Watch Taylor Hawkins Talk Grateful Dead In Last Filmed Interview

Late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins discussed the influence of the Grateful Dead on his playing in one of his last on-camera interviews. The footage was filmed by director Justin Kreutzmann, son of Grateful Dead/Dead & Company drummer Bill Kreutzmann, for his upcoming documentary Let There Be Drums.

“I saw them once,” Taylor Hawkins said in the clip from the film shared by The Daily Beast. “At first I was like, what’s going on? And everybody was, like, passing food around to each other and the song’s kind of starting, but have they even started the fucking song yet? They’re, like, jamming. Is everyone on stage yet? Everyone’s throwing energy and, you know, passing each other doobies and shit … and I’m like, oh OK, they don’t know how they’re going to start this song. They just do this improvisational-jazz thing. That got me good.”

“I’m not going to say I’m a huge Deadhead, but I love the chances they were taking the whole time,” added Hawkins. “Three days after that show I had to go to Europe to do a two-week tour with the Foo Fighters. And I just started taking a lot more chances and I had some of the best shows I’ve had in a long time if not ever.”

Taylor Hawkins, who sadly died at age 50 while on tour with Foo Fighters this past March, must have seen a Grateful Dead offshoot. Hawkins joined Foo Fighters in 1997, two years after Jerry Garcia’s death. “I kept saying to Dave, our singer and our fearless leader Dave Grohl, I just kept going ‘Dead show, man … it took me to new heights,'” Hawkins recalled. Taylor noted he’d never get Dave Grohl to a Dead show but as for him personally, “I got it!”

See the clip from Let There Be Drums! below:

Let There Be Drums! will start screening tomorrow (Friday, October 28) in select theaters and will be available for streaming through Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video. Ringo Starr, Stewart Copeland, Chad Smith, John Densmore and Matt Sorum are among the other legendary drummers Justin Kreutzmann interviewed for the film. He based the documentary around the 2015 Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years Of The Grateful Dead concerts and interviewed both his father and Mickey Hart as part of Let There Be Drums!