A puff of cigarette smoke blows out of Dave Grohl's mouth--which is appropriate, since the words he's speaking at the moment are in fact a smoke screen.
"What do you mean?" he says, responding flatly to a question about his experiences dating another rock musician. The leader of the Foo Fighters has been linked to Louise Post of the group Veruca Salt.
"Who?" says Grohl, with enough lack of guile to make you think it's not true.
But Grohl is dating Post. The lanky musician, who with his new Beatles haircut and goatee looks something like a stretched-out Matthew Broderick, simply is not going to acknowledge it. End of topic.
"This is a blackout, don't let it go to waste," he sings on "My Poor Brain," an intense rocker from the Foo Fighters' new album, "The Colour and the Shape," due in stores Tuesday. (See review, Page 62).
Indeed, Grohl, 28, makes great use of mental erasers. One of the other chapters in his life that he's blacked out--at least publicly--is his years with Kurt Cobain as the drummer in Nirvana.
"I have a very selective memory," Grohl explains, sitting in the garden of West Hollywood's hideaway of the stars, the Chateau Marmont. "There are things that I wish not to remember, and I don't."
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The first Foo Fighters album, 1995's "Foo Fighters," was a textbook case of forgetfulness and avoidance. The album was recorded during what by any measure would be dark days for Grohl, just one year after Cobain's suicide following a roller coaster of elation (the group's sudden status as the essential rock band of its generation) and trauma (Cobain's losing struggle with drug addiction).
Grohl and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic--who has a new band, Sweet 75, with an album due this summer--were looked to by Nirvana's mourning fans for insights and answers about the loss of their tortured hero. But the musicians steadfastly kept their feelings and observations private.
When Grohl recorded the first Foo Fighters album virtually by himself and then assembled his new band (featuring Nirvana auxiliary guitarist Pat Smear), it was a matter of diversion, not catharsis.
"The feeling was still fresh and I really did my best to stay away from any of those issues," he says. "And if I did touch on any of them, I tried to mask them, disguise them in some way. The first record, there's so much nonsense. I spent so much time trying to stay away from anything meaningful."
The new album is quite a different matter. When writing these songs, Grohl found his memory working all too well, and personal pain all too close to the surface.
Once again, though, fans looking for clues to Cobain may be disappointed. That's not the painful experience that Grohl focused on for the new album; instead, it deals with the breakup last year of his two-year marriage to photographer Jennifer Youngblood.
Grohl admits that some of the lyrics may easily be mistaken as being about Cobain.
"Sure," he says. "There's the pain of losing someone in this, which you can relate to Nirvana. There's the breakup, there's the turmoil within a relationship. Being in a band is sort of being in a relationship, but with three or four people, which can sometimes be a lot more difficult than just a marriage."
Only one song, "Hero," a look at the disappointment that ensues when idols prove to be "ordinary" mortals, directly relates to Cobain. Otherwise, it's very fresh pain in these songs.
"The whole thing kind of reads like a diary," Grohl says. "Which is weird, because I'm the last person in the world who would want to open up my journal and let everyone read it.
"But for some reason I feel I can go out and scream my guts out every night--which is something I haven't done with these songs yet. It was so easy to go play every night on the last couple of tours and sing those songs that were easy to sing. There are a few on this album that I just don't even want to play, that I don't even like listening to."
Particularly difficult for him is the song "Walking After You," a ballad about being left behind that he says is too emotionally raw for him ever to perform live. But writing it was necessary for survival.
"See," he says, leaning forward in his chair, "I've never been an overly emotional person. I always tried to stay pretty grounded, wanted to make sure that in the face of any serious crisis or trauma I could make it through it.
"I'm not gonna crack," he says, offhandedly quoting a line from "Lithium," a key song from Nirvana's culture-shaking 1991 "Nevermind" album. "I'm gonna make it. And these songs are probably one of the things that helped me get through."
Two days after the interview, Grohl does get a chance to scream his guts out onstage. In a "surprise" concert at the Alligator Lounge in Santa Monica, he leads Smear, bassist Nate Mendel and drummer Taylor Hawkins (playing his first show with the band after replacing William Goldsmith, who left after the new album was recorded) through a spirited, aggressive, 45-minute set.
