Speaking in a new interview with Guitar Player, Jake Kiszka was asked about the “worst band name [he’s] ever heard” to which he replied: “Foo Fighters. I was talking with Dave Grohl and he told me how much he hated the name.”
Derived from a term used by pilots in World War II to report unidentified flying objects, Grohl picked the name “Foo Fighters” in an attempt to remain anonymous after Nirvana’s tragic end, as well as to trick people into thinking it was a group of musicians and not just him (as he wrote and recorded the first album entirely on his own).
But Grohl has long admitted he isn’t a fan of his own band’s name, saying in an interview with Anderson Cooper in 2014: “It’s the dumbest band name ever… I called it Foo Fighters because I didn’t want people… I didn’t want to put my name on it at first. I didn’t want people to say, like, ‘Oh, that’s the guy from Nirvana.’ … Had I imagined that it would last more than a month-and-a-half, I might have named it something else.”
While Foo Fighters may be the worst band name, Kiszka also has opinions on who he thinks has the best band name, telling Guitar Player its King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard.