With their newly released 12th studio album, Your Favorite Toy, Foo Fighters are returning to the raw sound of their early material, and Dave Grohl has once again relied on his “lucky guitar” to bring it to life.
Grohl’s riff-writing totem is the guitar that gave his namesake Gibson DG-335 signature model many of its cues: a 1967 Gibson Trini Lopez he bought in his Nirvana days.
“I have a lucky guitar, and it was the first Gibson Trini Lopez that I ever purchased,” he tells the Tape Notes podcast. “I bought it at a guitar shop in Bethesda, Maryland called Southworth Guitars. It was like a museum; you’d walk in, and you’d see all of these beautiful classic guitars.
“I was still in Nirvana, and I just wanted a hollowbody to put in my lap and sit on the couch and just mess around,” he continues.
“I’m looking at this row of old Gibson ES-335s, and they’re all beautiful,” he says of that fateful guitar store visit. “And there’s this one that had this funny headstock, and it looked the body shape and design was the same, except it had these diamond F-holes and a different headstock. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s kind of cool,’ so I bought it and brought it home and just played it on the couch.”
History dictates, of course, that he did more than “mess around” with the guitar in the comfort of his living room. It became the cornerstone of the Foo Fighters’ sound and has been used on every Foos record to date. It’s a left-field workhorse he wouldn’t dare be without.
“We’ve never made a record without that guitar. It’s almost like a superstition to me: we couldn’t have made this record without that guitar, because I don’t want to make a record without that guitar.”