by Dave Grohl
That night, Tracey was planning on taking the L downtown to see local Chicago punk band Naked Raygun play at a dive bar just across the street from Wrigley Field called the Cubby Bear. Having just listened to their song “Surf Combat” that afternoon, I was dying to experience this radical lifestyle up close and in the flesh but couldn’t imagine Tracey would invite me along, as I looked like a square thirteen-year-old kid who’d just fallen off the back of a public school bus. More Opie Taylor than Sid Vicious, I could only imagine Tracey’s mortification if I were to walk with her through a room of Mohawks and spiked leather jackets. But, after a bit of cajoling from my aunt Sherry, Tracey graciously conceded and agreed to let me tag along. This was uncharted terrain, seriously foreign territory, and my stomach was in knots with nervous anticipation.
Courtesy of the author’s personal archives c/o Ruthless Records
Courtesy of the author’s personal archives c/o Ruthless Records
Not to mention . . . I had never been to a live concert before.
After all my years of watching MTV and staring at the KISS and Led Zeppelin posters on my bedroom walls, I foolishly thought that bands performed only on giant stages with smoke machines and massive displays of lasers and pyrotechnics. To me, that was rock and roll. Little did I know that all you needed was four walls and a song.
On the train ride into town, my mind was an electrical storm of dangerous premonitions, imagining the chaos and madness that awaited in that dingy hole-in-the-wall bar downtown. Just hours before, a truth had been unlocked in me that I couldn’t wait to live out. I now identified with something, and it wasn’t anything I had seen in my life back home. Those jagged record sleeves and distorted garage recordings that leapt out of Tracey’s speakers had forced open a window to my soul, and I had finally experienced a connection that made me feel understood. Having always felt slightly removed from the norm, I never had anywhere or anyone to turn to for understanding and reassurance among my peers. I was a kid from a broken home, a mama’s boy, an okay student at best. A ball of misplaced energy who was looking for his niche, his tribe. I was in desperate need of an existential makeover. I could feel it coming.
When we arrived at the Cubby Bear, I noticed a few punks hanging out on the street outside the club door and was surprised at how young they were. Teenagers like me, they weren’t the menacing faces that I had seen on Tracey’s album covers. Most were just skinny skater types in jeans, T-shirts, and Converse Chucks, bouncing off the walls with adolescent, hyperactive energy, just like me. Instantly relieved, we walked up and Tracey introduced me to her gang of outsiders. I soon picked up that everyone there that night knew everyone else, and it was a tight community of friends, all drawn together by their love of subversive music and the celebration of personal expression. Sure, there were some spikes, and leather, and colorful hair, and piercings, but I didn’t see this as threatening. I felt like I was at home.
Like a bomb ready to detonate, the room was ripe with anxious tension as Naked Raygun prepared to hit the stage. As the houselights went out, I was immediately struck by the intimacy of the gig. Unlike what I saw in those posters on my bedroom wall, I was shoulder to shoulder with everyone else, standing only feet from the small stage as the singer gripped the microphone, ready to count into the first number. And when he did, the small room ignited like a powder keg in a frenzy of limbs and deafening volume. People on top of people. Slam dancing, stage diving, the crowd chanting the words to each song with fists in the air like an army of loyal sonic soldiers. I was stepped on. I was shoved and punched. I was thrown about like a rag doll in the melee of the crowd, and I fucking loved it. The music and violent dancing released an energy within me that had been pent up for years, like an exorcism of all of my childhood traumas. THIS WAS A FEELING OF FREEDOM THAT I HAD WAITED FOR MY ENTIRE LIFE, AND NOW THAT I’D BEEN BAPTIZED BY SPIT AND SWEAT AND BROKEN GLASS, THERE WAS NO TURNING BACK. Song after thunderous song, I kept close to the small stage, bathed in the distorted glory of the music. Naked Raygun is considered by some to be the most important band in the history of Chicago punk, and their style almost resembled a hardcore Dick Dale type of surf rock. Of course, I didn’t understand their relevance then. I just knew that this music was filling my head and my soul with something I needed more of. With no song longer than about three and a half minutes, each stuttered blast was met with a riotous response, and the pauses between songs seemed like an eternity as I waited for the chaos to resume. It was all over much too soon, and as the houselights came up, I walked over to the merchandise table and bought my first punk rock record: Naked Raygun’s “Flammable Solid” seven-inch single. One of only a thousand made.
After the gig, we boarded the train and returned to Evanston with ears ringing and hearts made anew. In one summer day, I was forever changed, and now understood that I didn’t need the pyrotechnics, lasers, or impossible proficiency of a virtuoso instrumentalist to become a musician. The most important element of rock and roll had been revealed to me in Naked Raygun’s performance: the raw and imperfect sound of human beings purging their innermost voice for all to hear. This was now available to me, and I couldn’t wait to return home to Virginia and spread the gospel to all of my friends, hoping that they would see the light, too.
Turns out, Tracey herself was the singer in a punk rock band named Verboten, and they had already recorded some original songs and played live gigs around Chicago. With an average age of about thirteen years old, the four-piece was just kids doing it all themselves, writing and practicing in Tracey’s basement, booking their own shows, and making their own T-shirts to sell at their gigs. Guitarist Jason Narducy couldn’t have been more than eleven years old at the time, and his Gibson SG dwarfed his tiny body as he banged out power chords to songs like “My Opinion” and “He’s a Panther.” This inspired me even more, seeing a kid even younger than myself stepping out and following his dreams. I knew that my guitar at home was in for a right banging once I got my hands on it again. Hell, if these kids could do it, I could too.
The days of our vacation flew by as I immersed myself in Tracey’s library of music, studying each album, even discovering a few bands from my hometown in her collection: Minor Threat, Faith, Void, and my personal favorite, a group named Scream whose Bailey’s Crossroads PO box address was just miles from my neighborhood! Mind. Fucking. Blown. Scream were a bit different from the other, less polished groups, though. With strong melodies and hints of classic rock and roll here and there, their fast, aggressive songs seemed a bit more crafted than everything else I had heard on that trip. And they didn’t necessarily look like the punks I had seen on those other album sleeves and in those fanzine pages in Tracey’s room. Dressed in jeans and flannels and with scruffy hair, they looked like they were . . . from Virginia. I joyously played their album on repeat with a sense of hometown pride, memorizing every word—and every drumbeat.
The rest of our vacation was spent going to shows, buying albums at Wax Trax! records, and hanging out with other punks, as I slowly learned this new language of records and tapes that circulated among them. I witnessed that this underground scene was a grassroots network of young music lovers like me, blissfully removed from the mainstream idea of a “career” in music. Like the Three Belles many years before, there were hardly any professional aspirations in this crew, but rather a heartfelt passion to share the love of music with friends. The reward? Usually nothing more than a sense of accomplishment from doing something you loved entirely on your own. And it was worth every drop of blood, sweat, and tears. There were no rock stars here. Only real people.
The long drive back to Virginia was like a metaphorical journey from my past to my future. I had left something behind in Chicago. Long gone was the little boy who could never imagine his songs, his words, or his passions someday residing deep within the grooves of a dirty black slab of vinyl. Long gone was the little boy afraid of being ostracized for seeming different from all of the cool kids. Armed with a Germs record, a Kil
ling Joke T-shirt, and the “Flammable Solid” single I had purchased at the Naked Raygun gig, I was now determined to begin my new life as a punk rocker. I had finally shed that outer layer of fragile adolescent insecurity and begun to grow a new skin, one that would form into my true self, and I couldn’t wait to show it to the world.
They’ll rip your skin off
They’ll flay you alive
You try to keep breathing
On this ride of your life
I got gear
I got gear
I got gear
I can use it
John Bonham Séance
The altar was set. The candles were lit. The ritual was prepared. I quietly sat down on the floor facing the makeshift shrine that I had constructed by hand with scrap wood and leftover model paint, cleared my mind of all thoughts, and began to pray. I don’t know exactly who I was praying to, but I did know exactly what I was praying for.
Success.
I sat quietly and meditated, trying to open myself to the universe and receive some sort of divine intervention, imagining that every cell in my body would be transformed and empowered, providing me with the supernatural abilities that my heroes must have had in order to transcend time and space with their music. There must have been some intangible, mystical element at play, I thought, and I was desperate to tap into that, so I performed my primitive rite with the intense, earnest conviction of a seventeen-year-old with nothing to lose.
The flickering candles at each corner of the board spilled their yellow light onto the cold concrete floor of my carport, illuminating the symbols I had drawn to summon the spirits that would guide me to my destiny: the John Bonham three-circles logo and the number 606, two emblems that held deep significance in my life. With my own form of telepathy, I listed my deepest desires in the hope that someone, something, somewhere, would heed my call and answer my prayers in time. Manifestation was not a practice I was well versed in, but I did have faith in the idea that if you can perceive it, you can achieve it. With the help of the universe, this was my intention. Or, to go toward the sacred:
What you think, you become,
What you feel, you attract,
What you imagine, you create.
Some refer to this as the “Law of Attraction,” the idea that the universe creates for you what your mind focuses upon. As a teenager, I knew nothing about this concept, but from an early age I did believe very deep down that anything was possible if I devoted myself to it entirely. At best, my options in life were slim at this point. With no high school diploma and no family money, I was destined to live paycheck to paycheck, with music being my driver, which was thankfully enough to keep my spirit from dying. All I could do was dream. So, dream I did. But I no longer just fantasized about someday “making it” as a musician. I was intent on subpoenaing the unknown to take me there.
Courtesy of the author’s personal archives
What inspired me to take such drastic and extreme measures?
There is a theory out there that most musicians decide their creative path in life between the ages of eleven and thirteen. This is the golden window of opportunity where independence and identity intersect, a most treacherous phase in any child’s life where you become your own person, no longer just your parents’ accessory. A time to discover who YOU are, and if you happen to have any sort of musical inclination and drive, chances are you will decide this is who you will be for the rest of your life. A musician. I believe in this theory, because it is exactly what happened to me.
There was a time when music was just a sound to me. Simple nursery rhymes and radio jingles that I would mindlessly sing along to for fun, floating in one ear and out the other. Songs were just intermittent melodies and rhythms that would come and go like the wind, never completely taking hold of my heart, just moving the air that I breathed and filling time between life’s more important moments. UNTIL ONE DAY THEY BECAME THE AIR THAT I BREATHED.
It’s hard to explain this feeling to someone who doesn’t share the same affliction. It’s similar to being possessed, I would imagine, though I can’t verify this by personal experience as of yet. When your heart, mind, and soul cannot control or refuse the desire to create a sound, or lyric, or rhythm, and you are helpless against the burning impulse to purge these inner demons, you are forever committed to a lifetime of chasing the next song. If it weren’t such a sublime affliction, it could very well be considered a curse.
By the time music got its hooks in me, I became hopelessly preoccupied with every aspect of its construction, throwing all other childhood interests out the window. Nothing else fascinated and stimulated my mind as much as the composition and arrangement of a song, and every waking hour was spent unraveling this mystery. Having no true music training, I didn’t refer to the sound as “notes” on paper; it became shapes that I could see in my head as I listened intently to the multiple layers of instruments. Like colorful building blocks stacked upon each other, music became something that I could “see,” a neurological condition known as synesthesia, where when one sense is activated (hearing) and another unrelated sense (vision) is activated at the same time. My inability to read music sharpened my musical memory, because the only way I could retain information was to take a mental snapshot of it in my head, which honed my ability to focus. It was the handicap of not having lessons or even an actual drum set to learn on that challenged me and made me work even harder to get better, to find a way to succeed. I know that now.
At an early age, I started to play the drums with my teeth, sliding my jaw back and forth and chomping up and down to simulate the sound of a drum set in my mouth, doing drum rolls and grace notes as if I were using my hands, without anyone ever noticing. As I walked to school every morning, I would hum melodies and perform drum parts with my teeth, playing my favorite songs and writing original compositions until I walked through the front door and unloaded my backpack into my locker. It was my best-kept secret, almost as if I was silently practicing drumming all day long in my head, which taught me new tricks to try once I sat down at an actual kit. During one childhood visit to the dentist, the doctor inspected my pearly whites, backed up, and asked, “Do you chew a lot of ice?” Puzzled, I replied, “Ummmm . . . I don’t think so?” He informed me that I had an unusual amount of deterioration from something wearing down my teeth, and I immediately knew the culprit. “I can play the drums with my teeth!” I proudly exclaimed. Baffled, he stared at me as if I were a crazy person, so I told him to come closer, and he bent down, putting his ear just centimeters from my mouth. I proceeded to perform Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” for him, my jaw moving back and forth at lightning speed, the sound of calcium and enamel being chipped away like a tap dancer on a brittle stage, and his eyed widened as he stepped back in shock, telling me that I might want to reconsider this strange and orally detrimental habit. But there was no turning back. I was cursed to a lifetime of orthodontic percussion.
I have only met one other person in my life who followed this same abnormal practice: Kurt Cobain. It is most noticeable during our MTV Unplugged performance that we filmed in New York City in November 1993. You can see Kurt’s jaw clenching and moving side to side at certain points in the show, because it served as a sort of metronome while he strummed his guitar. To me, this made perfect sense, as every musician creates his own individual “feel.” There is an internal rhythm that each musician follows, and no two are the same. As I wrote in the foreword of Chad Kushins’s John Bonham biography, Beast, this concept is hard to define:
Every musician plays differently, we know this, but there must be something intangible that differentiates the music written on a chart from what is created by one drummer to the next. Is it the way that each mind interprets a pattern? The internal clock that is defined by one’s physical and emotional construct? The way they see the space between the notes? I have watched many producers try to explain and manufacture “feel,” but I am convinced that over-intellectualizing it is futile. It is somet
hing divine that only the universe can create, like a heartbeat or a star. A solitary design within every musician that is only their own. I liken “feel” to the cadence of poetry, sometimes comforting, other times unsettling, but always a gift from one soul to another. A romance between the giver and receiver which serves as the punctation of one’s truth.
And it was John Bonham’s “feel” that brought me to that fateful night in front of my makeshift altar in the carport.
I had been listening to Led Zeppelin since I was a little kid, as their songs were on permanent rotation on the rock and roll stations of my youth, but it wasn’t until I became a drummer that I noticed the confounding mystery of John Bonham’s sound and fell head over heels in love with their entire catalog. When I listened to his drumming, I literally heard voices speaking to me, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes in a scream. This was something that I never experienced while listening to any other drummer, and at times it almost scared me. There was something about the space between his notes that made the electrical impulses in my brain stutter, and time would slow in the milliseconds before each snare drum hit, as if I were falling into a crushing black hole over and over again. The weight behind his groove was more than physical, it was spiritual, and as hard as I tried to emulate his playing, I finally realized that it was no use because this was more than drumming, it was a language of his own, his irreplicable DNA laid bare on vinyl.