Foo Fighters see America in 'Sonic Highways'
Dave Grohl directs documentary series in which groups new album was recorded in a new city each week.
* FOO FIGHTERS: SONIC HIGHWAYS. 11 tonight, HBO.
* BIG DRIVER. 8 p.m. tomorrow, Lifetime.
BACK IN THE days when Dave Grohl was a drummer in Nirvana, his father, "a classically trained musician and writer," used to call him up and issue that classic parental warning: "Hey, you know this isn't going to last, right?"
Grohl believed him.
But as he told reporters this summer in a session for his new HBO series, "Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways," that was 24 years ago.
What's more, it's been 20 years since Grohl, in the wake of Kurt Cobain's death, decided to record his own music, ultimately putting together the band Foo Fighters.
As anyone who's spent years doing anything even remotely creative knows, even the best work can get stale if you don't change things now and then.
Enter Dave Grohl, director.
Following up on his 2013 documentary, "Sound City," about the history of the recording studio in Van Nuys, Calif., where Nirvana recorded "Nevermind," Grohl decided to take Foo Fighters on the road for its next album. ("Sonic Highways" comes out Nov. 10.)
"It's all about recreating or reinventing the process. We could just go and make another record in a studio and hit the road and sell a bunch of T-shirts and, you know, turn on KROQ and hear another Foo Fighters song. But where's the fun in that?" Grohl said.
"We've been a band for 20 years now. Let's go to tiny studios all over the country, tell the story of music from that city and what is it about each one of these cities that influences the music that comes from there. Because there are real reasons, cultural influence from each one of these places. There's a reason why jazz came from New Orleans. There's a reason why country went to Nashville and why the blues went to Chicago. And I get to interview all of these people and talk to them about that."
In tonight's premiere, which focuses on Chicago, "all of these people" includes Buddy Guy and Bonnie Raitt, Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen, as well as the cousin who introduced Grohl to punk rock.
(Grohl interviewed President Obama for another installment of the eight-part series, "because I wanted to talk to him about America as a country," but HBO's being a bit cagey about exactly when Obama will appear.)
A blend of history and nostalgia, "Sonic Highways" is more than an album companion piece, but people who come for the music will get to hear one new song at the end of each episode.
"On the very last day of the session, I take my transcripts with all the interviews, and I get a bottle of wine, and I sit in my hotel room . . . And I write the song from the episode. So the finale of each episode is a performance of the song, where you realize all of these lyrical references are from the show that you just watched," Grohl said.
"So that's the challenge. It's not like anything I've ever done. And it was so fun. I will never ever do it again. It was a pain in the ass."
'Big Driver'
If I were programming a network for women, I'd probably try to make it the one place on TV where we could go to forget about rapists and serial killers.
I wouldn't last a half-hour at Lifetime.
The network's trademark woman-in-peril genre gets a slight twist tomorrow night, though.
Norristown's Maria Bello stars in "Big Driver," an adaptation of a Stephen King novella in which she plays a writer of cozy mysteries about crime-solving women who knit - yes, my people! Her life is changed, in unpleasant ways, when she suffers a horrific assault.
Really, really horrific.
Bello, I'm guessing, was more interested in what happens next (and maybe in working with co-stars Olympia Dukakis and Joan Jett). I wouldn't think of spoiling a moment of it for you, but if you do watch, keep the lights on.
And it wouldn't hurt to bring some knitting.