Foo Fighters

by Mick Wall

  As far as the teenaged Dave Grohl was concerned though, Scream ruled. ‘They were from Virginia,’ he shrugged. ‘I had roots in Virginia.’ And though he had seen them play at the 9.30 Club many times, and knew they were local dudes like him, he knew absolutely nothing else. Scream were an enigma wrapped in a punk poster, awash in a punk wet dream. ‘I loved the fact I could be walking past them every day without knowing it.’

  No FB or Twitter to check them out on in those days, not even a blip on the regular music-magazine radar; all Dave had to go on was the music: hardcore, Brit-influenced punk – gritty, determinedly blokey and dry as Grandmothers’ dead bones. Typically, it was the third Scream album, Banging the Drum, released on Dischord in 1986, that Dave liked best. The speed-kills riffs of their first two albums were still here and there but they had brought in a second guitarist to flesh out their sound and the tracks now lasted longer than a minute or two. They had also let their hair grow out and were coming up with more obvious rock anthems such as ‘ICYUOD’ (short for: ‘I See Why You Over Dose’) and the sub-Who-style ‘Feel Like That’. There were even power ballads like ‘People, People’, and when Dave later talked about the album sounding more like early Aerosmith than, say, The Damned, it said everything you needed to know. Dave thought of it as ‘the album where Scream went from being a hardcore band into being a rock band’.

  When Kent Stax was forced to quit Scream in 1987 – ‘Kent had been married and he’d recently had a child,’ Franz explains, ‘and he just couldn’t go on tour any more, because back then we were not making any money and he had to provide for his child’ – the band placed a handmade flyer in the window of a local record store saying they were looking for a drummer and giving a phone number: Franz’s. When Dave saw the handwritten poster up on the wall the next day, he knew he had to at least call the number. ‘I thought I’d try out just to tell my friends I’d jammed with Scream.’

  The first time Dave rang it though, the elder brother, Pete, blew him off, said he was too young. The Stahl brothers were already in their mid-twenties; Dave was barely 18. For anyone else, that would have finished things off right there. Not Dave. He left it a while then called Pete back: lied about his age, told them he was 20. They said awright, come on over. He did and the first thing Franz Stahl asked him was which numbers he wanted to play, maybe something by Zeppelin or Sabbath? But Dave had his shtick all worked out. Nah, he told ’em, and reeled off the titles of half a dozen Scream numbers he’d already memorised. Still not entirely convinced, Franz played along then stood slack-jawed, chewing a cigarette and marvelling at how good the kid was. Franz laughs as he recalls the scene. ‘Our first record was like twenty-one tracks or something like that? And we just proceeded to blow through every one of those tracks – like that! I was just like, “Fuck!” The first thing I did was call Pete and say, “Dude, this Dave guy, we just fucking jammed and he’s it! We don’t need to find anybody else!” This skinny gangling kid who lied about his age.’

  The Stahl brothers offered Dave the gig on condition he was ready to commit totally, immediately, no pussying around. Dave acted cool, like no biggie, then fretted all the way home about how he was going to convince his mother it was a good idea for him to take off in the back of a battered old Dodge Ram van with these battered older punk guys. It was not an easy sell. Virginia hadn’t worked her fingers to the bone trying to get her only boy through high school to have him drop out and leave home with some band. Ever the shrewd, Dave enlisted the support of his father, but James was even less keen. Dave recalled his father making it clear he would rather his son enrol in the army than drum in some no-hope band of misfits. But Virginia eventually came to the rescue and gave him her blessing. ‘She said, “All right. Well, you better be good at this.” I’m like, “I’ll try.”’

  As learning curves go, becoming the drummer in Scream was a doozy. Once they’d started touring, ‘There were a few clubs where Dave would have to sit outside until it was time for us to play, because he was obviously underage.’ Dave was unfazed, though, determined to stick with it. ‘I’ve always seen Dave as being a really strong character,’ says Anton Brookes, the innovative young PR who would become first Nirvana’s, then the Foo Fighters’ London publicist. ‘From his punk rock background and everything that he’s been through, I’ve always seen him as really strong and he’s always been driven.’ Forcing his way into contention for the drum stool in Scream was early proof of that, says Anton. ‘He’d just gone from high school, being some punk rock kid, going to the 9.30 Club to watch bands. Then he graduated up to Scream. That shows Dave’s drive and ambition. That was part of his evolution.’

  Looking back years later, Dave would romanticise the experience. ‘The feeling of driving across the country in a van, stopping in every city to play, sleeping on people’s floors, watching the sun come up over the desert as I drove, it was all too much. This was definitely where I belonged.’ He would rhapsodise about learning to survive on seven dollars a day, living on cheap cigarettes and whack Mexican weed. Burger and fries was a banquet, mostly it was just fries.

  Then there were the chicks. The cool chicks would buy you a Taco Bell and a beer then take you back to your Dodge Ram and give you head. The uncool chicks would just blow you, after they’d blown the other guys first. It soon became clear that Dave was going to be the eternal newbie. ‘When Pete found out my real age and that he was ten years older than me, he became my father figure,’ said Dave. Franz also took the young drummer under his wing, showing him guitar licks and enlightening him on the brutal methodology of Iggy Pop and the Stooges, or the herbal spiritualism of Bob Marley and the Wailers. It was, admitted Dave, a real crash course for a would-be raver who had ‘never been past Chicago’.

  ‘He was always kind of farting around with [guitar],’ says Franz now. ‘I would show him stuff when he wanted to learn something, just like I would show Skeeter: “Hey, I got this riff” and we would jam on that. But Dave was always kind of fiddling around with guitar and coming up with stuff, although he didn’t really write anything until later on.’

  The only one Dave couldn’t quite figure out was the band’s dreadlocked bass player, Skeeter Thompson. Skeeter played bass like most people smoked bongs – with deep, heavy breaths. He was a black guy who liked to put blond streaks in his hair. A stone cold dude who always had a million girlfriends all looking out for him but somehow always managed to find himself in places no one else knew existed. He smoked bundles of herb and endless packs of cigarettes, and he liked coke. A lot. So much so he soon graduated to freebasing. So much so he then turned to smoking crack. So much so he was soon pawning his bass guitar and other bits of band equipment to keep up his habit. So much so he ended up so far over the rainbow nobody thought he would ever come back. (He did, eventually, and now lives the quiet life, clean and sober.)

  Franz sighs. ‘Skeeter is an infamous character, a loveable guy, and an insanely great bass player and musical mind. He’s the kind of guy you could go into any city in America and go, “You know Skeeter?” “Oh, fuck, yeah, I know Skeeter!” He’s that kind of guy. We would be in Amsterdam doing shows, and we would lose Skeeter for a day and he would come back in completely new clothes! “Oh, I hooked up with this chick, she bought me all these clothes.” Just a great guy; extremely good-looking. Me and Skeeter were very tight.’ They would sit around listening to Black Flag records, followed by the O’Jays, Parliament, Bootsy Collins, ‘all this crazy shit. He was like part of my musical education.’

  Dave, who had also taken to putting flashes of blond in his dark hair, also tried hard to find a way into Skeeter’s mind. They were, after all, the rhythm section of the band. But Skeeter had his own ideas, and at first would tease and torment the newbie, pinning him down on the ground and sticking his smelly feet in his face, or deliberately going his own way onstage. When things got really bad Skeeter would simply drop out of the band and they would hurriedly move to find a temporary replacement. At his worst, Skeeter was impo
ssible. But when he held himself together long enough to actually relate, he was the man, goodhearted, funny, more genuinely punk than the rest of the Scream team put together. The only problem was that by the time Dave was in the band, the Skeeter stories were becoming less funny with each new misadventure. It seemed only a matter of time before the whole shithouse went up in flames. And then one day it did.

  Dave was young enough, though, not to care. Not while Scream was able to still make albums and tour. The first record they made with Dave in the band was No More Censorship, released in 1988 on the RAS (Real Authentic Sound) label after Dischord decided they’d done all they could. The fact that RAS was a reggae label, formed by Doctor Dread – real name Gary Himelfarb, a reggae producer of huge renown who had actually been born in Washington – only added lustre to the label’s name, the way the Stahl brothers saw it, reflecting both their own occasional forays into raw-edged reggae and the historical link between punk and reggae as exemplified by their idols, The Clash, and, more recently, the inspirational Bad Brains.

  Scream had done a relatively big deal with the label, which gave them a budget of $20,000 to make the record and put them in a big studio, Lion and Fox, in Washington. It was supposed to be Scream’s big break, their first real shot at the big time. But they overreached, took it too seriously, and tried too hard to please too many people. At a time when the biggest band in America was Def Leppard, whose Hysteria album was all about textures, finesse, balance, a sophisticated blend of sweet pop and hard rock, RAS were looking to get in on the action, using Scream as a mast around which they could build their own rock roster

  These days, Franz recalls ‘keyboards and acoustic guitars, pianos, it was just one big fucking vomit of ideas. And it really never meshed out. There were some good tracks but it was like where have we gone, what are we doing?’ It didn’t help that ‘a lot of crazy shit was going on at the same time, there were lots of drugs going around … We were never happy with it. We were never sold on the songs. At one end it was very metal. Then there were some nice pretty songs, very dramatic. But we didn’t know what we were doing or where we wanted to go.’

  Listening to it now, the only one on the album who really sounds like he knows what he’s doing is Dave, whose obsession with John Bonham reaches its apotheosis on tracks like ‘Hit Me’, then cheerily morphs into passable imitations of Rat Scabies on ‘Fucked without a Kiss’ and Motörhead’s drummer, ‘Philthy’ Phil Taylor, on ‘No Escape’. Nobody in the band could really take this grudging step towards mainstream acceptance seriously, though. When Dave and some of the guys went to see the Monsters of Rock festival show at the RFK Stadium in Washington, other than Metallica they found the rest of the bill – starring the Scorpions and the headliners Van Halen – nauseously perplexing. But then Dave was tripping on some especially powerful acid at the time. He later said he spent the whole time veering between laughing and feeling sick. ‘It was a fucking comedy. Like, “Why is this person leaping around in ballet slippers with bandanas around his microphone? What the fuck is that all about?’”

  All Dave could see at the time were the shiny new advance copies of the No More Censorship record with his name on the back cover: ‘Dave Grohl – Drums’. That it would be several months before it was actually released hardly mattered. The plane ticket to Amsterdam, where Scream had begun their first European tour that year, in a bid to spread their flickering fame across yet more beer-and-butt-stained carpets, made up for that. Dave could not believe his luck! Getting on a plane with a band and flying to Europe to tour! Come on! What more proof did you need than that that you’d finally made it, were really going someplace; were sprouting real wings and beginning to move with both feet off the ground? Even if it meant you had to crashland at the other end of wherever it was you thought you were going? Even if it meant you never came back at all?

  Dave and the band found Amsterdam itself to be beyond their wildest dreams. It didn’t matter that they spent most of their time crashing at strangers’ pads. Pot was legal, man. That’s right, motherfucker! You could just stroll into one of the many coffee houses situated among the endless winding canals and buy whatever you liked: heavy black hash, sticky green weed, opium-streaked Nepalese Temple Ball … They’d even sell you tobacco and the rolling papers. Give you a chessboard to sit and relax with, or a book, or a hooker. And they never closed. If you had the cash you could just sit in one of these magical places for the rest of your life, right Skeeter?

  The gigs themselves paid next to nothing but the band would soon be surrounded by new girlfriends willing to spring for a burger, or a beer, so that was all right. New best friends would welcome them in like long-lost punk brothers. It was the same wherever they went in Europe. At one gig in Turin, Italy, they arrived to find the gig was in a squat where they were burning mattresses because they were infested with scabies. ‘You walk in with your gear,’ Dave recalled, ‘and they’re still trying to figure out how to steal electricity from the building next door. And someone’s building a stage. That’s how it was every night.’

  Touring Europe became a badge of honour for Dave and Scream. Back home they might have been slipping down the ladder in terms of recognition. But in Europe they were still regarded as the authentic voice of American hardcore. Over the next two years they would complete three European tours, the last of which, in the spring of 1990, found them playing 23 shows in almost as many days. There was little that was triumphant about these final appearances, though. After one show in Germany, they discovered someone trying to steal their T-shirts from their stand. As the band generally made more money from tee-sales than they did the gigs, this was viewed as a hanging offence and the band hastily ejected the joker from the venue. Then afterwards, as they went to load up the van, they discovered the same guy, ‘banging on the windows of the van and I just had a total loss of control,’ admitted Dave. ‘I just beat the shit out of his face.’

  So much for being the nice guy of the band. The fact was, the novelty was wearing off, for all of them – even in Amsterdam, which had become a second home for Scream, as the sheer grind of travelling and playing with little pay, less food and just an endless stream of cheap drugs and increasingly faceless wannabe friends and groupies to sustain them.

  One typical anecdote was later immortalised by Dave in the track ‘Just Another Story about Skeeter Thompson’, on which he tells the story, in spoken word against a comically gruff punk riff, of how the band were staying at the apartment of one of their Dam friends named, simply, Toss. Skeeter had begun an affair with the hot-looking girl that lived next door. ‘I guess she had a lot of money,’ Dave recounts in the song, ‘Cos she was constantly buying him clothes.’ Clothes and weed and wine and whatever else Skeeter wanted, baby. Until one day Skeeter walked in, dumped his stash bag on the table, pulled out his dick, squeezed the head of it, and asked Dave to take a look at it. ‘He said, “Does that look like pus to you?”’ says Dave in the song. ‘I said, “No, I think it’s lint.”’

  The track ends there so it’s not known whether Skeeter was reassured by the reply or decided to get a second opinion. But the next time the band came skidding and careening through Europe, Skeeter was out of control. He didn’t even bother to try and conceal his bags of weed as the band went through customs, crossing another border. Then, halfway through the dates, he bailed out completely. Pete called a friend back home, J. Robbins, singer-frontman of fellow DC rockers Jawbox, to fly out and help them finish the dates. But you knew things must be bad if even Skeeter couldn’t take Europe any more. By the end, they were all glad just to get home in one piece – or several pieces, as it turned out, though that wouldn’t become entirely apparent for a few more months yet.

  Two live documents exist of Scream’s foreshortened European career: two albums taken from either end of their tours with Dave. The first, Live at Van Hall – Amsterdam, which came out on the independent Dutch label Konkurrent, at the end of 1988, captures Scream still trying to find a middle ground b
etween the outright punk of ‘U Suck A / We’re Fed Up’ and the mainstream rock-lite of ‘Walking by Myself’. The second, Your Choice Live Series Vol. 10, comes from one of their last shows in Germany, in 1990, and veers a little more towards the original punk sound that made them once so nearly famous. The most stand-out features now though are the drums, which are brilliantly explosive while sacrificing none of their rhythmic dexterity, and the guitar, which Franz is now so skilled at it’s as if he is having to dumb down his playing in order to make what he’s now capable of fit into what Scream are still gnawing away at.

  Still, the dream dies hard when you’re still under 30 and people keep telling you how good you are and how big you would be if only the world would wake up and recognise your talent. When they came back from the No More Censorship tour, Franz was still so upset with the album he immediately began working on new material. ‘I wanted to write something straightforward, rocking, fast, and I grabbed Dave and we went into the basement and we kicked out this whole record’: a brutal ten-track mini-masterpiece that would eventually become Scream’s fifth and final album, Fumble. ‘We wrote that whole record, just Dave and I, basically, regardless of what anyone else says. They were mainly all my ideas but Dave and I were like, “Let’s do these riffs. None of these fucking keyboards and acoustic guitars, let’s just do something really hard and solid.” And we did.’

  They also tuned down ‘for half a step’ – a trick that would become a signature of the grunge bands that were now hovering on the musical horizon – ‘which, sonically, made it very heavy. Because I heard Metallica was doing that. So I adopted that idea.’ At the same time he and Dave were listening to a lot of stuff by a Canadian progressive thrash metal band, Voivod. ‘That was in the mind-set, too.’