Taylor Hawkins could be forgiven for suffering from stage fright when he played drums with Foo Fighters. The band, after all, was led by Dave Grohl, one of the most celebrated drummers in rock history.
Once Grohl had slung a guitar round his neck and promoted himself to lead singer, someone else had to take over the drum stool and the task fell to Hawkins. If you imagine Eric Clapton deciding to play bass and an unknown replacing him in his band on lead guitar, you begin to get an idea of how daunting a challenge it was.
Grohl had been the drummer behind the singer Kurt Cobain in Nirvana and was a hero to Hawkins, who recalled the first time he heard Nirvana’s era-defining early 1990s hit Smells Like Teen Spirit with something approaching awe.
“It was that same moment that all those kids in America had when the Beatles played on The Ed Sullivan Show,” he said. “I remember where I was and the colour of the light outside changed. No one can play better than Dave Grohl. He just has this vision in his head.”
At one point after he had joined Foo Fighters, Hawkins admitted that he told Grohl, “Listen, dude, I just don’t think I can do this.” Yet daunting as the gig was, it was also an opportunity and in the end Hawkins seized it with sticks flailing in both hands.
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He turned out to be not only a hard-pounding, rock-solid drummer but to be blessed with a wide-ranging musical imagination. On joining in 1997 after Foo Fighters had completed their second album, he helped Grohl to transform the group from alternative rock cult status to mainstream success, selling out at the world’s biggest arenas and stadiums.
The benefits-in-kind were as huge as the venues they played, too, and when asked what it was like to have the job of keeping the beat behind one of the world’s greatest drummers, Hawkins had a simple answer. “I’m rich,” he would cackle. “That’s what it’s like being Dave Grohl’s drummer — and then I go home to my mansion next to the Kardashians. Next question!”
Home was a 7,000 sq ft property in Hidden Hills, a gated community in California’s San Fernando Valley where his neighbours included not only the Kardashians but Madonna and Britney Spears. He purchased the property with a resort-style pool, spa and waterfalls for $2.7 million. There was also a second guesthouse in the grounds, which he turned into a studio and a “rock’n’roll clubhouse”, which he admitted his wife hated and would not go near.
In his quarter of a century as a Foo Fighter, Hawkins played on eight million-selling albums and won 12 Grammy awards. He also co-wrote many of the band’s songs and occasionally sang lead vocals, including on Sunday Rain on the 2017 album Concrete and Gold. He was particularly proud of the track as it featured Sir Paul McCartney playing drums while Hawkins took the microphone. The former Beatle was a great fan and inducted Hawkins and his fellow Foo Fighters into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2021.
Over the years Hawkins became Grohl’s closest confidant in the band. In his 2021 autobiography, The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music, the Foo Fighters’ leader called the drummer his “best friend and partner in crime” and suggested they must have been “separated at birth”.
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“I think he underestimates his importance in this band because he wasn’t the original drummer,” Grohl added. “But, my God, what would we be without Taylor Hawkins? Could you imagine? Taylor’s insecurity pushes him to overachieve.”
Hawkins’s time in Foo Fighters was almost cut short in 2001 by a near fatal overdose of heroin while on a trip to London, which left him in a coma for six weeks.
It took him far longer to come “out of the fog”, as he put it, and he later spoke openly about his battle with drugs. “I wasn’t like a junkie per se,” he insisted. “But I was partying a lot and took it too far.
“I believed the bullshit myth of live hard and fast, die young. I’m not preaching about not doing drugs, because I loved doing drugs. But I got out of control for a while and it almost got me. I’m glad it got knocked on the head at that point.”
He kept in trim by mountain biking but continued to embrace the rock’n’roll lifestyle.
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“I’m trying hard to figure out how to continue to keep the intensity of a young man in a 50-year-old’s body, which is very difficult,” he admitted when Foo Fighters returned to the road after a long lay-off due to the Covid-19 lockdown.
He is survived by his wife, Alison, whom he married in 2005, and their three young children, Oliver, Annabelle and Everleigh.
Oliver Taylor Hawkins was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1972 and grew up in Laguna Beach, California, the youngest of three children. His father, Terry, was a businessman whom he remembered principally for his “stony coldness” while his mother, Elizabeth, had a drink problem. When she passed out on the couch, his older sister, Heather, took care of him, although his mother encouraged and supported his interest in music, which began when he first sat behind a “rickety-rackety” drum kit in a neighbour’s garage at the age of ten.
Two years later she took him to his first rock concert to see Queen at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre in Orange County. He recalled telling her that one day he would play there. He not only did so but sang a Queen song from the same stage with Foo Fighters. Away from the band he also recorded with Queen’s Brian May and Roger Taylor.
By his late teens he was playing pick-up gigs as a drummer-for-hire, while making ends meet by cutting lawns and delivering pizzas. He first rose to prominence as the drummer for Alanis Morissette and appeared in the videos for her hit singles You Oughta Know and You Learn. “I owe so much to her for giving me that space to be a show-off,” he said. “I’d still be delivering pizza if it wasn’t for her.”
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He had met Grohl a few times on the road when Morissette and Foo Fighters had shared the same bill and called him after hearing on a Los Angeles radio station that he was looking for a new drummer. “Why, do you know any?” asked Grohl, who did not for a moment think Hawkins would give up his lucrative employment with Morissette. To his surprise, Hawkins volunteered his services, was invited for a jam and got the gig.
Amiable and easygoing, Hawkins gave his final performance with Foo Fighters in Argentina five days before he died. It was due to be followed by concerts in Colombia and Brazil with North American and European tours scheduled for the summer.
“When I was a kid, I wanted to be the fastest, the loudest and the one with the biggest drum set, but obviously my aspirations have changed a bit since then,” he noted in one of his last interviews. Then he gave a broad grin and added, “Well, some of them anyway . . . ”
Taylor Hawkins, rock drummer, was born on February 17, 1972. He died of a suspected heart attack after alleged drug use on March 25, 2022, aged 50