Revisiting ‘Sound City’: Dave Grohl’s First Salvo In The War To Save Rock N’ Roll

For the better part of a decade former-Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl has served as a one-man evangelist for the power and mystery of rock n’ roll. Whether shining a light on his heroes, both famous and unsung, or waxing poetic about the importance of learning to play a musical instrument, Grohl has championed the genre, recounted its history and done all he could to keep it alive in an ever-indifferent world. He’s become so ubiquitous at tribute shows and as a talking head in music documentaries, it’s kind of annoying. However, as the great thinker Dr. Johnny Fever once pondered, “If I die, who will teach the children about Bo Diddley?” Dave Grohl would Johnny, and despite his overexposure, we’re all better off because of it.

While the Foo Fighters had long made a habit of covering their favorite songs and dragging their favorite musicians up on stage with them, Grohl took his curatorial inclinations to the next level with Sound City. The 2013 documentary, which is currently available for streaming on Amazon Prime, was produced and directed by Grohl and was his first attempt to put his love of rock n’ roll into a historical context, something his HBO docu-series Sonic Highways expanded upon. It recounts the history of Sound City Studios, a dumpy recording facility in an unhip part of Los Angeles, which just happened to be where some of rock n’ roll’s  greatest albums were put to tape.

After a staged beginning, featuring an engineer firing up the mixing desk and loading the reel to reel with an archaic analog 2” tape, Grohl sits down behind a mic and begins picking a plaintive folk drone on an expensive vintage acoustic guitar. In a voiceover, he then batters us with a rash of clichés that sound like they were lifted from a Bryan Adams song. “We were just kids with nothing to lose and nowhere to call home. But we had these songs and we had these dreams so we threw it all in the back of an old van and started driving. Our destination – Sound City.” Cue LOUD GUITARS!

He is, of course, describing Nirvana’s trip south from Seattle to record their major label debut, 1991’s Nevermind, which would not only make rock stars out of them but set off a seismic shift in ’90s rock. Despite their big ambitions and beckoning musical breakthrough, the future titans of grunge were not particularly impressed when they arrived at Sound City, located in the perpetually uncool San Fernando Valley, unpleasantly downwind from an Anheuser-Busch brewery. The place was a dump. However, dumps, dives, shitholes and places that smell like beer are usually very conducive to making great rock n’ roll.

The first half of Sound City gives us the history and highlights of the studio’s life. Opened in 1969 by music industry mavericks Joe Gottfried and Tom Skeeter, Neil Young’s 1970 melancholic After The Goldrush was the first classic rock masterpiece recorded there, and helped attract like-minded artists seeking a good sounding, no frills environment to get down to the dirty work of music making. The studio’s reputation grew with the purchase of a handmade $75,000 (over $400,000 in modern dollars) Neve recording console in 1973, which gave whatever it recorded a wide-open, natural sheen, as if the drummer, guitarist or singer was in the room with you when you put the needle to the record.

Sound City is filled with the kind of stories that make music nerds weak in the knees. There’s the story of the young hippie couple named Lindsey and Stevie who hung around in the early ‘70s and hooked up with fledgling British blues combo Fleetwood Mac as they were searching for a new recording studio. They ended up joining the band and recording their 1975 breakthrough self-titled album there. Or how producer Jimmy Iovine was, like Nirvana years later, unimpressed with the facilities until he heard the sounds coming out of the playback monitors during the recording of Tom Petty’s breakthrough album, Damn The Torpedoes. Even Petty got weak in the knees, the night rockabilly legend Carl Perkins visited the studio during the recording of Johnny Cash’s Unchained in 1996.

While the ‘80s brought hair metal and the ‘90s alternative rock, a changing musical climate shuttered Sound City’s doors in 2011. Record companies no longer give bands big recording budgets, consumers no longer care about the sound quality big room recording studios can achieve, and recording software enables kids to make songs on their laptops which become hits via social media. While it’s an older music fan’s complaint, it is not without merit, and Sound City successfully explains to the viewer what was lost and why such old school musical values as feel, inspiration and “getting sounds” are so important.

As might be expected, Sound City’s final act gives Grohl a chance to invoke his inner fanboy; recording new material with some of the stars of the studio’s past on its famed Neve board, now residing in Grohl’s home studio. The depth of talent is impressive and revealing, whether it’s one-hit wonder Rick Springfield rocking for all he’s worth, Fear singer Lee Ving’s undiminished fury, or Stevie Nicks’s vocal mastery. The film culminates in a Nirvana reunion of sorts, with Paul McCartney standing in for deceased singer Kurt Cobain. It’s a nod to the band members shared love of The Beatles, and an ebullient climax, as Grohl explains, “Getting the chance to play music with a person that is the reason why I’m a musician, recording through the board that’s the reason why I’m here today. It was a huge full circle moment.”

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter: @BHSmithNYC.

Watch Sound City on Amazon Prime Video