Foo Fighters’ Taylor Hawkins Dead At 50

Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins has died, according to a Twitter statement from the band. He was 50.

“The Foo Fighters family is devastated by the tragic and untimely loss of our beloved Taylor Hawkins,” the statement says. “His musical spirit and infectious laughter will live on with all of us forever.”

Foo Fighters had been scheduled to play at a festival in Bogota, Colombia, on Friday night. Hawkins’ final concert was Sunday at another festival in San Isidro, Argentina. The band was slated to headline Lollapalooza Brazil at Autodromo de Interlagos in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Sunday.

Police vehicles, an ambulance and fans were gathered outside the hotel in northern Bogota where Hawkins was believed to have been staying.

Colombia’s Prosecutor’s Office released a statement Saturday saying toxicological tests on urine from Hawkins’ body preliminarily found 10 psychoactive substances and medicines, including marijuana, opioids, tricyclic antidepressants and benzodiazepines. It did not provide a cause of death and investigations are continuing.

It is worth noting that definitive toxicological reports generally take four to six weeks or longer.

“It was a band I grew up with. This leaves me empty,” Juan Sebastian Anchique, 23, told The Associated Press as he mourned Hawkins outside the hotel.

After Grohl, Hawkins was the most recognizable member of the group, appearing alongside the lead singer in interviews and playing prominent, usually comic, roles in the band’s memorable videos and their recent horror-comedy film, “Studio 666.”

Hawkins was Alanis Morrissette’s touring drummer when he joined Foo Fighters in 1997. He played on the band’s biggest albums including “One by One” and “On Your Honor,” and on hit singles including “My Hero” and “Best of You.”

In Grohl’s 2021 book “The Storyteller,” he called Hawkins his “brother from another mother, my best friend, a man for whom I would take a bullet.”

“Upon first meeting, our bond was immediate, and we grew closer with every day, every song, every note that we ever played together,” Grohl wrote. “We are absolutely meant to be, and I am grateful that we found each other in this lifetime.”

It’s the second time Grohl has experienced the death of a close bandmate. Grohl was the drummer for Nirvana when Kurt Cobain died in 1994.

Born Oliver Taylor Hawkins in Fort Worth Texas in 1972, Hawkins was raised in Laguna Beach, California. He played in the small Southern California band Sylvia before landing his first major gig as a drummer for Canadian singer Sass Jordan.

Hawkins told The Associated Press in 2019 that his early drumming influences included Stewart Copeland of The Police, Roger Taylor from Queen, and Phil Collins, who he said was “one of my favorite drummers ever. You know, people forget that he was a great drummer as well as a sweater-wearing nice guy from the ’80s, poor fella.”

When he spent two years in the mid-1990s drumming for Morrissette, he was inspired primarily by the playing of Jane’s Addiction’s Stephen Perkins.

“My drums were set up like him, the whole thing,” Hawkins told the AP. “I was still sort of a copycat at that point. It takes a while and takes a little while to sort of establish your own sort of style. I didn’t sound exactly like him, I sound like me, but he was a big, huge influence.”

He and Grohl met backstage at a show when Hawkins was still with Morrissette. Grohl’s band would have an opening soon after when then-drummer William Goldsmith left. Grohl called Hawkins, who was a huge Foo Fighters fan and immediately accepted.

“I am not afraid to say that our chance meeting was a kind of love at first sight, igniting a musical ‘twin flame’ that still burns to this day,” Grohl wrote in his book. “Together, we have become an unstoppable duo, onstage and off, in pursuit of any and all adventure we can find.”

Hawkins first appeared with the band in the 1997 video for Foo Fighters’ most popular song, “Everlong,” although he had yet to join the group when the song was recorded. He would, however, go on to pound out epic versions of it hundreds of times as the climax of Foo Fighters’ concerts.

He also co-starred in Foo Fighters’ recently released horror-comedy film, “Studio 666,” in which a demonic force in a house where the band is staying seizes Grohl and makes him murderous.

In the film, Hawkins and other members of the band — Pat Smear, Rami Jaffee, Chris Shiflett, Nate Mendel — are killed off one by one. The move allowed the group, who for decades have been one of rock music’s most durable acts, to have fun while acting out a long-running joke.

The premise came out of their work on their 10th studio album at a home in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley.

He also drummed and sang for the side-project trio Taylor Hawkins and the Coattail Riders. They released an album, “Get the Money,” in 2006.

Hawkins is survived by his wife Alison and their three children.