He might be one of the busiest men in music, but it turns out that Dave Grohl once couldn’t find the time to tour with his lifelong heroes Motörhead, it has been revealed.
Back in 2009, Motörhead were set to perform a tour of the United States, only to suffer a bit of a setback when drummer Mikkey Dee found himself unable to play.
Having accepted a spot on Kändisdjungeln (a Swedish version I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here!), the band found themselves needing a replacement drummer, and fast.
Ultimately, this role went to Guns N’ Roses’ Matt Sorum, whose schedule had cleared up thanks to the dissolution of Velvet Revolver months earlier. However, as Sorum explains, he wasn’t Motörhead’s first choice.
Speaking to Eddie Trunk on his podcast recently (via Alternative Nation), Matt Sorum revealed that the Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl was first on the call list, but couldn’t make the tour work.
Check out Motörhead’s ‘Ace Of Spades’:
“Lemmy called me up… He actually texted me, and I could hear his voice through the text: ‘Matt, I need you to play drums’,” Sorum began. “And I actually texted him back. I wrote, ‘Why me?’ I don’t know why I said that. And he wrote back, ‘Dave Grohl’s not available.’”
“Lemmy wasn’t a guy to mince words; he’d tell you the truth. I loved that about him. And I texted him, ‘When are we rehearsing?’ And he wrote back, ‘We aren’t.’”
“I got a DVD [of Motörhead’s performance at the] Wacken [Open Air] festival,” he continued. “It came in the mail, like the next day, [via] FedEx. And he said, ‘Learn the Wacken show.’ And I learned it.”
“And then I met them at the 9:30 club in Washington D.C. We soundchecked and I played that night… And it was amazing. For a drummer, though… it got confusing, ’cause there’s a lot of Motörhead songs that have that sort of thunderous rock kind of beat happening underneath, and I just needed to kind of decipher that.”
“But, obviously, playing ‘Overkill’ and ‘Ace Of Spades’… Then I had to learn the newer stuff that Mikkey did, like ‘[In The Name Of] Tragedy’, which some of that stuff was, like, ‘Wow!’”
Check out the Foo Fighters’ ‘White Limo’:
Of course, before you start thinking that Dave Grohl passed up a huge opportunity, Motörhead’s US tour actually clashed with Dave Grohl’s first tour with Them Crooked Vultures. Needless to say, this would’ve been a rather tough decision to make, especially with Matt Sorum describing the tour as “one of the greatest experiences that I ever had.”
“It was a very energetic, high-energy set, and I loved it,” Sorum explained. “And I still remember it like yesterday. Especially being on the bus with Lemmy. He’s just got great stories. He knew everything there was to know about every civil war.”
“We’d be driving down the highway through the Midwest, or in the South, where they had battlefields. And he’d point. He’d go, ‘Over there was the battle of…’ you know, whatever, and he knew everything about it. Not only the Second World War, First World War, but the American Civil War. So he was a history buff.”
Despite having passed up the chance to tour with Motörhead, Dave Grohl did find himself frequently collaborating with Lemmy over the years, with the rocker appearing on Grohl’s Probot side project, the video for ‘White Limo’, and returning the favour by recruiting the Foo Fighters frontman for his own solo album years later.
Needless to say, we can’t begin to imagine how amazing a Motörhead show with Dave Grohl behind the kit would have been.
Check out Motörhead’s Lemmy performing with the Foo Fighters:
