Probot: 20 Years Later

Once upon a time, Dave Grohl decided to make a metal record for his teenage self wherein he invited vocalists of some of his favorite bands from the 1980s to guest on it. Four years in the making, he debuted the project in February 2004, calling it Probot. To date, the superb self-titled album is the only full-length release from the project.

Probot, then, is an excellent overview of the ’80s metal underground, artists you might have not otherwise discovered. In the span of 50 minutes, you get speed metal, first-wave black metal, crossover thrash, doom, and classic heavy metal. The record functions as Grohl’s own version of samplers like Music for Nations’ Speed Kills or the Metal Massacre series from Metal Blade. Thankfully, Grohl has the required taste for such an endeavor. There’s an essay in the liner notes written by him about growing up as a hardcore kid and being obsessed with Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, and Bad Brains, but wanting something more: “I liked it fast and weird (still do), but I was looking for something heavy.” And then we get to the project’s impetus: “This is where Probot begins. These vocalists were chosen, not randomly, but specifically for their contribution to the underground metal scene [in the early ’80s].”

Releasing Probot in the early 2000s was Grohl stepping outside of the metal mainstream. The early part of the decade was a low point in the genre’s history, being the tail end of nu metal and giving us St. Anger. But that period also saw some metal classics come out—e.g., Blackwater Park, Nothing, and Through the Ashes of Empires. And then there’s 2004, the best year of the decade’s first half: it offered four un-fuck-withable classics: Epitaph, The End of Heartache, Leviathan, and Ashes of the Wake, the latter two of which were revisited earlier this year. So, being an album stuck out of time is perhaps why Probot has aged better than most metal albums that came out around that time: the records it borrows from—Welcome to Hell,  Don’t Break the Oath, and Psalm 9—have nothing to do with nu metal, NWOAHM, or metalcore.

That’s why this project works as well as it does: without being beholden to trends, Grohl’s allowed to chase his obsession with the heaviness and scuzziness of the early ’80s. And it’s why he smartly tailored each song to each vocalist. He nails the lizard-brain punk-metal of Motörhead for Lemmy Kilmister on “Shake Your Blood” (though, being a Grohl composition, it’s as much percussion-driven as guitar-driven); he borrows Voivod’s oddball, herky-jerk thrash on “Dictatosaurus” for Denis “Snake” Bélanger; and he goes full-Satan by channeling the evil-as-Hell trad-metal of King Diamond’s solo work for “Sweet Dreams.” And while most of the record is metal-oriented, Grohl allows his inner hardcore kid to come out and play on “Access Babylon” with Corrosion of Conformity’s Mike Dean. Grohl clearly prefers when COC played crossover—in the liner notes he calls their second album, 1985’s Animosity, “some seriously ground-breaking shit”—and “Access” is easily the most unhinged song of the collection.

Naturally, because of the range of styles and vocalists, there’s a range of lyrical topics, too. The guests, of course, stick to what they know. Least surprising is Kilmister, offering the (sarcastic?) MTV-esque appeal of being a rockstar—“Looking good, get some wood / You knew you should, you knew you could”—and then throwing out the slightest word of warning: “Want to be a winner? / Want to be The Man? / Want to make yourself insane? / Join up with the band.” Elsewhere, you’ve got Max Cavalera on the Soulfly-esque “Red War” tossing out threats of a quasi-religious war (“Babylon fall, and red war will come”), Dean discussing the difficulties of the hardcore scene (“Force-field limbo caught in mid-strata / Funds evaporate, so-called friends scatter”), Bélanger imagining a battle against what might be the robot-monster-thing on the cover (“Soaked in lies and fears / After all these years / When the sun will rise / The monster’s gonna die”), and King Diamond ruining your sleeping patterns (“I am the pain in your brain when you dream / I am the tears you cry when you’re asleep”). Unsurprisingly, the record’s best writing comes from Dirty Rotten Imbeciles’ Kurt Brecht on “Silent Spring,” where he seethes over humanity’s environmental destruction: “Mother Earth wept as they tore off her dress / Heart broken, humiliated, in a state of distress / They ripped out her hair, and they scratched at her skin / Drained her of her fluids, then committed their sin.”

And yet, Probot works as a surprisingly coherent whole because none of it feels like (cheap) imitation. Instead, there’s honesty in the fanboy-ness and child-like glee of it all. As such, Probot is the best album of Grohl’s post-Nirvana career. Some of the records he’s played on since In Utero have been a lotta fun (Tenacious D, Them Crooked Vultures), and some have been excellent (Songs for the Deaf, Dream Widow). Probot is both. And the "why" is easily explained: Grohl made it for himself. Adult Grohl made a record that Teenage Grohl wanted. Think of it this way: Probot is designed for an audience of one vs Foo Fighters’ audience of millions. With this project, there was no need to aim for the cheap seats because there aren’t any. There’s just a kid in his basement banging on the drums, strumming on the guitar, and screaming into a microphone, fantasizing about doing at least one of those onstage someday. He followed his muse to make himself—that is, the scene-kid within—happy, and he succeeded. These songs don’t invite sing-alongs in the way that, say, “My Hero” does. The record’s only inviting if you’re already sold on dingy basements full of scratched vinyl and beer-soaked furniture. The only downside to Probot, then, is that there’s one of them.