“The next project that I’m trying to initiate,” Dave Grohl once said, “involves me on drums, Josh Homme on guitar, and John Paul Jones playing bass. That’s the next album. That wouldn’t suck.”
Right, it probably wouldn’t suck, but it would just take a while — years — to come to fruition from when he first said it.
If indeed it has! I’m getting ahead of myself. But it’s looking like, uh, it has.
Fronting the Foo Fighters only scrapes the surface as to who this guy is and what Grohl has been capable of. Once known only as the drummer throughout all of Nirvana’s major success, this guy has revealed himself to be a primo singer and guitarist, savvy songwriter and ambitious collaborator.
Grohl never did make a secret of his desire to take John Bonham’s place in a reunited Led Zeppelin, and when given the chance to work with — or even just hang with — anybody from that group, he has repeatedly taken it.
(Right, who wouldn’t? Maybe the emphasis is more on the fact that he has been given those chances more often than just about anybody else in recent memory. Some would say this guy deserves it.)
And now that the name Dave Grohl has been blurted out online as one of two people working with Jones on a project that would see them releasing an album and going on tour, it seems to be a perfectly logical conclusion — if not a convenient one.
A couple of months ago, Jones spoke out and said he’d been “working on some other music, which is more rock based, with a couple of other people.” He said he couldn’t reveal who they were as it was all “secret.”
“Top secret” perhaps? This two-word turn of phrase was invoked less than a week ago, when Greg Werckman of Ipecac Recordings revealed to Rock-A-Rolla magazine that singer and multi-instrumentalist Josh Homme “has got a new top secret project that he’s working on now.”
Homme is the other guy mentioned as having been recording with Jones and Grohl, and it brings to fruition a dream Grohl expressed in the above quotation. That remark of his comes from an interview given to Stevie Chick for Mojo magazine back in 2005.
Yes, 2005. That dream of his first went public four years ago.
At that time, the Foo Fighters released the double album, In Your Honor, for which Jones met up with the Foo Fighters at their recording studio that was designed to look like the Stockholm facility where Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door was born as the brainchild of Jones, foremost among the members of that band.
Grohl may have wanted his next album to be with Jones and Homme, but it didn’t happen in 2006. Sessions the following year yielded the album Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace. The band spent a while touring in support of its new disc, the highlight of which came on June 7, 2008, when Jones rounded up Jimmy Page to show 86,000 people — and however many have bought the live DVD since its release last November — at the Foo Fighters’ Wembley Stadium finale just how well they could still play the Zep songs “Rock and Roll” and “Ramble On” in their 60s, as well as how eager they were to do it!
Since this, the Foo Fighters have gone on hiatus, and the hopes for some kind of a continued Led Zeppelin reunion beyond just one single show were dashed. Ever since things have settled down, it seems all too probable that Grohl has finally gotten his way as far as his wish to bring Jones in to help him write and play with Josh Homme.
We await official confirmation, and we also await the dates of an album release and a tour.