Monkey Wrench

Culture will miss the mischief of Taylor Hawkins

The news of Taylor Hawkins' death is numbing. Taylor Hawkins. How is that possible?

The press release came through to my email this evening and I asked aloud in line at Whole Foods: Taylor Hawkins. Which one? There's another one, right? Wait, what am I saying? Oh my god, Taylor Hawkins. No, not Taylor Hawkins. Dead? Taylor Hawkins dead?

Devastating. I think the word “devastated” actually trended on Twitter.

evebarlow

A post shared by Eve Barlow (@evebarlow)

Taylor Hawkins is one of those guys you can't imagine being dead because he's so fucking alive. Or he was. To type that feels so many shades of wrong. Was. Whenever anyone mentions the halcyon days of MTV, I swear to you the first image I have when I think of days spent in front of that square jukebox is of Hawkins' face in the “Learn To Fly” video, playing the flight attendant. And what a song. The brightest, most energized surging chorus about despair and confusion.

“Hook me up a new revolution, cause this one is a lie
We sat around laughin' and watched the last one die.”

I love the Foo Fighters. The first time I ever met Dave Grohl, back in 2010 or something, I told him I still regularly listened to The Color And The Shape (still do, by the way), and he said: “You do? Man, you really gotta stop doing that!” I really enjoy a self-deprecating leader of a self-deprecating band. I think the last time I saw Hawkins play was at the last Cal Jam festival out in San Bernadino. Cal Jam is Dave Grohl's own curated festival, headlined by the Foo Fighters every year, but halted in the pandemic times. I thought a lot about my own identity crisis when COVID-19 shut us down, but I thought more about the survival of the people I write about, of the people who let me into their inner sanctums, of the people I know don't function without the applause of a crowd, or the stomach-curdling nerves that come with repeatedly launching yourself out of the metaphorical moving planes that exist in the form of new albums, new tours, and new heights. Cal Jam was a place Grohl proudly announced as a festival you can only play at if you rock in a real way, man. You know; guitars, drums, bass, long hair. Nothing else. As much as this kind of statement irked me, and resides at the arse end of hip, I always respected the unforgiving stubbornness of that ideology. It's like a dinosaur refusing to learn how to swim even though there's no more food left on dry land.

By the way, Cal Jam is/was a riot. If you can't have fun at Cal Jam, you're definitely trying too hard. You probably suck.

I used to go to Foo Fighters' three-hour epic rock-athons all the time, and struggle to distinguish between most of them, because the fun you have at a Foos show is reassuringly consistent. It's as consistent as eating your favorite brand of junk food. It's not gonna change. You're not going to buy a packet of Peanut M&Ms and have it taste any different from the pack you ate last Saturday night. It's not like there was a good vintage of them that made one batch stand out from the rest. You eat them because you know them, intimately. You know exactly what happens when you serve them out the refrigerator versus room temp. You know how they react to being chucked on a brownie, or sprinkled on some ice cream. You can depend on your Peanut M&Ms. And yet, I remember that Cal Jam headliner with Foo Fighters distinctly aside from all the others, and for two reasons.

One: it ended with a Nirvana reunion of sorts. Pat Smear and Kurt Novoselic joined Grohl (on drums) onstage, and Joan Jett filled in as Kurt Cobain. It was ludicrous and extraordinarily moving. But the other reason I remember that headliner is because of Hawkins. During one of his many, many big garish completely over the top drum solos, his riser elevated into the sky and he was just up there like Beyonce flying over the crowd for Lord knows how long, in his fucking shorts, thrashing the shit out of his kit, with the biggest grin on his face; a grin wider than the enormous stage he was now practically floating on top of. And I remember thinking to myself: that guy's a giant. I think he might be one of the greats. I don't think anyone will dare to say that about him till he's in the ground because this band is not taken seriously enough by anyone, least of all the people in the band.

aysia @aysiamarotta

Listen, I'm not saying that Foos aren't serious about the band but they're only serious about the band in so much as it secures their eternal brotherhood with each other and keeps them happy and busy. The Foo Fighters are great because they know they're not one of the greats. They know they're not The Beatles. They're not trying to be the Stones. They are completely themselves. They're the rock band version of the fellowship in the Lord Of The Rings – on a global mission every couple of years to take the riffs back to their original home of Mordor, and they meet with chaos along the way every single time, and people love seeing their heroes come home to roost.

Grohl and I had a run for a few years where we pretty much did an annual interview. I enjoyed it, a lot. You can't not enjoy interviewing that man. The last time we did an interview, he invited me to Foos HQ, aka their studio in the San Fernando Valley. This studio is a shrine to Foo Fighters, and Grohl is essentially the museum tour guide. He is a breathing relic of himself, and of Gen X. Grohl knows he's a lucky fucker. He really does. He knows that it was chance that landed him in Nirvana just as the band was careening towards mainstream success. He knows that the drummer isn't supposed to be the legend of the story. He knows that having a two-decades long career in the spin-off band he started in his deepest moments of grief after Kurt Cobain's death is absolutely ridiculous and only a result of extremely hard work and likeability. Because of all that, there is never a time in Grohl's company where he resembles anything other than the cat who got the cream.

Foo Fighters were a band born out of grief. That is something people don't consider often because of the nature of their output. Not only are Foo Fighters a funny bunch of musicians, their music is laced with humor. They're not on the nose like their peers in Tenacious D, but their existence is humorous to defy life’s misery. I'm not calling the band a joke. I'm calling life a joke, and some people get to laugh at it in the best way, because they need to survive. That's Foo Fighters.

The last time I interviewed Grohl, it was for a Guardian piece. We walked back to Cobain's suicide; a time in which Grohl was being invited to join the likes of Pearl Jam and refused. Instead he wrote a whole record and played all the instruments himself as an exercise in mourning. “I never imagined I would be the singer of a band,” he told me. “After Nirvana ended, I didn’t wanna play music. I sure as fuck didn’t wanna go be someone’s drummer. I knew that it would remind me of Nirvana. I’m very proud. Nirvana changed my life for ever but there were times when I wanted to escape it. Just picking up an instrument or turning on a radio made me so sad. Then I realized that doing the thing I’d always done – go to a basement, record by myself – might restart my heart.” He called the project Foo Fighters. He never intended for it to be anything like what it's become. He just missed his friend.

When news of Hawkins' death poured out tonight, my phone blew up, and it was a consistent message; absolute shock, total disbelief, sheer pain and sadness. My mentor, who used to head up Vh1 during its peak era, sounded winded. He told me that Hawkins once played drums with his son. “He was that guy”. He was. I saw it. I saw it backstage. A sweet man. A kind man. A man who belonged where he was, who played for the love of playing, who was surrounded by the types of people who actually had the exact same reason for standing in the rehearsal space. You know, in band culture, that's rare. Particularly 20 years in. That's special.

Eve Barlow @Eve_Barlow

Found a quote I never used from a Dave Grohl interview. "Before you walk onstage every night you know that it's gonna kick your ass physically. Taylor and I look at each other every night and go, My god why are we doing this?" Can't even begin to imagine his loss.

I think Hawkins was an icon of his generation. I do. He looked like he might have been a character on Jackass, but he played like some of the greatest drummers who have ever sat behind a kit. He had what all drummers should: personality. It takes an enormous one to sit at the back of a band and be the focus of people's attention. You could never take your eyes off Hawkins, even with Grohl roaring around in front of him all night. The whole band will feel the loss of that kind of backbone. Only time will tell how Grohl may fight through this. It's hard to imagine how he could. I can't conceive of a Foo Fighters without Taylor Hawkins. Can anyone? A band born to defy death now dealing with an unspeakable loss. It feels tremendously unfair.

There is nothing cool about Foo Fighters, apart from one thing; their joy. And Hawkins was the literal beat of that joy. What a huge loss to the music world. My thoughts and sincere condolences are with his family, friends and the band, and particularly with my friends at SAM management.

Listen to the drum solo on “Rope” tonight and throw some horns to the sky.

Rest in power, Taylor.