The Tragic Death of Taylor Hawkins | Foo Fighters Drummer

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Taylor Hawkins rose to fame as the drummer for Foo Fighters, stepping into a vacancy created once chief Foo Dave Grohl found himself at loggerheads with his chosen drummer. Hawkins wound up being an ideal fit for Foo Fighters, matching Grohl's energy and boundless joy for music. Foo Fighters also allowed Hawkins to pursue his rock star fantasies, giving him a built-in audience for his side project the Coattail Riders, a band where he unapologetically indulged in his love for Queen and Cheap Trick. While Foo Fighters remained his main gig -- he anchored the group through thick and thin, sometimes stepping to the center stage for a song or two -- he kept the Coattail Riders active until his sudden, unexpected death at the age of 50 on March 25, 2022.

Taylor Hawkins was born in Dallas on February 17, 1972 but grew up in the surf and sand of California's Laguna Beach. Influenced from his youth by the Police's Stewart Copeland, Hawkins briefly spent time early in his career honing his skills with the experimental group Sylvia before enlisting in the touring band for Canadian singer/songwriter Alanis Morissette. When Foo Fighters suddenly found themselves without a drummer in 1997, Hawkins jumped at the chance to join the group's ranks behind the drum kit. Though immensely enjoying his position with the band -- and just as Foo Fighters grew to be considerable stars in the alternative rock world of the late '90s and into the 2000s -- Hawkins considered himself somewhat of a frustrated songwriter. So in the style of bandmate Dave Grohl (Nirvana drummer-turned-Foo Fighters frontman and guitarist), Hawkins began, somewhat accidentally, a side project in the summer of 2004 that would eventually become Taylor Hawkins & the Coattail Riders.

Differing from Grohl, however, Hawkins served as both his band's vocalist and its drummer. The Coattail Riders formed when a restless Hawkins started randomly writing songs with drummer friend (and aspiring producer) Drew Hester during a break in Foo's schedule. Hester's housemate, Gannin, added some guitar parts, and what started out as just the guys having a good time suddenly materialized into an album. Chris Chaney (Jane's Addiction, Alanis Morissette) was recruited for bass duties, adding his parts in only one day. Recorded in three weeks, the songs were set aside to concentrate on In Your Honor, Foo Fighters' pending release, but Hawkins returned to them in mid-2005. The resulting self-titled album was tinged with classic rock influences including the Police, early prog rock, Devo, and Queen, and Coattail Riders released an eponymous album in March 2006 on Thrive. Red Light Fever, the second album from Hawkins & the Coattail Riders, followed in 2010.

Hawkins launched a second band, the metallic combo the Birds of Satan, in 2014, who released a self-titled album that year. He returned to the Coattail Riders in 2019, releasing Get the Money that November. In March 2022, Hawkins and the Foo Fighters traveled to South America to play a handful of concerts, headlining the Lollapalooza Festival in Argentina on March 20.

On March 25, 2022, Hawkins was in Bogotá, Colombia, where he was scheduled to perform with the Foo Fighters later that evening. After Hawkins complained of chest pains, emergency services were called up to his room at the Four Seasons Casa Medina hotel. Health personnel arrived and found Hawkins unresponsive; they performed CPR, but he was declared dead at the scene, at the age of 50. His cause of death was not immediately revealed.

The following day, Colombian authorities announced that a preliminary urine toxicology test indicated that Hawkins had 10 substances in his system at the time of his death, including opioids, benzodiazepines, tricyclic antidepressants, and THC. Colombia's National Institute of Forensic Medicine stated that they would "continue the medical studies to achieve total clarification of the events that led to the death of Taylor Hawkins", and the attorney general's office would continue to investigate his cause of death in a "timely manner"

The Foo Fighters announced the death of Hawkins in a Twitter statement on March 25, writing that "His musical spirit and infectious laughter will live on with all of us forever." On March 29, the band cancelled all their upcoming shows. On the night of his death, Hawkins was scheduled to perform with the Foo Fighters at the Estéreo Picnic Festival in Bogotá as part of their ongoing South American tour. The festival stage was turned into a candlelight vigil for Hawkins.