Session Information
There was seemingly no end to the supply of songs coming from Dave Grohl’s mind and in April 1993, he was once again back at the Laundry Room Studio to put more of his ideas onto tape. The studio was however no longer in the basement of his own shared house. Grohl had moved out into his own bigger house and Barrett Jones had also moved, setting up the studio inside a house in the Lower Queen Anne neighborhood in Seattle. The new studio was still using Jones’ trusty 8-track tape recorder but was fitted out with new outboard gear and DAT machines. Grohl dropped by the studio on April 18th, 1993 and put to tape four new original songs as well as one cover.
‘For All the Cows’, ‘Good Grief’, ‘Exhausted’ and ‘Weenie Beenie’ were all tracked here for the first time, songs which would all be later re-recorded for the first Foo Fighters album. When recording ‘Exhausted’ Jones suggested Grohl use what he described as a “weird no-name tube amp that was dying a slow death” to achieve the deep, dirty sound he was looking for on the track. “We were able to coax this wonderful sound out of it before it died,” said Jones.
The final song to be tracked owing to Grohl’s “growing love of recording covers songs” was his take on KISS guitarist Ace Frehley’s song ‘Ozone’, from his eponymous 1978 solo record. Just six of the available eight tracks on the 8-track tape were utilized by Grohl – two each for drums and guitars, one for bass and one for lead vocals.
With a large collection of songs amassed up to this point, Dave did briefly have the idea of releasing some of his material independently, whilst still in Nirvana. “Around the summer of 1993, I had been talking to a fellow in Detroit about possibly releasing some of my stuff on his small label. I wanted to remain anonymous, but ultimately have something to send to friends and stuff,” explained Grohl.
“Nirvana's upcoming tour put that stuff on the back burner, but I was genuinely looking forward to pursuing it once the band had some time off.”
Whilst that plan did not come to fruition one song from this session, ‘Exhausted’, did get a public airing at a much later date. On January 8th, 1995 Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam took to the airwaves with his nationally syndicated “Self-Pollution” Radio show, a four-hour broadcast in which Pearl Jam played live songs and Vedder played some music by other artists. One of those artists was Grohl, having given Vedder a tape with the song. Another Grohl track broadcast during the show was ‘Gas Chamber’, a further cover (The Angry Samoans) that he had recorded.
In 2004 a cassette was digitized and shared online by a Foo Fighters fan which contained generated recordings of ‘Good Grief’, ‘Exhausted’ and ‘Weenie Beenie’ from this session but none have to-date seen any official release.
The cover of ‘Ozone’ was released in August 1995, included as a B-Side to the Foo Fighters ‘I’ll Stick Around’ single.
