked up?

He was in a band called No Use For A Name. Before that, he was also in 22 Jacks, and Me First & The Gimme Gimmes. In fact, back in 1987, the first time I ever went on tour, his band actually opened for my band, Scream, in Santa Barbara. Plus we have a lot of mutual friends, so it's funny that we've been running in the same circles for a long time but haven't bumped into each other.

Nirvana went through something like seven drummers before you entered the picture right before Nevermind. Nave you ever felt like you're going through the same thing, only with guitar players?

Kind of, and we'd been talking about that. In all the press that we've been doing lately, people ask Chris Shiflett, "Well, don't you feel disposable?" Or "Do you feel like you're a member of the band?" Or "Do you feel like you've assimilated?" And 'Are you comfortable?" And he's only been in the band for about three weeks now! In his defense, I always say, "You know, the whole time I was in Nirvana I really thought that I was going to be fired or replaced because of the long line of drummers before me." And it's a weird feeling when you come into a situation like ours, where Taylor [Hawkins, drums], Nate [Mendel, bass], and I are best friends; we're very, very close. It's hard to immediately make your way into that tight of a relationship, and it's twice as hard when you feel like there have been two people before you who have done the same thing. But the thing about Chris is that--and this is no lie---he is the best guitarist and the best vocalist that we've had in the band yet. He's enthusiastic, excited, and genuinely stoked to be in the band. Last night we played in a place that holds about 10,000 people, and I don't know if he'd ever done that before. He just seemed really, really excited, and it's great. It makes us all excited; it makes us all feel like we're starting over again. We expect a lot from each member of the band, and we've all devoted our lives to this thing, so we want someone that will do the same.

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"All of those songs on the last album were written on acoustic guitars, even ‘Breakout’ and ‘Stacked Actors’. A lot of this stuff that we’ve been writing now has been written with everything on 11!"

Chris, who joined the Foos after ‘TINLTL’ had been completed, is swiftly finding his niche in the band.

"We have guitar leads on our songs now!" Dave laughs. "And that’s Shiflett, not me! We have this new fast song that we decided to give to Shiflett for a lead break. We were recording live in the room down there, and I can’t really hear Shiflett’s amp. When I went back and listened, he was shredding this fucking ‘Yngwie’ lead!"

Dave shakes his head in bewilderment.

"I was like, ‘Oh my God! Who are you? I didn’t know you could do that!."