According to some of his friends, late FOO FIGHTERS drummer Taylor Hawkins felt hesitant about returning to the road after the easing of COVID-19 restrictions and wasn’t sure he would be able to remain a full-time member of the band if they continued to tour at the same pace.
One of them, PEARL JAM drummer Matt Cameron, told Rolling Stone: “[Taylor] had a heart-to-heart with Dave [Grohl] and, yeah, he told me that he ‘couldn’t f*cking do it anymore’ — those were his words. So I guess they did come to some understanding, but it just seems like the touring schedule got even crazier after that.”
A rep for FOO FIGHTERS denied that Hawkins ever raised these issues, saying “No, there was never a ‘heart-to-heart’ — or any sort of meeting on this topic — with Dave and [Silva Artist Management].”
“Honestly, I think he was just so tired,” Hawkins‘s longtime friend and former boss, singer Sass Jordan, said. “Tired of the whole game.”
A colleague and friend of Hawkins‘s, who asked to remain anonymous, said: “The fact that he finally spoke to Dave and really told him that he couldn’t do this and that he wouldn’t do it anymore, that was freeing for him. That took f*cking balls. That did take a year of working up the guts to do.”
A rep for FOO FIGHTERS said: “He never ‘informed Dave and [management]’ of anything at all like that.”
Hawkins was found dead on March 25 at the Four Seasons Casa Medina hotel in Bogota, Colombia while FOO FIGHTERS were on tour.
An official cause of death for Hawkins hasn’t yet been released, but Colombia’s attorney general’s office released a preliminary toxicology report, saying that medical examiners found evidence of 10 types of substances in Hawkins‘s body, including opioids, benzodiazepines, marijuana and antidepressants.
Before joining FOO FIGHTERS in 1997, Hawking was the touring drummer for Sass Jordan and Alanis Morissette, as well as the drummer in the progressive experimental band SYLVIA.
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