Foo Fighters: The Album Dave Grohl Recorded Alone So He Could Keep Going

In 1990, Dave Grohl joined Nirvana as its drummer. On tour he carried a guitar and wrote songs, but he never dared to show them to anyone: he felt they didn’t measure up to Kurt Cobain’s.

In April 1994, Cobain died and Nirvana was over. Grohl sank into depression: even listening to music was hard. Other bands offered him the drum stool, but he said no. Any band would remind him of Nirvana.

In October of that year he booked a studio in Seattle, almost as therapy. In six days he recorded the songs for what would become his first album, and he played everything himself: guitars, bass, drums and vocals.

He had no plans to release it. He made copies on cassette and handed them out to friends. So nobody would know it was him, he put a made-up name on them: Foo Fighters, what World War II pilots called the strange lights they spotted in the sky.

The tapes got around, record labels came calling, and Grohl had to put together a real band to play those songs live. The album came out in 1995 and was a hit.

Thirty years later, Foo Fighters are one of the biggest bands in rock. They’ve had their own heartbreak, too: in March 2022, drummer Taylor Hawkins died in Bogotá, just days after playing in South America.

Today the band carries on, with Ilan Rubin on drums. On February 28, 2027, they return to Chile for the fourth time, at the Parque Estadio Nacional, and the same tour stops in Montevideo, Buenos Aires and Lima.