Dave Grohl has admitted he was “fucking pissed” at Foo Fighters bandmates Pat Smear and Nate Mendel when they quit the band.
Smear joined the Foo Fighters in 1995, before quitting two years later. However, he rejoined the group as a touring guitarist in 2005, and was reinstated as a fully-fledged member in 2010.
Meanwhile, bass player Mendel also joined in 1995, but quit for a far shorter amount of time. Back in 1999, he told Dave Grohl he was leaving to rejoin his former bandmates at Sunny Day Real Estate, but the idea only lasted for a day.
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Grohl opened up about how he felt about the incident with Mendel at the time.
‘Oh, I was fucking pissed. Like, ‘Dude, we made a pact!’ I was in Virginia at my mother’s house, and my friend Jimmy and I went to our favourite bar, this shitty barbecue restaurant called Ribsters,” he said.
He continued: “I remember getting so drunk that we drove home and turfed every front lawn in the neighbourhood. Kids, stay in school, don’t do drugs! But then about 8 AM, my mother walks into my bedroom and hands me this huge Flavor Flav-sized cordless from 1995 or whatever, and it was Nate saying, ‘Man, I’m really sorry. I changed my mind.’
“We told each other we loved each other. I cried and hung up and went back to sleep and threw up, I think.”
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Elsewhere in the interview, Smear revealed that Grohl would manage to “pull [him] back in” when he thought about leaving for good.
“On one hand, I think it was a really good thing that we started so soon after Kurt’s [Cobain] passing [in April 1994], but on the other hand, it maybe was a little soon for me,” he said.
“I was still pretty traumatised by the whole ordeal. But Dave would always play me the next album and the next one, and that’s what would pull me back in.”
Check out ‘Learn To Fly’ by Foo Fighters:
