Dave Grohl on Digging Up Never-Before-Heard Songs for Record Store Day

Foo Fighters are celebrating their 20th anniversary this year, so Dave Grohl unearthed some interesting recordings from the time the band started for a special Record Store Day release, due out later this month. The 10-inch vinyl release Songs From the Laundry Room contains demos of Foo Fighters singles “Alone + Easy Target” and “Big Me,” as well as a cover of Kim Wilde’s 1981 New Wave anthem “Kids in America” and the previously unreleased Foo song “Empty Handed.” Additionally, Grohl is serving as this year’s Record Store Day Ambassador – the event takes place on April 18th – so he says he dug deep to make the release unique.

“There was a kid that lived not too far from me that had a four-track studio in the laundry room in his parents’ house, his name was Barrett Jones,” Grohl tells Rolling Stone, explaining that the recordings date back to his days playing in punk bands in Virginia. “He was a couple years older than me. But he was the guy who bought the equipment and started figuring out how to record all of his friends’ bands. So the first time I ever recorded anything was with Barrett.”

Grohl remembers he was in a band called Freak Baby. “I think we put the instruments in his bedroom and the control room was in the laundry room in the basement of his parents’ house. So he was just our guy. He was the Quincy Jones of Arlington, Virginia.” Grohl laughs, and names all the bands he was in that Jones recorded over the years: Mission Impossible, Scream, Dain Bramage, Nirvana.

“In the early Nineties, I moved out to Seattle, and then he came out and we got a place together,” Grohl says. “So I had his eight-track studio in my basement at my house, and I would go downstairs every time I came home from tours and he and I would record songs. That’s how the Foo Fighters started, really.”

“I had, songs I had no recollection of, which is weird. It’s almost like seeing a snapshot of yourself, passed-out drunk at a party.”

Throughout the process, Grohl kept all of the recordings to himself. “They were an experiment for fun,” he says. Plus, it was easy to keep them secret since he was the only musician playing on them. “It’s funny because I hadn’t heard some of these songs since I’d recorded them,” Grohl says. “When we went to shoot Barrett for the Sonic Highways Seattle episode, he was putting on songs that I’d recorded, fuck, I don’t know, 25, 26 years ago? I had, songs I had no recollection of, which is weird. It’s almost like seeing a snapshot of yourself, passed-out drunk at a party. You’re listening to a song like, ‘Oh, my God, what was I thinking?'” Grohl laughs again. Jones would go on to coproduce Foo Fighters’ self-titled debut.