by Mick Wall
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For Anna Valentine, whose idea this book was
Acknowledgements
Without whom none of this would have been possible: Robert Kirby, Malcolm Edwards, Linda Wall, Maureen Rice, Vanessa Lampert, Harry Paterson, Emma Smith, Amy Elliot, Mark Foster, Mark Handsley, Susan Howe, Margot Weale, Jessica Purdue, Rebecca Gray, Richard King, Krystyna Kujawinska, Isadora Attab, Marianne Ihlen, Anna Hayward; Sarah and Martin Sando, Sandie Alcock, and not forgetting Ian Clark, Steve Morant, and all at the SNC. Extra special thanks: Dave Everley and Joe Daly the X Team.
1. Learning to Fly
Reading Festival, 26 August 2012. Sunday night. The one they’ve all been waiting for. Nearly 90,000 people, all ready to let themselves go, all ready to explode with pride on behalf of the most prideful band in rock, all ready already.
Knowing this, feeling the occasion more keenly than the most fish-eyed fan, Dave Grohl makes his move. His timing has always been excellent. This time, though, he knows he has excelled himself, for this is a special night: 20 years exactly since he first headlined Reading with Nirvana, before the shit hit the fan and the world went all wrong.
But now it is all right again. Now everything is just cool, brother. It’s 20 years later, a new generation, another century, and Dave is feeling so good he decides to stop the show and tell the crowd, his people, all nearly 90,000 of them, a little story. It goes like this …
Strumming his guitar, stroking it like the hair on a baby’s head, gently, playfully, sensually, absent-mindedly, the rest of the band shutdown, hidden in the shadows, listening as intently as the crowd, Dave just wants to share, to connect, to be like Bruce Springsteen but without the self-righteous bullshit, guitar twinkling.
‘… so I grew up in Virginia, right outside of Washington, DC. I played in a punk rock band. We played in little clubs and squats and we toured and we fuckin’ starved and it was really, really fun. One day this friend of mine says, “Hey, you ever heard of that band Nirvana?”…’
The crowd, Dave’s crowd, some of whom have never owned a Nirvana record, but are smart enough to play along, give this an enormous roar of approval. Nirvana, golden name, golden band, golden age, now gone, lost in the single blast of a 20-gauge shotgun and the simple delirium of an OD-strength hit from a syringe, Kurt’s loaded body shaking interminably then stopping. Abruptly. Bloodily. Stupidly.
‘… I’m like, “Yeah, I’ve heard of Nirvana.” He said, “Well, they’re looking for a drummer and they think you’re pretty good.” I said, “Really?” “Yeah.” So I flew up to Seattle…’
His guitar twinkling, drifting, like orphan stars high above. Black tee. Black jeans. Black-and-white sneakers. Black beard and white, spotlit face.
‘… and they already had a drummer. This guy named Danny. He was a fucking great drummer. Danny was in a band called Mudhoney…’
Some modest yells of recognition. No one out there can actually name two good Mudhoney songs, let alone who the drummer was on the first Nirvana album, but here’s a clue: it was neither Danny nor Dave. Yeah, and so?
‘… and they’d been over here and toured and played a bunch. So the first day I ever hung out with Krist and Kurt and all those guys, we were having a little barbecue and I said to Danny, I said, “What’s the biggest audience you’ve ever played to?” And he said, “Uh … 35,000 people.” I said, “Where the fuck did Mudhoney play to 35,000 people?” He said, “Oh, this place called the Reading Festival”…’
Now comes the real sweet spot as the nearly 90,000 people at this Reading have a rippling, whole-body crowdgasm.
‘About a year later, we had recorded the record Nevermind and we had come over here to play some festivals…’ The last of these words are drowned out as the crowd erupts into another fetishistic thunderclap. They can’t believe what they’re hearing, what they’re witnessing. Dave Grohl never mentions Nevermind. Never talks about Nirvana. Not at a Foo Fighters show! Except, he is! He just fucking is!
Dave continues to spin his yarn, about the first time he and Nirvana played Reading, even further back, how he had ‘never been so fucking scared in my entire life’ at the prospect of playing to so many people. How it was ‘beyond my wildest fucking dreams’, and the 2012 Reading crowd continues to lap it up, baying and hooting and hanging on every gooey, sentimental syllable.
Then a little misstep: ‘Over the years I’ve seen the stage get taller and taller and I’ve seen the barrier get farther and farther away.’ It’s leading up to something but the crowd doesn’t give him time to finish. They start to booooooo.
But Dave Grohl didn’t get where he is today without knowing how to recover from mistakes, to find the instant rejoinder that gets the conversation back on track, the evasive action that guarantees to right the ship, that gets the show back on the road.
Without even flinching, he just rolls it out, like a punch line, like he always knew what he was doing all along. ‘But, from right here, it looks the same as it has for twenty-two years.’
The booing stops and the crowd melts as one. They knew they could rely on Dave. That he would never let them down, never stop making sense or call on them to get their eyes blackened.
But still it’s not enough. He goes on, talking about his mother, who is there at the side of the stage, as she often is these days, as she sometimes was even in Nirvana days, and whose birthday it is in a few days’ time, getting the crowd to sing her ‘Happy Birthday’, which of course they are more than happy to do, the giant video screens flashing on her at the side of the stage smiling, enchanted, bursting with pride for her most prideful son.
It’s like one of those scenes from a Disney movie, where the handsome young hero, having fought his way up from nothing, against all odds, despite the haters, the bullies and the badmouthing, finally triumphs and gets to make his valedictory speech in front of an adoring crowd of whooping, cheering Hollywood extras.
It’s exactly like that, except … well … this is real. Right?
‘This festival’ – he chokes out the words, his guitar becoming insistent – ‘is not just a festival to me.’ Pause, drama, pause, dingle-dangle-doo on the guitar, piercing stare into the crowd. ‘Tonight … is like the most important gig of my life.’ The tide of approval rolls in across the festival grounds, the mental visuals all in sweeping long shot, the dream panorama almost complete now …
‘So this one’ – small breath – ‘is for all of you!’ No blam into the song though, no band follow-up. ‘It’s called “Times Like These”…’
Dave, the master of delayed gratification, merely upping the stakes by singing the song alone, just him and the crowd and his almost 90,000 very best friends, on the occasion of the most important gig of his life.
‘It’s times like these you learn to live again,’ he croons, sounding a little like Tom Petty, whom he nearly joined after Kurt died, but was too smart to. ‘It’s times like these you learn to give and give again�
�’
And there you have it: the reason why it isn’t just the people at the Reading Festival that love Dave Grohl and his Foo Fighters; it’s the millions around the world who have bought his CDs and DVDs, his concert and festival tickets; the generations that bought into his story, his dream, his self-fulfilling prophecies. Dave’s a giver. He may not have the savant glamour of Kurt Cobain, but Kurt was a taker. Kurt dwelled in darkness, on the wrong side of the moon. Dave is a sun worshipper, a lover not a loner, a bringer of light.
Above all, Dave is a fast learner: in everything he has, all that he does, picked up along the way, from the street, from the breast of his mother, from his kids, his fans, and the band mates he tolerates and conveys fame and wealth to. Everything Nirvana did wrong, the Foo Fighters do right. Everything Kurt could not stomach, that he choked on, Dave has chewed up and spat out and allowed to make him stronger. Where Kurt was the perpetual victim, inviting the stalkers to rape him, Dave is the ultimate survivor, daring the world to try and tell him different. Vanquishing foes with that big goofy smile and warm embrace; unafraid in private to draw the knife and strike whenever he really has to.
‘It’s times like these you learn to love again,’ he sings that night at Reading. ‘It’s times like these, time and time again…’
And that’s when the band does finally come in, the timing perfect, the drama heightened, cathartic, real, the stage now fully lit as Dave shows again just how well he has learned the game, become a master at it, and how we all can’t help but love the nicest man in rock, while knowing no one gets this far down the road by simply being nice. That to be a real foo fighter you have to fly so fast across what passes for most normal people’s radar that they really can’t identify what or who you are, just follow the streak as it wends its way, zigzagging back and forth across the sky, night or day, in pretty colours, both alien and human, in revolving order.
That to be a real foo fighter you have to know how to pilot a ball of fire. Learning to fly so fast the only real trail left behind – the only truth left to be told – is all yours.
2. Foo are You?
They wanted this book to be about the Foo Fighters. But the Foo Fighters as a band is only a notional idea. Something that only exists in your head. There is only one real Foo Fighter and his name is Dave Grohl. The rest – the floating cast of members that surround him – play no part in the decision-making process. They are mere appendages. Staff members. Hired and fired by Dave. Musical actors. Who play their parts well but that doesn’t make them intrinsic to the Foo Fighters’ story any more than the Munchkins are in The Wizard of Oz. They are the dwarves in this story, dancing jauntily around the central figure of Grohl, who appears as both Dorothy and the Wizard, depending on his mood. And they are lucky to be there.
Even Nirvana – who could sustain the loss of five drummers and a second guitarist before Dave Grohl was hired, but not a single moment without Kurt Cobain – was more of a real band than the Foo Fighters have ever been. Kurt had Krist Novoselic to anchor Nirvana’s band identity, even as he later pushed him into signing a contract that took away most of his ownership in the group’s songs retrospectively. Dave has only the fantasy of a real friend in his band. Oh, much is made of his longstanding relationship with guitarist Pat Smear. But Pat bailed on Dave after just one album and didn’t appear fully on another Foo Fighters album for 14 years, by which time Dave didn’t need him any more, his empire already built. Good old Pat’s back now but only by Dave’s good graces.
Then there’s the drummer Taylor Hawkins, the ‘little brother’ whom Dave sat beside in hospital in London in 2001 after he overdosed on heroin and alcohol and nearly died. Taylor was 29 and, by Christ, should have known better, and Dave was 32 and had already seen this movie with Kurt, thanks. Yet Dave stayed beside Taylor. Cancelled a European tour and allowed him to recover back home in Los Angeles, on the promise he clean up his act. Two months later Dave was playing drums with Queens of the Stone Age, leaving his own band stewing and Taylor, in particular, standing tiptoe on an emotional ledge, threatening to throw himself off. Dave never blinked and after three days Taylor was much better off. Or else.
How about the other ‘original’ Foo Fighter, the bassist Nate Mendel? Nate came in, like everybody else, after Dave had already formed the ‘band’, at a time when it consisted of just one member, Dave, who had written, recorded, produced, sung and played every instrument on the first Foo Fighters album. Nate came in because the guy who had been the drummer in Nirvana, the biggest band in the world, the best band in the world, the most influential and important band in the world since the Beatles, asked him to. Nate, whose own band, Sunny Day Real Estate, no one outside their own dreams had ever heard of, or could name a single song by, had folded through total lack of interest. Nate, in his earnest beard and awful dad-shorts, studiously gnawing away at his bass, who would never in a million years have had Pat Smear in the band, nor Taylor Hawkins, who called Dave one night in 1999 to tell him he was leaving the Foo Fighters, too, only to call him back at six the next morning to beg for his job back, realising what a dumb thing he had just done. Nate was lucky to still be on the scene and nobody knows it better than Nate. Except Dave, of course, who knows things none of the others could ever imagine.
As for Chris Shiflett, bless his heart; does anyone know how to pronounce his name properly, let alone what he’s supposed to do as ‘lead guitarist’ in the Foo Fighters? Chris, the real nice guy in the Foo Fighters, who plays nice guitar but had never been credited with writing a song in his life before receiving co-credits on the fourth Foos album, One by One, in 2002 – an album he later admitted he kept turning up to work on, only to be left to sit around ‘drinking coffee’ and eating lunch until he was told to go home again. Until Dave scrapped it and began again, this time with Chris in the same room, at least. Chris the nice guy whose job was threatened every step of the way by the ever-present ghost of Pat Smear, whom Dave was talking to privately on the phone about coming back to the band for years until it was eventually made official in 2006. Chris was furious. ‘I was just like, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”’ But Chris didn’t have any say in the decision. Nobody did. Just Dave. Well, duh.
So this is not going to be a book about the Foo Fighters the band. Because that would make this is a fairy tale for idiots. This is instead a book about the Foo Fighters the man. Cos that’s what it is, millions of Foos fans. Don’t pretend you would want it any other way, either.
The real story of the Foo Fighters goes back to Springfield, Virginia, in the late Seventies, where the nine-year-old David Eric Grohl, son of an Irish-American single mother, Virginia Jean, is practising guitar, trying to play along to his Led Zeppelin records. ‘I don’t think Dave was ever that much of an angry punk rock kid,’ says Paul Brannigan, who would become Dave’s first biographer. ‘There was an element of that in his upbringing but people who talk about him from then always talk of him more as being goofy and a bit of a clown – the life and soul of the party rather than the intense young man sitting at the back of the classroom. Kurt Cobain was that archetypal rebel kid. But Dave wasn’t really that. He liked the music but it wasn’t like he was some sort of twisted ball of neurosis.’
Dave was always the comedian, always the attention-seeker. A Capricorn born in the Age of Aquarius, 14 January 1969, back when peace and love and long hair still meant something, man. According to Kurt Cobain, who also came from a broken home but came out of it with a completely different outlook, Dave Grohl was ‘the most well-adjusted boy I know’.
Ironically, what helped Dave achieve this apparent state of grace was the fact that his father, James Harper Grohl, a hardworking news reporter of Slovak–German lineage, divorced Dave’s mother, Virginia, an English teacher, in 1976, leaving his seven-year-old son to grow up with just his mother and older sister, Lisa. Consequently, ‘there was no male balance,’ Grohl reflected in 1996. ‘There was no father who wanted you to be like Dad, so you were left to be an i
ndividual because of course your mother didn’t want you to grow up to be like your mother, and your sister didn’t want you to grow up to be like your sister.’ Growing up without that strong ‘male balance’, he insisted, ‘had a strong influence on me. When I was twelve, I was in theatre groups and they were predominantly gay – growing up in rural Virginia, where everyone’s either a farmer or works in the Pentagon, to be so accepting of gay people was a real bonus.’
The only words of fatherly advice he could recall, he later claimed, were: ‘Never get into a pissing match with someone who buys their ink by the barrel.’ Prophetic words of wisdom for a boy destined to spend most of his adult life being profiled and fingerprinted, defined then redefined by an over-eager media ready to laud or disdain him on the strength or weakness of his every utterance, his every gesture. His just being there, after the fall of Nirvana, the sole survivor who refused the guilt trip the world wished to foist on him. To make them feel better. Dave wasn’t having any of that. Fuck you, man.
Instead, the boy Grohl grew up uninhibited by notions of Midwestern American manhood, neither enamoured of nor rebellious towards the idea of family, of home, and his cherished place in it. With only one parent’s income to rely on, there was little money for treats or vacations. ‘There were tough times when we’d eat peanut butter and pickle sandwiches for dinner,’ he told Nirvana’s biographer Michael Azerrad. But the family unit was tight, supportive, unwavering. As a result, Dave once explained, ‘I’ve always craved stability. I’ve never gotten off on chaos. Throughout the whole Nirvana experience I retreated to Virginia whenever I felt sucked into the tornado of insanity. Same thing with the Foo Fighters – I wouldn’t be able to do this if I didn’t have my feet planted firmly on the ground.’
