Alex's Pizza

The title of this early Dave Grohl demo track was for many years unknown, referred to by fans as 'Unknown #1' or 'Untitled #1' as it was the first of five instrumental tracks recorded by Dave, his sister Lisa and Mike Dees in April 1992. Whilst some of the other tracks recorded on that day were known by proper titles later in their life, such as 'Podunk' and 'Make A Bet', this one remained an unknown.

In 2015 Barrett Jones uploaded a photo of the master tapes for a later session in November 1992 which saw Dave add vocal tracks to the instrumentals and this track was labelled on the box as 'I Don't Want Your', although Barrett has always noted that for some tracks where Dave never wrote down a proper track title, he made his best guess based on the lyrics. So whilst this was for a time the adopted title, it was never certain to be the true final title.

Cue another studio owner, Don Zientara of the legendary Inner Ear Studio in Virginia. In private correspondance with this website he told us more about a recording session he'd recored with Dave and his sister Lisa in 1994. The siblings had visited Inner Ear post-Nirvana to continue working on Dave's early demos and one of the tracks worked on was 'Unknown #1/I Don't Want Your'. Only by 1994 the track had a new title, Zientara revealing his copy to be labelled 'Alex's Pizza'.

This new version of the track again featured lyrics with Zientara confirming the placeholder title 'I Don't want Your' was indeed based on the lyrics, a repeated phrase throughout the song.

That seemed like mystery solved but in early 2025 there was another chapter to the story. Barrett Jones hosted an online streaming event to mark the 30th anniversary of the debut Foo Fighters album and during the stream he revealed that for the first time since the session he now had access to the unedited master tapes for the session. As well as revealing some isolated portions of well-known tracks he revealed that Dave had infact attempted to record more than the widely known fifteen songs at the session, with this track being one of two new additions. Playing a sample of the track during the stream, it naturally sounded more professional than any earlier version but it was still unmistakably still the same track, this time recorded once again only as an instrumental.

There was also another difference, Barrett's copy was titled 'Alex's Tuning'. So, there is still some uncertainty as to the true Dave Grohl approved title for this song, Pizza or Tuning.