Dave Grohl’s documentary Sound City airs on Saturday night at 10 p.m. on VH1 and VH1 Classic. In this piece drawn from our April-May cover story Grohl talks about his work on the film and other recent efforts.

When I first met her, she walked in the room and said, ‘What’s up, asshole?’ That’s when I realized we were going to become lifelong friends." Dave Grohl is speaking about meeting the comedian and late-night talk-show host Chelsea Handler for the first time. The reason that her name is a topic of conversation is because Grohl, in between Sound City Players gigs, filled in for the smack-talking queen of late night for a week’s worth of Chelsea Lately shows this past February. He hosted with such apparent ease that one hopes his turn at the Grammys isn’t far away.

What makes the Grammys idea actually plausible is one simple fact: Everyone likes Dave Grohl. Whether it’s the kids (Foo Fighters rule!), the husbands (dude knows how to party), the wives (he’s hot; he’s a sensitive man with two daughters), the elder statesmen of rock (he’s humble and respectful), the up-and-comers (he’s not an asshole like so many other big artists) or even the jaded journalists (he thoughtfully responds to questions with a refreshing candor), they’re all keen on the new crown prince of rock and roll.

“The key to long life and health is happiness – more than anything,” he says, ensconced in the corner of a couch at photographer Danny Clinch’s studio during our first chat. “I see people that spend so much time counting calories that they worry themselves sick. I’m the opposite. I like to enjoy people and music, wine and butter. Having music [in my life] is exactly that – it’s the anti-diet. The more you have, the better you feel.”

With his self-confessed “Midwestern, Protestant work ethic,” Grohl is a busy man. “Even when I was a stoner, I couldn’t do the sweatpants and Cheetos thing for more than about half and hour before I started losing my mind,” he quips.

For those Relix readers that might be unfamiliar with Grohl’s professional music career, here’s a recap: He joins the D.C. hardcore band Scream as a drummer in 1986; plays drums in Nirvana from 1990 until Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994; begins fronting his own band, Foo Fighters, in 1994, for which he plays guitar and sings; debuts the side project in 2009 dubbed Them Crooked Vultures, featuring Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones on bass and Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme on guitar.

In between all of that, he temporarily played drums for groups ranging from Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers to Tenacious D; collaborated with a laundry list of musicians in the studio, including Mike Watt, Cat Power and Trent Reznor among many others; and sat-in with everyone from Paul McCartney to Bruce Springsteen onstage.

So once Grohl developed the idea for his Sound City documentary – a multi-threaded story about the studio, analog versus digital and his unique musical collaborations for the resulting album Real To Reel – getting a who’s who of musicians to participate was a relatively easy task given his résumé. What proved to be more difficult was interviewing all these legends.

“I was a little nervous at first,” Grohl admits of the process. “Because I wanted it to seem informal – I didn’t want it to seem like a Q&A – I never had any notes with me. I always tried to focus on what I needed to talk about with that particular person and just have a conversation… Fortunately, Mick Fleetwood will talk for six hours and not let you get a word in edgewise. It relieved a lot of my nerves.”

Surprisingly, working with Paul McCartney in the studio didn’t cause much anxiety. “I knew that having McCartney come into the room with Nirvana would yield some pretty spectacular results,” he says from Los Angeles when we speak later. “Something about me playing drums with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and having seven hours to write a song, that could go either way, you know?”

It’s that collaboration with BRMC’s Robert Levon Been and Peter Hayes on the tune “Heaven & All” which Grohl describes as “one of the most special studio experiences of my life” that delivered “the most beautiful piece of music I think I’ve ever recorded. It reminded me of what it was like to be in Nirvana,” he confides.

“When the three of us would go into our practice space in Tacoma, Washington, which was basically a barn, the first thing we always did was improvise. And we would jam some improvised noise for the first 15 or 20 minutes of every rehearsal. Songs came from that; ideas came from that; arrangements came from that. Those were exercises or lessons in dynamic and that’s what it was like with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club that day.”

As we’re talking, Grohl is driving home after a meeting with his management company, in which he mapped out the next two years of his life. There’s no doubt that this is in conjunction with the forthcoming Foo Fighters record that he began recording demos for the previous evening.

“There’s still a part of me that, whenever the Foo Fighters make a record, I feel like it’s the first time we’ve ever done it,” he says of his current state of emotion. “I really want people to enjoy it because I don’t want to go back to working at Shakey’s Pizza.”