Foo Fighters

[botley]

I read the whole Rolling Stone piece, and it's far from a take-down in my opinion. It's not unusual for journalists to get quotes about the lives of famous people who died under mysterious circumstances and then put together a narrative to explain what might have happened, so I'm not going to play the "evil media" card here and drag them for doing it. We're all curious about this dramatic and sad death of a celebrated public figure. If your take-away is that they suggested Grohl worked Hawkins to the brink, well.. maybe there's a kernel of that, but I don't entirely agree that this is all that RS was suggesting.

My read on the backtracking statements in response is that the Foos' corporate/legal machinery (and I'm not singling them out for this; any band selling tickets at their level is part of one, to some extent... they employ hundreds of people, even in unfortunate circumstances like this one where they hire crisis management teams to protect how their brand is affected) is clamping down hard on any speculative suggestion that Taylor may have been struggling prior to the tour. They essentially denied everything that Smith and Cameron and another background source said happened, and Rolling Stone duly printed their responses, right there in the story — and after it came out, to strengthen their position, the FF team probably had someone from Hawkins' family immediately get on the phone to ream those guys out, and also demanded public social media apologies from them right away.

But if Cameron was just telling the journalists what Hawkins said, and now he says it has been printed out of context — well, what was the original context for it? Smith divulged what happened with Hawkins having to be resuscitated from unconsciousness last year — but later he just said the article was misleading. Not factually incorrect. We don't know what the whole story is, and we're not ever going to get a satisfying answer, I suspect.

Really sad that this is playing out the way it is. I feel bad for everyone involved.