Foo Fighters‘ Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins sat down with Howard Stern for an episode of his Sirius XM broadcast, The Howard Stern Show.
Stern inquired into Grohl’s hearing loss. “Dave you said your hearing is so fucked up now that you don’t hear voices normally – they sound like they’re robots talking or something, right?”
“It’s not that bad,” said Grohl, laughing. He said that while he hadn’t visited an ear doctor recently, he could predict their prognosis: “You have hearing damage and tinnitus in your left ear more so than your right ear.” He went on, “My left ear is worse than my right because of my snare drum and my stage monitor when I played the drums.”
Stern asked why Grohl doesn’t wear in-ear monitors when on stage performing. “The problem that I have with it is it removes you from the natural atmosphere sound,” he said. “I want to hear the audience in front of me and I want to be able to turn around and hear Taylor right there and then go over here and hear Pat [Smear].”
Grohl has been working with monitor engineer, Ian Beveridge, for 31 years, dating back to his time in Nirvana. “So, even though I’m not using in ear monitors, the sound on stage to me is fucking perfect,” he said.
Grohl also clarified that, despite his hearing loss, he still picks up on things in the studio. “If I hear something that’s slightly out of tune or a cymbal that’s not bright enough … in the mix I can fucking hear the minutiae of everything that we had done to that song.”
However, Grohl’s hearing is not quite so robust when he’s out at a restaurant. “If you were sitting right here,” he said, motioning half a metre from his head, “I wouldn’t understand a fucking word you were saying to me the whole fucking time.”
Watch the clip below.
