Dave Grohl retraces his life-affirming path from Nirvana to Foo Fighters
-Dave Grohl still remembers the first punk show he ever saw: Naked Raygun, in Chicago around 1982, at a little corner bar across from Wrigley Field called The Cubby Bear.
"They knew four chords and the singer was, like, on top of my head, and I was against the stage, and it was life-affirming, because I thought ... 'Oh my God! This is what I want to do,' " the Foo Fighters frontman says.
There was an undercurrent of anger to the punk scene back then, but Grohl says he wasn't fueled by rage. Rather, he describes himself as a hyperactive kid who loved life and wanted to play the drums — he started out by pounding pillows on his bedroom floor.
"This was that hyperactive energy that I had my entire life, but I was kind of channeling all of that into the way that I played drums," he says. "It felt so good."
Grohl eventually dropped out of high school in Virginia to join the band Scream, spending a few years on the road with the group. But then he got a call from Kurt Cobain, asking he wanted to play drums for an upstart band in Seattle called Nirvana.
"I moved up [to Seattle] and we went into a small rehearsal space and started playing, and within 45 seconds it sounded like Nirvana," he says.
"I was heartbroken," he says. "I didn't really know if I ever wanted to play music again, until I realized that music was the one thing that had healed me my entire life."Nirvana catapulted to superstardom with the release of its 1991 hit "Smells like Teen Spirit." But just three years later, in 1994, Cobain killed himself, and Grohl considered giving up on music entirely.
Six months after Cobain's death, Grohl recorded the Foo Fighters' first album as a one-man project, only assembling the band after the record was complete. The band gelled; in 2021 they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
A few years ago, the Foo Fighters played to a sold-out crowd at Wrigley Field in Chicago — just across the street from the dingy corner bar where Grohl had seen his first concert.
"It took me 36 years to cross that crosswalk and make it to that stadium across the street," he says. "But I did it with my friends and the people that I love, and most of us survived. And that night after the show, we all sort of gathered together and celebrated just that, and I'm very proud of it."
On his percussive guitar playing
I can't read music. I'm self-taught, so I don't really have any formal sense of theory or scaling or anything like that. But I do look at the strings on a guitar like it's a drum set. So if you imagine the lower strings are kicks and snares. And then the cymbals, when the song opens up, you let the other strings ring out. So it makes the sound sort of, like, blossom into this crescendo. ... I'm not a soloist. I'm not a virtuoso. But I'm a really good rhythm guitarist, because I look at it like it's a drum set.
On sleeping in a van with five other guys while touring with Scream
There were five guys in the band and my best friend Jimmy was the roadie. And so basically, back then, underground bands, most bands toured in vans that were kind of converted into a tour bus, meaning you would have to put all of the people and all of the equipment in a van and go from town to town. You would build a platform out of plywood and make a little shell for a loft so that you could sleep in your sleeping bag on top of the gear. You put the gear under the shelf and then everyone would sleep like sardines in a can in their sleeping bags.
And that was just kind of the way it worked, because when your per diem is $7 a day, there's no hotel rooms. If you're lucky, you might find someone that'll let you crash on their floor. If not, it was perfectly fine to sleep in the van. And to be honest, to this day, if I'm having a hard time going to sleep — it doesn't matter if I'm at home or if I'm at the Ritz-Carlton — if I'm having a hard time going to sleep, I actually try to transport myself back to that time when I was in a sleeping bag like a sardine in the van, rolling down the highway. It's almost like being swaddled to sleep. It's almost like having ... a white noise or something. There's some sort of comfort in that. But that's what we would do.
On living in a squalid apartment in Seattle with Nirvana
I had moved up there without having met the guys from Nirvana before, so they were strangers, and it was really the music that kept me there. Living in that tiny apartment that was pretty squalid and pretty gross was OK, as long as there was music at the end of the day. And the music that we were making was great.
I got homesick sometimes, and maybe I would call my mother and wish for Virginia, that's where I'm from. But then I'd get behind the drum set with Kurt and Krist [Novoselic] and think, "No, I belong right here. This is good." (by https://www.npr.org/).-
