Dierks Bentley’s Interview With Foo Fighters Guitarist: 5 Things We Learned
With his newest album, Black, set for release this Friday, May 27th, Dierks Bentley met up with Foo Fighters guitarist Chris Shiflett earlier this spring to tape an installment of Shiflett’s podcast. Their conversation drifted from Whitesnake’s “Still of the Night” to Hank Williams Jr.’s “Man to Man,” with both musicians swapping road stories and songwriting tips along the way. Their dialogue forms the basis of Shiflett’s newest Walking the Floor, a biweekly show that finds the guitarist talking shop with country stars and Americana icons.
Recorded in Nashville while Bentley prepared for a business trip to Europe, the Walking the Floor episode presents Bentley not only as a musician, but as a genuine music fan. Here are five of the biggest takeaways from the conversation, which doubles as the first installment of Shiflett’s podcast to be released by the PodcastOne network.
1. Bentley was a hair-metalhead.
Like Carrie Underwood, Bentley grew up on hair metal. He was a teenager during the late Eighties, when rock acts like Van Halen and Def Leppard blanketed the airwaves. When another friend expressed interest in learning the electric guitar, the two began working together to learn some of the era’s most popular riffs. . .although Bentley wasn’t as quick as his buddy to master those dive-bombs. “We were working on a Whitesnake riff or something,” Bentley remembers, humming the riff of “Still of the Night,” “and his pick and his fingers were so much more coordinated than me. It was frustrating. He was advancing so much further than I was, so much quicker. So I worked on more Look What the Cat Dragged In power chords, like Poison. I discovered early on that I was more of a strummer than a picker.”
2.When it comes to the tour bus, Bentley doesn’t pull rank.
Some of his bandmates have been playing with him since his earliest shows in Nashville, and they receive the same amenities as Bentley himself. “It’s really healthy for the long-term longevity of a band,” he says. “We’re super close. We all ride in the same bus together. I don’t have a bunk in the back; we’re all just in the center aisle. I try to treat it as equally as possible. I will look out for those guys, because I know when they’re happy and their families are happy, our show is gonna be better.”
3. As a kid, Bentley listened to a mix of his dad’s country music and his sister’s pop cassettes.
Country music had become increasingly popular during the Eighties, and, while growing up in Phoenix, Bentley tuned in at the right time. “By the time I was 15 or 16,” he says, “that was the ‘Class of ’89,’ so you had Alan Jackson, Garth Brooks, Marty Stuart, Dwight Yoakam, Steve Earle. There was a lot of good music coming out of Nashville.” At the same time, he also found himself drawn to his sister’s music, which included artists like U2, Madonna and Michael Jackson. That shared love of country twang and pop hooks would later find a home in his own music, although Bentley has left his teenaged attempts at mimicking a different artist — “I spiked my hair like Billy Idol,” he says proudly — in the past.