Growing up in the 1970s, Dave Grohl was still figuring out what he wanted to be. Despite being one of the greatest drummers in the world, Grohl was never sure where he wanted to go until he heard The Beatles for the first time. Although he may have been fascinated with music from the moment he heard the Fab Four, Grohl had to wait a few more years before another band turned his world upside down.
For most of the 1960s, the British invasion was home to the most inventive acts in the world. Despite the amount of pop-centric acts like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, there was also a healthy amount of blues, with bands trying their best to develop songs that sounded a little more grizzly than the average rock song.
In the middle of that scene stood Jimmy Page, who was just making a name for himself as a member of The Yardbirds. After years of playing the same traditional bluesy fare, though, Page knew that he wanted to expand his craft, quitting the band to pursue a career with a new outfit that would become Led Zeppelin.
Drafting in John Bonham and Robert Plant alongside session veteran John Paul Jones, Led Zeppelin roared onto the scene unlike anything else in rock. Though they were playing the same kind of music the rest of the blues scene did, there was a distinctively rougher approach to their attack, with songs like ‘Dazed and Confused’ being blown up to goliath proportions.
When he first heard it, Grohl was shellshocked by the music’s effect on him. Practising his drum chops by mimicking Bonham’s signature groove, Grohl would use that fury to inform his first musical loves. After being enamoured with punk rock, Grohl kept returning to Led Zeppelin, kneeling at the alter of their first handful of records.
Although Grohl would admit that The Beatles were the best in their field, he still considered Zeppelin to be in a class by themselves, telling Rolling Stone, “They showed me that human beings could channel this music somehow and that it was coming from somewhere…It was coming from four musicians taking music to places it hadn’t been before – it’s like it was coming from somewhere else. That’s why they’re the greatest rock and roll band of all time. It couldn’t have been any other way”.
While The Beatles may have started the rock revolution for many, it’s easy to see how Zeppelin took the genre even further. As Grohl described, many of the band’s greatest hits came from experimenting with different sounds, channelling their soul into every song they wrote.
Take a song like ‘The Rain Song’, for instance. The guitar is tuned in one of the most unconventional time signatures of all time, and yet Page could squeeze an entire song out of it, slowly following the muse down a path before he finally settled on a model for a song that fits with Robert Plant’s melody.
Zeppelin’s approach to heaviness would go on to define what Grohl was doing as well. Both in Nirvana and with Foo Fighters, Grohl knows how big the drums have to sound, creating musical notation out of strong rhythmic accents on every main beat. Grohl may have found his first love with The Beatles, but the impact of Zeppelin has become a part of his musical DNA.
