For Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters, a ginger look back before blasting forward

The album was recorded in Grohl’s garage in California’s San Fernando Valley so he could sneak out to the pool and take a dip with his daughter between takes. The album also sees the return of on-again, off-again Foo Fighter and Nirvana guitarist Pat Smear, who describes the “Wasting Light” sessions as “the easiest, nicest recording experience I ever had.”

The first Foo Fighters’ album was born out of a much tougher recording session in 1994, one in which Grohl scraped himself off the couch and forced himself into a Seattle recording studio. There, he made a demo on which he played every instrument and sang every lyric. He liked it enough to go ahead and release it as the Foo Fighters’ 1995 debut album. But he didn’t want to be a solo act, and he quickly filled out the band with Smear, bassist Nate Mendel and drummer William Goldsmith, formerly of the proto-emo band Sunny Day Real Estate.

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The trailer for "Back and Forth," the new documentary about the Foo Fighters.

When the media swarmed the band after its first rehearsal, Grohl was annoyed. “What the [expletive] would we have to talk about after one rehearsal other than the past?” he still wonders. “We don’t even have a silly tour anecdote yet.”

They’d soon have plenty. The documentary traces the Foo Fighters’ ceaseless touring and chapters of internal drama that you’d hardly expect from a band that looked as though its members were having so much fun in their spoofball music videos. There are falling-outs, betrayals, drug overdoses, quittings, firings — the works. (Grohl says he winced during a segment about how he rerecorded Goldsmith’s drum parts on the band’s second album, causing Goldsmith to quit the band and Grohl to earn the unshakable reputation as a control freak.)

He describes the band’s extended internal drama in a very Grohl-ish way, recapping the band’s highs and lows in an hyper-caffeinated, sing-songy voice: “Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha! Someone quits! Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha! Someone ODs!”

‘Like my Woodstock’

Grohl knew he was famous on Christmas night 1991. He was in his mom’s living room at her annual holiday party, a cozy little get-together that would usually draw about two dozen family friends. “Nevermind” was racing up the charts, where it would soon dethrone Michael Jackson from the No. 1 spot and go on to sell more than 10 million copies.

“There were 150 people at that party in a house the size of a McDonald’s bathroom,” Grohl says. “I was like, ‘Oh no. Really? Is this what it’s going to be like?’ And my buddy Jimmy [was] drunk with a knife, saying, ‘If I don’t know you, get the [expletive] out of here right now!’”

His mother, Virginia Grohl, says she was always happy to have her son home between tours but could tell he was troubled by the turbulence surrounding Nirvana’s breakneck ascent. “It just didn’t seem like it was as much fun as it ought to be,” she says.

“In some ways, nothing had changed,” Grohl says of his retreats home. “I still mowed my mother’s lawn and raked the leaves and took out the trash. To be honest, it wasn’t much different than being a high school dropout without a job.”