The recent passing of Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins has sparked another round of reactions, the type we can always expect when something like this happens. (This time, though, I must say I was taken by surprise when a friend of mine who’s basically my same age pointed out that Hawkins was barely older than we are.)
I didn’t know Hawkins’ work very well at all, and my main exposure to him was via interviews I’d caught over the years. In all of the interviews I remember, he was side-by-side with Foo Fighters bandleader Dave Grohl, but most recently I got to watch Hawkins speak on his own in his several appearances in HBO’s Alanis Morissette documentary Jagged.
As much as we can accurately gauge someone’s personality from that kind of presentation, Hawkins struck me as having a genuine radiance to his being. Apparently, others saw him in that light as well. After the news surfaced that Hawkins had died in Colombia while the Foo Fighters were touring Latin America on a festival run, Classic Rock magazine’s online editor Fraser Lewry re-posted a film review that he and late editor Malcolm Dome commissioned Hawkins to write about the 2014 film Whiplash.
Lewry writes:
I never met Taylor Hawkins, but we emailed a couple of times. I wanted a drummer to review the movie Whiplash before it came out, and the late Malcolm Dome suggested Taylor, then gave me his email address.
Normally it doesn't work like this, especially with bands like Foo Fighters. They're hard to reach. You don't email them. You go through their earthly representatives, and nine times out of 10 you don't get anywhere, especially if what you're asking doesn't align perfectly with what they're promoting.
But I had nothing to lose, so I reached out. And Taylor got back to me right away, saying he'd love to do it. I sorted out a stream of the movie, and he came back the following day with 1138 words of copy.
He didn't really review the film as such, but we got so much more. He told this great story about a musical director he worked with, and about the similarities between his own musical education and the film's plot. The piece was all the better for it, more than we could have ever hoped for. And he gave the movie a 10.
I was also struck by how endearingly human Hawkins came across in this 2019 clip, where he presented Morissette with the Icon Award at Billboard’s Women in Music event. In his introduction, Hawkins messes up his lines several times and appears to be quite nervous — it also struck me that I’d never noticed how gaunt he was:
All of which is to say that Hawkins is probably the worst example I could point to in order to illustrate the point I’m getting at, which has very much rubbed people the wrong way when I’ve made it in the past.
I should preface by saying that 1) I cry more easily than my 4 year-old daughter when we’re watching children’s films together — and not even necessarily at the parts that are meant to be “sad” or tear-jerky 2) I’m kind of militant when it comes to empathy and the idea that, as a species, we need to develop our empathic capabilities to their absolute maximum.
But the truth is that I can’t connect at all when masses of people respond with outpourings of grief when an artist or public figure they have a deep affinity for passes away. Further, I always find these displays of grief to be intrusive, an expression of ownership over the life of another person, another reflection of the distorting effect that fame has on our perceptions of artists as people who are due the respect of our distance when they die.
Maybe that sounds… emotionally disconnected? Dismissive? Insensitive? If so, I just ask that you hear me out and stay with my line of thought for a moment.
What is it exactly that we’re lamenting when there’s someone whose work we love, and then that person is suddenly gone? Are we sad that they won’t be putting out any more work? In Hawkins’ case, he was relatively young, so I can understand the sense that he was snatched away too soon. But when David Bowie died two days after his 69th birthday in January of 2016, my initial-reflex feeling wasn’t “Oh, that’s so sad” but “Wow, now that’s what I call a complete life — what a great run.” I was actually happy for the guy — not for dying, of course, but for living so fully.
I mean, if you make it to the doorstep of 70, you’ve done well. Of course, if you’re someone’s spouse or child, that’s not going to be comforting at all because, for you, it’s never a good time for the person you love to depart. But that’s the thing: we aren’t those people! So we can’t lay the same claim to a David Bowie that his surviving family can. And that’s the way it should be. Just because someone’s music has essentially served the same role as a living, breathing person in our lives, that doesn’t give us the basis to confuse one thing for another.
And in Bowie’s case, for example, he left behind a voluminous body of work that would take even his most ardent fans a whole lifetime to digest — including an album he completed just prior to dying. I don’t understand why the immediate response in a situation like that isn’t one of gratitude for everything this person left behind for our edification, or of admiration for a life so thoroughly lived and so thoroughly marked by accomplishments.
Likewise, when the renowned Buddhist monk Thich Nhất Hanh passed away this January at the age of 95 (the subject of a tribute I’ll be sending out here), my immediate sense was one of extraordinary admiration: How lucky we all are to have this person’s teachings still so readily available that they can bring such light to so many people.
So what is it exactly that’s missing now that the actual person leaves the earth? Of course it’s only natural that we would feel a sense of connection to that person through the work they’ve left behind — which, it should be noted, is very much alive and well and there for us even after they die. And I get it: certain figures connect with us so deeply, it’s as if we can feel their presence. When I was done reading author Quincy Troupe’s book on jazz giant Miles Davis, 1989’s Miles: The Autobiography, I walked away from the book feeling like there was a combination guardian angel/protective uncle sitting on my shoulder, nudging me along. Imagine a Tinkerbell-sized Miles hurling “motherfucker”-laced tirades of encouragement in your ear and that’s how I felt. It was quite wonderful!
Now, one key distinction is that Miles Davis was already long deceased by the time I read that book. Not to mention that, as the book makes abundantly clear, his actual company wasn’t always the most, um… pleasant. Nevertheless, I get how we can feel like we’re taking a slice of another person’s being into the circle of our own life. But we have to be mindful of the fact that there’s a distinction between that presence we feel — which, I would argue, isn’t an illusion, but a combination of the “true self” that comes through the work and lots of stuff that we project onto the person based on how the work connects with us. Because there’s really no way for us to know who the person was on an intimate level.
And so my contention is that when a Taylor Hawkins or a Miles Davis or a David Bowie or a Thich Nhat Hanh or anyone like that dies, we have to be respectful of the fact there are people who are grieving the loss on a much more substantial level than we are.
I remember when comedian/actor Robin Williams died, a friend messaged me to say that she was sad, which I summarily dismissed. Williams, mind you, played one of the lead roles in one of my all-time favorite films, 1991’s The Fisher King. His performance in that film continues to reverberate for me on a profound personal level thirty years after first watching the film.
“How do you think Williams’ immediate family members feel to know that millions of people are being all loud and demonstrative about how ‘hurt’ they are?”
“I would think,” my friend answered, “they would feel appreciative that he was so beloved.”
When I try to put myself in their shoes, I don’t see it that way. I see it more like masses of people crashing a funeral — a space that’s reserved for people who knew this person as they were — and and loudly voicing their feelings so that they dominated the proceedings.
Honestly, I think I’d be pissed, like something was being stolen from me by people it didn’t belong to, that the real person I knew and loved was being smothered in the glare of all this other stuff millions of people were projecting onto them.
That strikes me as… improper, inconsiderate and — yes — insensitive.
Just the other day, Elton John paid tribute to Hawkins at a concert in Des Moines. My initial — unfair — reaction before watching the clip was “Why Elton John gotta get all up in the shit and push to the front of the room with his box of kleenex?” If you watch the clip, you’ll see what that’s, um, not what’s happening.
In fairness to Elton, then I remembered the one and only time I was truly moved to tears after an artist died — not on actually hearing the news of late Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell’s death in 2017, but a few days later when I came across a clip from the crowd right before a U2 concert in Pasadena, where the Cornell-penned Soundgarden classic “Black Hole Sun” was played over the P.A.
What was I feeling that moved me to tears? Sure, there was a feeling of release that someone who had contributed so much meaningful work to my life was gone. I mean, you couldn’t tell the story of my life, or understand it, without mentioning this person’s music. Still, though, there was something more: I realized, as the tears poured down, that what I was feeling was something like sorrow for not having paid closer attention.
Wow, I felt, all that anguish was there all along — it’s right there in the song. And he meant it! Yet I’d never taken it at face-value. I never heard the song as particularly sad. To me, it was a testament to having overcome those feelings? Why did I assume that? Because I wanted to the artist to be as functional as possible so as to keep making the music I wanted him to make. And I was like Damn, I hadn’t actually been paying attention.
Another clip that still moves me to tears every time I watch it: Living Colour’s tribute to Cornell from a show in Perth, Australia, their cover of Soundgarden’s “Blow Up The Outside World” which, if my calculations are correct, they must’ve had to learn within hours of the news breaking. In any case, you can feel the tremors of emotion, not just in the room, but also in singer Corey Glover’s voice when he hits the chorus.
Another clip of the same performance:
It’s interesting because Reid, who I interviewed for Paste a few months afterwards, has spoken in the past about how he felt the death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain in 1994 had a “traumatic” effect on Living Colour. When you watch the clip, it comes across that these are people who viewed the deceased as a peer — for them, it seems, it’s personal on a different level than it would be for those of us who aren’t in their line of work.
I remember, when Nirvana was still active, reading an interview with Dave Grohl where he said “We’re not best friends, or even good friends.” I admired the candor, and have always wondered where that person went. Over time, Grohl has increasingly talked about that part of his life with a misty-eyed sentimentality that just doesn’t square with the things he was saying while he was living it. He and Hawkins seemed to put a great deal of energy into presenting themselves as average Joe’s, likable down-to-earth lunkheads who are no different than you or me.
I don’t think that presentation is insincere so much as a defense/survival mechanism. I look at Grohl’s persona as a necessary means for him to draw a line around himself, to find some way of buffering himself from the effects of his meteoric rise to superstardom in a way that doesn’t feel, to him, like it’d done irreparable damage the instructional integrity of who he is — or, more precisely, to the parts of himself that he values the most.
That’s fine, and we’re really in no position to judge. As producer Steve Albini describes in his lengthy interview about the making of Nirvana’s 1993 swan song In Utero, the band’s ascent was so steep and rapid that “these were people hanging on by their fucking fingernails.” But what Grohl’s aw-shucks presentation ensures is that we’re not really going to get to the truth of his feelings regarding Hawkins, which have to be complicated given the circumstances, and given that Grohl has already lived through one situation where substances played a major role in the death of a bandmember.
I anticipate that Grohl will actively encourage the most saccharine expressions from fans. Those expressions will give him cover from having to publicly grapple what he’s going through, just as those expressions give cover to listeners who don’t want to grapple with the idea that there’s more to musicians — in death and in life — than what we take from their work.
Look, I understand — for most of us, these larger-than-life figures become, oddly enough, small-but-dependable fixtures in our lives, like the equivalent of a modest-sized picture frame that sits on our mantle. Surrounded by other picture frames and objects of sentimental value, we might not even notice that specific picture most of the time we walk in the house, until the moment it falls and shatters. That’s when we’re jolted into appreciating it.
I’m just saying: we need to remember that these people are more than that, too.
Here’s a podcast of me discussing this exact same topic five years ago — with even less tact! — alongside longtime reporter and culture analyst James Brown five years ago. Funny how my perspective hasn’t evolved much in the five years since!
<3 SRK