Foo Fighters – Foo Fighters Rough Mixes

Just a few comments on the notes and credits. Steve Culp was the house engineer at Bob Lang's and he assisted me, but I was the main engineer. There was no "Mastering" done for this cassette. Dave did not have JCM 900, we used my JCM 800 50w, along with many different effect pedals I brought with me. The "Can" amp is an actual battery powered amp that I had bought in England and is made by Ampeg. For the distorted vocals in this session we ran a mic through the marshall JCM 800, for the demo's that we did at Laundry Room Studio we did use the "Can" for that.

I guess I should mention the "review" by Jarjeff was written by me - I added it to the release notes and it was removed following a long discussion on the Discogs board. Then added as a review by him though not a word of it is his work. Would have been nice if he'd given me credit for it, though it's good it's still out there for people to read against the release

Grohl recorded every instrument himself during the session with the exception of one guitar track on 'X-Static', which was recorded by Greg Dulli of the band 'Afghan Whigs'. Equipment for the session was fairly simple, Grohl using a combination of a custom Les Paul and a red Gibson Trini Lopez for recording guitar tracks with a Pro Co RAT 2 for affects. For amplification a Marshall JCM 900 was used for the most part but for some of the more 'grunge' sounds, a battery powered Marshall Amp placed inside a gas can (nicknamed "the can") was used. This setup was also used for the distorted vocal effect on the tracks 'Podunk' and 'Weenie Beenie'. The drum kit Grohl used was the same Tama kit he'd used in Nirvana.

The very next day after Grohl had completed the session he went to a cassette duplication lab in Seattle and ran off 100 copies of the complete session, roughly mixed at Robert Lang Studios. He would later describe this as the first mistake in keeping the release anonymous as he had originally desired. The second mistake was his generosity. "That fucking tape spread like the Ebola virus, leaving me with an answering machine full of record company jive." recalled Grohl. "I'd give tapes to everybody. Kids would come up to me and say 'Nirvana was my favourite band' and I'd say 'well here, have this'". Family and friends also received copies, among them TR Youngblood, his then brother in law and close friend.

These mixes which were done at Robert Lang on the final day of the session were only very rough. Eventually the mixes on this release would be discarded when new final mixing was performed at 'The Shop' studio in Arcata, California in March 1995. Those later mixes would become the first Foo Fighters album.

With all of the music now known to be by Dave Grohl and many songs being aired on US radio and spreading like wildfire, Grohl realised he would need a band of musicians if he wanted to promote it. And the Foo Fighters went from one man to a full band.