Inner Ear Studio
Summer 1994, and Dave Grohl is unsure of his musical future. He has a large cache of songs in his pocket, but what would he do with them? Go solo? Form a band? Whilst he decided, he kept adding to his repertoire, heading to the famous Inner Ear Studio with his sister Lisa to lay down a quartet of tracks.
Sections
Grohl x Grohl
In mid 1994, after the demise of Nirvana, Dave Grohl headed to Inner Ear Studio in Arlington, Virginia, to work on some more of his own material. Rather than going alone he also invited his sister Lisa, just as he’d done in April 1992 when recording as part of the Allister Lob group. On this occasion there wasn’t a third member to play guitar, just the two Grohl siblings, with Lisa playing bass and Dave recording everything else.
Four songs were worked on at Inner Ear by the duo in a session which owner Don Zientara described as a "relaxed, fun time". It’s unclear exactly when this session took place, Zientara unable to locate his notes for the session, but he did remember Dave talking to him about his future plans, including the Foo Fighters name, which likely places the session in mid to late 1994.
Dave and his sister worked efficiently completing four songs over the course of two to three days.
The first of those was another version of ‘Weenie Beenie’, a track he’d first recorded alone in April 1993. This version of the song was unsurprisingly quite similar to that earlier version, with that version already very similar to the final 1994 recording which appeared on the first Foo Fighters album.
Alex and his Pizza?
'Alex's Pizza' was a track that Dave had first recorded with Lisa as Allister Lob in April 1992, known for many years to fans as simply 'Unknown #1'. The tracks at that stage were so new that no titles were attributed to them by the trio, simply referred to as 'Song #1, Song #2' and so on.
The session reel for that session was later updated after further work by Dave in November 1992 to give the track the title 'I Don't Want Your' which was simply taken from the opening lyrics of the song - "I don't want your reason, cause I don't care".
This version from almost two years later also had a full vocal track from Dave with the instrumentation remaining pretty similar to the earlier demo. 'Alex's Pizza' is therefore likely to be the final title for this track although Zientara was not aware of any local pizza establishments by that name, so the title may have just been referring to an individual named Alex and their Pizza. Curiously a version recorded a few months later was titled 'Alex's Tuning', so the true title is currently unclear.
Two further tracks recorded, 'We're At Home' and 'Song #6', were unique compositions not heard outside of this session. The former had rough vocals recorded by Dave whilst the latter was only recorded instrumentally. Both remain unreleased.