Encino garage, tape only, Butch Vig
In April 2011, Foo Fighters released Wasting Light on Roswell/RCA. Dave Grohl insisted on two rules: record in his two-car garage in Encino, California, and stay on analog tape with no computer editing. Producer Butch Vig – who had cut Nirvana’s Nevermind with Grohl twenty years earlier – agreed if the band delivered their heaviest set yet. Engineer James Brown ran a Studer tape machine and an API 1608 console in a dry rectangular room that sounded like what it was: a garage.
The lineup was the mid-period Foos: Grohl, Nate Mendel, Taylor Hawkins, Chris Shiflett, and Pat Smear back as a full member. Krist Novoselic added bass on I Should Have Known. Songs like Bridge Burning, Rope, White Limo, Arlandria, and Walk are built on live takes, punch-ins, and razor edits rather than grid fixes. When commercial-studio mixes lost the garage pressure, they returned to the API and finished there. The album debuted at No.1 on the Billboard 200 with more than 235,000 first-week US sales.
The companion documentary Back and Forth filmed the sessions and the band’s history in parallel. On stage, the songs translated as loud, mid-tempo rock with Hawkins’s fills left imperfect on purpose. Vig’s brief was weight and commitment, not polish.
Rather than go to the best studio in the world down the street in Hollywood, and rather than use all the fanciest computers that you can buy, we made this one in my garage with some microphones and a tape machine.
(Dave Grohl, Grammy Awards speech, 2012)
At the 2012 Grammys, Wasting Light took Best Rock Album; Walk won Rock Song and Rock Performance; White Limo won Hard Rock/Metal Performance; the long-form video won too. The practical aftertaste is a 2011 Foo Fighters record that proved a home garage, tape, and a reunited Vig/Grohl partnership could still top the US chart without a Pro Tools net.
