Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life

by Steve Almond

  Journalists are dependably loyal to this protocol, because their professional stature depends on access. When that access is promised then suddenly denied in irrational ways, when you are basically standing around in a strange place far from home with an unctuous publicist as your only ally, it makes you angry, but more than that it makes you very very needy. And so when you finally get to talk to the rock star (or movie star or politician or athlete) in question it’s like they’ve rescued you from a terrible nightmare, which is the nightmare of your own helplessness and your unfamousness and your accession to the shitheadedness of fame, and by your affiliation with them you are temporarily elevated into the world of the semidivine. This is one of the reasons celebrity profiles are so fawning: because they manage to capture a spirit of slavish gratitude that is the result of weeks (sometimes months) of hegemony and self-colonization.

  I hope this helps explain why, the first time Dave Grohl spoke to me, approximately fifty-nine hours after we were first supposed to meet, six hours before my return flight to Boston, I was so instantly grateful, so starstruck, so possibly and confusingly in love, that I could only nod my head and fight back tears. Grohl didn’t just say hello. He walked up in plain view of his posse and smiled at me and said, “Hey man, you’re always so mellow. I love this guy. We’ve got to get some time to hang out. Can you hang out tonight?”—an outburst of such diabolical psychological brilliance that for a few moments I actually felt guilty. I was going to have to blow Grohl off to catch my flight. Man, I’m sorry, Dave.

  But then I realized that this was how they got you, these famous people. They made you feel responsible for their burdens, then gave you the slip. So I said, “Could we talk right now?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sure man.”

  There was nowhere private we could go except the bathroom. This was how I wound up interviewing Dave Grohl in the crapper. I wasn’t sure where to sit, but he dropped right onto the floor and I sat across from him, a bit closer to the toilet than I maybe would have liked. Here’s the thing about Grohl, though. It didn’t even matter. Because he was so completely the opposite of what I expected (i.e. egotistical, bratty) that he came off as the least neurotic person I’d ever met. Within five minutes, he had confided in me about his idyllic childhood, how he met and wooed his wife, the drug overdose that nearly killed his best friend, drummer Taylor Hawkins, how this trauma helped convince him to have a baby, and how much he adored his baby. Then he lit up a cigarette and offered me one. We’d just had celebrity profile sex.

  Ghost in the Machine

  A minute later, Grohl’s manager knocked on the bathroom door and told him that the crew from Wal-Mart had arrived to shoot the official Wal-Mart promotional video for the new album. The Foo Fighters were very tight and very loud and Grohl himself sang in such a manner that the veins in his neck turned red and sort of vibrated. It was impressive.

  Afterward, I stood in the lobby of Foo HQ, considering what would happen if I didn’t get any more time with Grohl. And what I realized (depressingly) is that I already had enough material. It almost doesn’t matter what you write when it comes to celebrity profiles. The only salient point is that you got access. So if you’re wondering how much face time you need to write the cover story for SPIN, the answer is ten minutes. Rolling Stone is more exacting; you probably need twelve minutes.

  As I was thinking this, Grohl strolled over and invited me to swing by his house. This, too, was a calculated move, because he knew that I had a baby daughter at home and he, too, was a new father; this would give us something over which to bond. So I followed him up to his mansion in the hills above Encino and interviewed him on the veranda and met his stunning wife and watched him goof around with his stunning daughter and change her diaper.

  But here’s the strange thing: while I recognized that Dave Grohl and I were engaged in a deeply contrived scene, staged expressly for PR purposes, hanging out with him made a deep impression on me. He was the first musician I’d met—hell, the first artist—who’d achieved stardom without turning his life into shit. Who, on the contrary, had maintained the tranquillity of his domestic life despite the pressures of fame. In fact, the reason he’d blown me off for the first two days of my visit was so he and his wife could interview nannies.

  Grohl’s equanimity struck me as even more remarkable given that he’d spent his early twenties backing Kurt Cobain, the modern archetype of self-destructive rock stardom. I assumed Grohl, having spent so many years in Cobain’s shadow, would avoid talking about him. But I was wrong. As we sat out on the veranda, Grohl, apropos of nothing really, volunteered that he’d been watching a YouTube clip that morning, of Kurt’s home movies. “He’s hanging out with his family in a park,” Grohl explained. “Sitting by this stream as these little girls run around, and it broke my heart because I knew when that was and I knew that he wasn’t necessarily happy at the time.” Grohl shook his head. Down below him, the L.A. sunset stood ready to flare. A few feet away, his beautiful toddler Violet Maye was circling a barbecue grill, murmuring to herself hot hot. “He couldn’t fully experience the joy of life,” Grohl said softly. “And I’m at that point now where I can.”

  Grohl looked dour for a moment. Then he looked over at Violet and scooped her up and suddenly I had a pretty good idea why Cobain’s ghost had been sucking around. It had nothing to do with the burden of living up to his genius, or even his loss as a friend. It was the simple and horrifying fact that Cobain was, at the time of his death, the father of a girl almost exactly Violet’s age.

  The Myth of the Suffering Artist

  So there I was talking to Dave Grohl, but what I was thinking about was my friend Lee, who wept the day after Kurt Cobain died and insisted that he was our generation’s John Lennon. I hadn’t said this to Lee at the time, or to any of the millions of other DFs voicing similar sentiments, but this struck me as dead wrong. Lennon wrote hundreds of songs, in a wide range of emotional and musical vernaculars, and became one of the most important political activists of his era before he was murdered. Cobain wrote in one genre, in two moods at most, and shot himself in the head while on heroin. He was instantly canonized for this act, which totally fucked over everyone in his life.

  So what I was thinking about, really, was the Myth of the Suffering Artist, the obdurate notion that success should come at the expense of happiness. I was thinking about Boris and Nil Lara and Ike Reilly, guys who had twice the talent necessary to be stars, but who remained essentially neglected figures. And I was thinking about myself (as usual) and the ways in which I identified with these guys because of my own knack for greeting creative triumphs with self-punishment.

  Bob Schneider had told me this story about touring with Dave Matthews and how charming Matthews was to everyone and how much this had made everyone want to help him. His point was that charm was the crucial ingredient to making it big. But I saw something more fundamental in Grohl. He struck me, above all, as an empathic guy, someone who had resolved his internal conflicts, the guilt and grievance that we use to bar ourselves from the kingdom of happiness. Maybe he wasn’t Saint Kurt of the Wounded Heart,19 or Mozart or Van Gogh or Rimbaud, but he was a genuine artist doing his best with his given portion of talent and being kind to the people around him.

  Hokey as it may sound, the guy struck me as a role model just then. Because so often in my life I’d assumed that the only score that mattered was the one for artistic merit, and that I was almost duty-bound to screw up everything else on its behalf. That wasn’t how I wanted to measure success anymore. I wanted to be a loving husband and father, a good friend, a conscientious citizen, someone whose life of his work. Maybe that meant that I’d never be anything but a midlist toiler. But why did I need to be anything more? Why did anyone?

  Hell, wasn’t the very concept of “fame” a modern pathology? For most of our history as a species, after all, fame didn’t even exist. The only true celebrities were figures from mythology or religious stories. And there was no commerci
al barrier to creative expression. It was enough to be able to sing or tell a story or ride a horse with grace or make a beautiful shoe—these talents were recognized for the immediate pleasures they provided.

  But somewhere along the line we’d convinced ourselves that acts of imagination only had value if strangers would pay for them, or if they won fancy prizes, or if critics decided they had merit, notions that had proved a boon to the Myth of the Suffering Artist. Because now, in addition to the anguish that arises from trafficking in unbearable feelings, artists had to worry about these vile forms of regard.

  It was a fucking crock, and I wanted to tell Dave Grohl as much. But we were too deep into our own fame charade to turn back at this point. Grohl did his best to make it bearable. He remained friendly and self-deprecating, and even though his estate was at the top of a mountain and contained a tennis court and a waterfall, he made a joke about how the terra-cotta roof tiles reminded him of a Chi-Chi’s franchise. When I mentioned that I’d be back in L.A. soon he asked why and I told him for a reading and he said, “Hey, I’ll have to check that out.”

  We were standing in Dave Grohl’s circular driveway, gazing down upon the Valley of the Non-Famous, unto which I would be descending momentarily. A gleaming turquoise Harley was parked beside a tiled fountain. I wanted to say, Look man, you don’t have to try so hard. But it seemed important to Dave Grohl that he be the sort of rock star who would show up at a reading interviewing him, and it seemed wrong, given all he’d taught me, to dash his hopes.

  List #6

  I See Your Muffin and Raise You a Pirate: The Many Silly Names of Rock Star Spawn

  Back when Erin first got pregnant we spent hours yakking about What to Name Baby. This is pro forma activity in the age of over determined parenting, as is giving your fetus a nickname. Ours became Peanut. There was a brief stretch during which we seriously considered making it legal, or at least enjoyed terrorizing the grandparents with this prospect.

  Eventually our daughter was born and somewhere in the midst of this howling endeavor the gravity of the parental mission dawned on us. Yes, Peanut Almond exuded a certain snacky insouciance. But here was this actual person, very small, very frightened seeming. Giving her a gag name suddenly seemed just a tad indulgent. We settled on Josephine.

  The fascinating thing about rock stardom is that it seems to impart the opposite lesson: that naming a child is an activity that should, above all, reflect the cheeky creative spirit of the parents in question. Had we been rock stars our child almost certainly would have been named Peanut Almond. Or Marzipan Almond. Or Chocolatta Joy Almond. And I know this because the roster of actual strange rock star child names is so expansive that they can only by catalogued by genera. (As a special added bonus, I’ve made up one name per genus.20 Happy hunting!)

  Genus: Flat-Out-Bat-Shit-Crazy

  Audio Science (Shannyn Sossamon)

  Speck Wildhorse (John Cougar Mellencamp)

  Pirate (Jonathan Davis of Korn)

  Zowie (David Bowie)

  Rebop (Todd Rundgren)

  Seven Sirius (Erykah Badu and André Benjamin)

  Annarchy (Buzz Osborne of the Melvins)

  Bamboo (Big Boi of OutKast)

  Elmo (Curt Kirkwood of Meat Puppets)

  Subgenus: The Majestic Remix

  Messiah Ya’Majesty (T.I.)

  O’Shun (Tamika Scott of Xscape)

  Jhericurlicious (Rick James)

  Jermajesty (Jermaine Jackson)

  God’lss Love and Heaven Love’on (Lil’ Mo)

  Keypsiia Blue Daydreamer (Big Gipp of Goodie Mobb)

  Genus: Tragically Misguided Cutesiana

  Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily (Michael Hutchence of INXS)

  Fifi Trixibell (Bob Geldof of Boomtown Rats)

  Nutella Sphinx (Roger Waters of Pink Floyd)

  Zuma Nesta Rock (Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale)

  Bluebell Madonna (Spice Girl Geri Halliwell)

  Subgenus: Pottery Barn Paint Swatch

  Saffron Sahara (Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran)

  Sonora Rose (Alice Cooper)

  Humboldt Green (Phil Lesh, Grateful Dead)

  Blue Angel (The Edge)

  Dandelion (Keith Richards)

  Subgenus: Inexplicable Feline

  Tiger Lily (Roger Taylor of Duran Duran)

  Rufus Tiger (Roger Taylor of Queen)

  Ocelot (Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon)

  Calico (Alice Cooper)

  Puma (Erykah Badu)

  Subgenus: Redneck Boutique

  Shooter (Waylon Jennings)

  Gunner (Nikki Sixx)

  Justice (John Cougar Mellencamp)

  Steelin (Toby Keith)

  Fordtuff (Alan Jackson)

  Genus: Pretentious Homage (subgenus: Musical)

  Devo (Maynard Keenan of Tool)

  Django (Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics)

  Jagger (Scott Stapp of Creed)

  Jazz Domino (Joe Strummer)

  Nina Simone Smith (LL Cool J)

  Manilow (Clay Aiken)

  Thelonious (Mitch Dorge of Crash Test Dummies)

  Wolfgang (Eddie Van Halen)

  Zeppelin (Jonathan Davis of Korn)

  Hendrix Halen Michael Rhoades (Zakk Wylde of Black Label Society)

  Subgenus: Historical/Literary

  Galileo, Artemis (Alex James of Blur)

  London Siddharta Halford (Sebastian Bach)

  Raskullnikov (Slash)

  Electra (Dave Mustaine of Megadeth)

  Tamerlane (John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas)

  Genus: Geography for $200

  Harlem (The Game)

  Atlanta (John Taylor of Duran Duran)

  Memphis (Bono)

  Burkina Faso (KRS-One)

  Island (Gregg Allman)

  Egypt (Treach of Naughty by Nature)

  China (Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane)

  Kenya (Quincy Jones)

  Lifetime Achievement Award: Frank Zappa

  Moon Unit and Dweezil get all the ink, but my faves are Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen and Ahmet Emuukha Rodan. When asked why he saddled his children with these names, Zappa famously replied, “Because I could.”

  That’s so rock star.21

  18. For a micro version of this dynamic, consider the last live show you attended. Did the band members begin at the time advertised? Of course not. They sat in the greenroom and bitched about the deli platter. This delay not only sold lots of overpriced beer for the club, but served as a potent reminder of the power structure. You might have acted annoyed, but deep down you were relieved. The band’s negligence affirmed your status.

  19. Let me add for the record here—knowing it to be a mortal sin against Rock Critic Dogma—that I consider Dave Grohl a more talented musician than Kurt Cobain.

  20. My “source” on all of this is a consortium of Internet sites, meaning 75 percent of these names are probably total bullshit. Sorry.

  21. The phony names are Annarchy, Jhericurlicious, Nutella Sphinx, Humboldt Green, Ocelot, Fordtuff, Manilow, Raskullnikov, and Burkina Faso.

  Dayna Kurtz Sings the World a Lullaby

  You will have noticed by now an apparent gender bias in my Fanaticism. Nor can it have escaped your attention that I have some issues around attraction to men, who happen to outnumber women by a wide margin in the rock star category, anyway. But I’m going to suggest that the main reason my musical Dream Team is a sausage party is much simpler: I creep out female musicians.

  I have certainly tried to inflict my Fanaticism on several, the most ignominious example being the night I showed up at a small club in Cambridge to see Shivaree and specifically that band’s alluring lead singer, Ambrosia Parsley, whom I followed backstage and stared at in mute wonder until security was summoned. I have made repeated efforts to secure an interview with Neko Case, but I can never get past her publicity people, who seem to have a sixth sense when it comes to Drooling Fanatics posing as music journalists. And yes, it is true that I once spot
ted Patty Griffin down in Austin and pursued her on foot, but she lost me in a strip mall. (I’m pretty sure it was her.) There is no shortage of female artists I find Droolworthy—Beth Orton, Bettye LaVette, Nikka Costa—merely a shortage of female artists who will have anything to do with me.

  The single exception (and she happens to be my favorite female artist of all, so good luck there) is Dayna Kurtz. We met five years ago on a Sunday night in winter. Dayna was playing a dumpy bar in Cambridge, the same bar where, two months later, I would read from my first book and not quite meet Erin. There were four people when I arrived. I waited for the late rush. There was no late rush. The late rush was me. The moment Dayna opened her mouth the room was filled, instantly, with a deep human trembling.

  I knew this was going to happen because I’d been taking her new record, Postcards from Downtown, intravenously. The other four people in the bar were there for dinner. They talked over her songs at such a volume that she eventually asked them to please quiet down. They ignored her. Dayna had every right to stop. But she gave herself to those songs, fully and without embarrassment. She sounded like Billie Holiday and Leonard Cohen whispering into the same mic, and her melodies were swollen with the complicated joy of sorrow.

  Afterward, I went up to apologize for the loudmouths. Dayna was tearing through a hamburger. She wanted a quick getaway and for this reason she allowed me to help lug her gear outside to the car. Only there was no car. We walked up one block, then another, then turned around. The situation slowly dawned on her. “Fuck,” she said. “This is so fucked up.” She began to weep.