by Dave Grohl
Courtesy of Virginia Grohl’s personal archives
Courtesy of Virginia Grohl’s personal archives
As the record company filed in, we hung with Iggy in the tiny dressing room offstage, smoking cigarettes and listening to stories from his fabled career. THIS MADMAN, REVERED FOR LIVE PERFORMANCES WHERE HE SMEARED PEANUT BUTTER ALL OVER HIS BODY, CUT HIMSELF WITH SHARDS OF GLASS, AND EXPOSED HIMSELF TO THE AUDIENCE, WAS NOTHING BUT A FRIENDLY, WARM, DOWN-TO-EARTH GENTLEMAN. As if things couldn’t get any weirder! He made us feel entirely welcome, and soon our nerves turned to excited anticipation. Every now and then there would be a knock at the door, and a label representative would ask, “Need anything?” Skeeter and I quickly realized that these people thought we were ACTUALLY Iggy’s band! So, without hesitation, we began to see how much we could milk this already unimaginable experience. “A pack of smokes?” Done. “A case of beer?” No problem. “A carton of smokes?” Absolutely. It then hit me: This is what it feels like to make it. No sleeping in a freezing van with four other guys, lined up like sardines in sleeping bags on a plywood platform, rationing a $7.50 per diem on Taco Bell and shitty weed. No going home and begging for my job back every time a tour was over, patiently waiting for another to take me away from my high-school-dropout reality. No waiting in littered alleyways for your shot at some imaginary stardom. I knew that this feeling of success was fleeting, so instead of just a taste, I took a mouthful.
We hit the stage and were greeted with applause like I had never experienced before: Iggy Pop–sized applause. “FUUUUCK YOOOOU!!!” he screamed into the mike as we counted into the first song, “1969,” and the crowd went wild. No longer that warm, down-to-earth gentleman I had just befriended backstage, he was instantly transformed into the Iggy punk fans all over the globe know and love. Tearing through song after song, I barely had time to reflect on the full-circle nature of this incredible twist of fate, so with head down, I surrendered to the moment and beat the living shit out of that big yellow drum set like it was my last night on earth. Every now and then I would look up through my greasy hair to see his chiseled, crooked frame stalking the stage like in all of those iconic one-dimensional photos and videos I had seen a thousand times before. Except now, he was three-dimensional, reassuring me that life is indeed real and that I am not alone. It was over within a matter of minutes, far too soon, and with free cigarettes and beer in in hand, we thanked Iggy and went our separate ways. I HAD FINALLY “MADE IT,” EVEN IF ONLY FOR ONE NIGHT, AND IT WAS JUST LIKE I’D ALWAYS DREAMED IT WOULD BE. Too good to be true. So, without the least bit of disappointment, I appreciated it for the beautiful experience that it was. It was practically delusional to expect I would ever be in the right place at the right time again. What were the odds?
Our Scream tour continued, though not without complication. The shows that we were to play throughout the Midwest in order to get us to the West Coast were canceled, meaning we had to make the four-thousand-mile drive to Olympia, Washington, with nothing but those free cigarettes and the cash in our pockets. Having nothing left to lose, we decided to go for it. After all, we had made it this far; what was another long trip across America?
Little did we know it would be our last.
Every Day Is a Blank Page
Courtesy of the author’s personal archives
“Anyone seen Skeeter?”
A bit hungover from another wild night in Laurel Canyon, we all began to rise from our sleeping bags on the crowded living room floor of the dilapidated Hollywood bungalow that we had been sharing with a few Hollywood Tropicana mud wrestlers and took a head count. Pete, check. Franz, check. Barry, check. But Skeeter was nowhere to be found. There’s still time, I thought, as we didn’t need to be at soundcheck for that night’s gig until later in the day, so crawling back into the comfort of my little cocoon for another few hours of sleep, I closed my eyes and crossed my fingers that, first and foremost, Skeeter was okay, but also that he hadn’t left us stranded on tour thousands of miles from home with no money and no way back. A legitimate concern, considering that he’d pulled a disappearing act before.
By 1990, my travels with Scream had taken me from Louisiana to Ljubljana, Memphis to Milan, San Francisco to Stockholm, and at this point I had become a hardened road veteran, no stranger to the occasional crisis or conflict, so having one member missing in action was just another day in the life on tour. What had once been a crash course in how to survive on less than $10 a day in a van was now a familiar, comfortable routine, and I had assimilated into the life of a wandering vagabond quite easily.
The European tours were especially exciting; we visited countries that I had seen only on the nightly news or read about in my painfully neglected textbooks. But rather than the usual historic tourist sites that most people experience when traveling overseas, I was discovering the world from the seedy underbelly of the underground punk rock scene. Since Scream had toured Europe once before I joined the band, they had already established a network that took us in like family, giving us places to stay, food to eat, and equipment to use on tour since we had no money to ship our own instruments from home. Most of those friends were musicians as well, and most lived in squats, abandoned buildings that were filled with punks and anarchists, often pirating utilities from the city grid to survive. These communities of radicals were not only intriguing to my young, impressionable mind but also inspiring, as life in these makeshift communes was broken down to the most basic human elements, forgoing the trappings of conventional existence (materialism, greed, and social status) for a life of protest, freedom, and the understanding that we all need each other to get by. I found it all to be quite beautiful, worlds away from the suburban white-picket-fence syndrome I had left behind at home. The simple trade of a warm bed for a song created the foundation for my appreciation of being a musician, one that I still rely on to this day and use to get perspective when I feel lost in the tsunami of my now much more complicated life.
Amsterdam had become our home base for plenty of reasons, some obvious (weed), some simply logistical (proximity to northern Europe). We would usually save up our hard-earned money working our menial day jobs at home and fly standby on a Dutch airline called Martinair for ninety-nine bucks a pop, arrive at Schiphol international airport, steal a bike the first night, and spend the next few weeks preparing for our tour by making phone calls with a pirated phone card, rounding up gear, and renting a van that would become our home for the next few months. For extra cash, we would return bottles at the night shop, try our hand at the gambling machines in the bars, and even take odd jobs here and there to make ends meet. (I once worked at a small mail-order record company named Konkurrent, stuffing boxes full of albums to be shipped all over the world, just to support my weed habit until the tour started.) It was bare bones, but the hospitality and camaraderie shown to us by our gracious friends made us feel like we were living in the lap of luxury, and I eventually fell in love with the city so much that I even attempted to learn Dutch, a language that I’m convinced is impossible to speak if you weren’t born in Holland.
BUT, MORE THAN ANYTHING, I WAS FREE, AND THERE WAS ADVENTURE AROUND EVERY CORNER.
One night in Amsterdam as we were all hanging out drinking on the sidewalk in front of our favorite punk rock bar, De Muur, there was a sudden burst of energy across the street at the Vrankrijk, one of Holland’s most infamous squats. An army of skinheads and right-wing fascists had organized an attack on the building, and as they came marching up the small street, the residents of the Vrankrijk prepared for battle. Blinding floodlights turned on from the balconies, and chicken wire came down over the windows as punks began pouring out of the squat with makeshift weapons and shields. A full-on riot broke out, and before long we all joined in, throwing our glasses of beer high into the air, raining them down on the crowd of angry fascists in explosions of shattered glass like catapults launching warm malted grenades. Within minutes, the intruders surrendered and ran off, and we continued on wit
h our night, now celebrating the rebellion like Vikings home from war. This wasn’t rock and roll. This was medieval shit.
And that was just a Tuesday night.
Traveling Europe’s gorgeous countryside became my favorite pastime, more so than rolling down the long, monotonous superhighways of our American trips, but it came with its own unique set of challenges. As we jumped from country to country, we were faced with a new language every week, and communication was reduced to a primitive version of sign language that bordered on ridiculous miming. That being said, I was learning about languages and cultures I never would have experienced in school, and the physicality of actually being in these places deepened my understanding of the world as a community, which is much smaller than most imagine. But the border crossings were always interesting . . . imagine the delight of a customs official when a gang of young punks would pull up in a van bearing Netherlands license plates (big red flag) and filled with guitars and amplifiers (bigger red flag). Like shooting fish in a barrel, they would line us up like convicts on the sidewalk and tear our van to shreds looking for any and all contraband. (I must admit, I’ve been subjected to more than a few body cavity searches over the years.) Though, having watched the 1978 film Midnight Express one too many times, we were all responsible enough to know to smoke up all our weed or hash before crossing any border, for fear of rotting away in a dark, dank prison. That being said, there was always a way to get around “the man.” Whether stuffing our speaker cabinets full of Scream T-shirts to sell at shows (our bread and butter on the road) to avoid taxation from country to country or hiding small chunks of hash in Skeeter’s dreadlocks so that we’d all have something to smoke on the long drives between shows (nothing like watching our bassist play with the drug dog at the border, knowing full well that his tangled mop was filled with ounces of spicy black hash), we did what we had to do to get by. But not without a few close calls along the way.
Once, when walking down an alleyway in Amsterdam with my old friend Marco Pisa, an Italian tattoo artist who I had met in Bologna when I painted his tattoo studio in exchange for a beautiful branding on my left shoulder, we were approached by two junkies trying to sell us heroin. Neither of us were fans of heroin (or junkies), so Marco politely declined with a stern “Fuck off!” and we kept walking. They persisted, following us closely, tapping our shoulders, and in a flash, Marco whipped out a switchblade with ninja speed and repeated, “FUCK OFF!” Stunned, I turned to walk away, but in the corner of my eye noticed one of the junkies about to hit me full force in the head with a metal pipe he had picked up from a construction site we were walking past. Marco and I took off like a shot, chased by a pack of screaming zombies, barely outrunning them before having a nice Thai lunch by the scenic canals.
It was enough to make anyone want to pack up and fly back to the comfort of their warm bed at home, but it was this element of danger that kept me from doing exactly that. FROM DODGY RENTAL VEHICLES DRIVING THROUGH APOCALYPTIC SCANDINAVIAN SNOWSTORMS AT NIGHT, TO PASSPORTS BEING STOLEN FROM YOUR ROOM AS YOU SLEPT, TO FISTFIGHTS WITH DRUNKEN ASSHOLES TRYING TO STEAL GEAR OR SWAG FROM THE VAN, EVERY DAY WAS A BLANK PAGE, WAITING TO WRITE ITSELF.
Even in the depths of my frustration and starvation, I never once entertained the idea of surrender. What did I have to go back to? Begging my boss at the furniture warehouse to let me come back to ten-hour days of coating garish sleeper sofas with toxic 3M chemicals? A lifetime of crippling rush-hour traffic, counting the strip malls and fast-food restaurants on every corner? I would rather have lain delirious in a tiny Spanish apartment, shivering in a pool of my own sweat from a debilitating flu as the sound of Barcelona’s bustling Las Ramblas district echoed below. I’d rather have slept on a cold nightclub stage in Linköping, Sweden, after the show as paramedics rushed in to save someone dying from a drug overdose. I’d rather have pulled in to play a squat in Italy where they were burning their linens outside after a scabies outbreak, or been warned not to eat the pasta prepared by a local promoter who was attempting to poison us in retribution for a broken toilet.
Ride or die, as they say.
But perhaps it was this life of instability that made Skeeter abandon us the first time. On what would ultimately be my last European tour with Scream, in the spring of 1990, he decided that, for whatever reason, he just couldn’t hang and flew home, leaving us stranded on another continent thousands of miles away. Fortunately we had our good friend Guy Pinhas fill in for a few shows so that we could finish the tour with just enough money to catch the standby flights back on El Al airlines, but I was beginning to think that maybe Skeeter’s dedication to the band wasn’t the same as Pete’s, Franz’s, and mine. We would have done anything and everything to keep the wheels from falling off.
Though none of us were irreplaceable, the chemistry between the four of us was undeniable, and Skeeter and I had a certain groove together, something that he had instilled in me years before at one of our early rehearsals, and something that was sorely missed when we played with a substitute bassist. I was like a wild pony when I first joined Scream, playing as fast and as hard as I could, placing meaningless drum fills at the end of every phrase to impress anyone within earshot. One day, Skeeter sat me down, rolled an enormous joint from the paper wrapper of a tampon found in the bathroom, and got me so fucking high I could barely see straight. “Okay, we’re gonna play one riff, the same riff, for thirty minutes and you’re not going to do one drumroll,” he said. Easy, I thought. I sat down behind my kit and he began to play his silky bass line, part reggae, part Motown, and I confidently joined in. It wasn’t forty-five seconds before I felt the urge to do a drumroll, but he shook his head and warned me not to do it, so I continued on with the groove. A minute later, I again felt the insatiable need to do a crazy drumroll, almost like a form of musical Tourette’s or holding back a sneeze, but Skeeter just shook his head. Essentially, Skeeter was breaking the wild pony, training me to respect the simplicity and power of a groove, teaching me to refrain from gratuitous bluster. After thirty minutes, I was an entirely different drummer. This was perhaps the most valuable musical lesson of my entire life, and I am forever indebted to him for that.
Courtesy of the author’s personal archives
The few replacements that filled his shoes on the following tours were great players, but when Skeeter offered to return it was hard to say no, even though we worried that he’d pull his disappearing act again. Things actually seemed to be looking up for the band at the time, as we had just recorded a new batch of songs that caught the attention of a fellow punk rocker turned music business insider who offered to help us find a place for it at a much bigger label. A friend of a friend, and well respected in the punk rock scene as a man of great integrity, he offered us a contract to sign that would allow him to shop our tape around and find us a deal. This could be it, we thought. Maybe this was our ticket out of the alleyways full of junkies and scabies-infested squats that we had grown accustomed to over the years. As tempting as it was to sign it right there and then, we decided to think about it before trusting our lives to a complete stranger.
It wasn’t until one sweltering-hot day in Spokane months later, stranded in the parking lot of a Denny’s after multiple shows across the country had been canceled, that we pulled out the contract and read it in the back of our van, thinking that we had nothing to lose. Because at this point, we truly didn’t. The walls seemed to be closing in, and no matter how hard we tried, it never seemed hard enough. Without any legal representation present, we signed that contract out of sheer desperation, a reckless act of naiveté. One that eventually came back to haunt me a year later, when that “punk rock man of great integrity” sued me, a twenty-one-year-old kid, for joining Nirvana, basically claiming he owned me. This, ladies and gentlemen, was my introduction to the music industry.
At least we had Los Angeles to look forward to.
Los Angeles was always the highlight of every tour, not just because of the obvious bells and whistles
that came along with a few days in hairspray heaven, but because we had family there: Pete and Franz’s sister, Sabrina. Sabrina was the most fun, bubbliest, most beautiful woman you had ever seen, and had traded the sleepy suburbs of Virginia for the glamour of L.A. sometime in the late eighties. Whenever we were in town, we would shack up at her place, and like an eighties video vixen chaperone, she would show us around, from the bright lights of the Sunset Strip to her place of business: the Hollywood Tropicana.
Sabrina was a mud wrestler.
For those unfamiliar with this rather fringe sport, it is the act of two people wrestling in a pit of “mud,” which is maybe not actual mud but something else that resembles Silly String and cooking oil (don’t ask me, I’ve never had the pleasure). Not necessarily sanctioned by the Olympic committee (yet), it is a very casual affair, usually consisting of one woman in a bikini versus a drunken businessman who blew the majority of his entertainment budget on the company card to get his ass handed to him by a five-foot-eleven supermodel in a neon swimsuit. I mean, these women gleefully beat the living shit out of these dudes, leaving most men to be carted away holding their ruptured genitals in screaming pain as the crowds roar with the ferocity of Romans in the Colosseum. As difficult as it may have been for Pete and Franz to see their younger sister step into a slippery pit of mud with a complete stranger, we would all go down for free drinks and collapse in fits of laughter as one by one each victim was carried off. And after the merciless slaughter, we would return to the Laurel Canyon bungalow that Sabrina shared with a few other mud wrestlers and party all night. “Slumming” is not a word that comes to mind.