Ongoing History Daily: Dave Grohl gets ready for his solo debut

Before Dave Grohl started up the Foo Fighters, he’d been writing and recording his own songs for years. But since Kurt Cobain was the guy in charge of Nirvana, Dave never really expected any of his songs to go anywhere. He just kept writing and recording his own stuff whenever he had time, doing the singing, the guitars and of course, all the drums.

It went on like that for six years.

After Kurt died and Dave started sifting through this material, he was surprised to find that he had somewhere between 30 and 40 songs ready to go. He wanted to re-record a dozen or so of his favourites and release an indie album on vinyl—press up ten or twenty thousand copies and leave it at that. But before he got around to it, he made a bunch of cassettes for his friends, and one by one, they started falling into the hands of record companies.

The response was so huge that Dave was more or less forced to issue the material as-is. And when that debut Foos album was released, he was shocked to see it sell more than a million copies.

The past posted talked about a hacking nightmare.