The Storyteller

by Dave Grohl

  Los Angeles fascinated me, almost as much as the centuries of history in Europe, but in a much different way. Everything seemed so . . . unbelievable. As much as Washington, DC, could be considered a transient town, with its social dynamic shifting dramatically with every new administration, L.A. seemed to change minute by minute. Like it was the world’s largest Greyhound bus station, people came and went through a revolving door of opportunity and demise, leaving their filth behind for the next wave of visitors to wade through in hope that they would be the next big thing. There was a sadness that seemed to be masked by excess and overindulgence, making the hangovers just a little bit harder to drink away the morning after. And nothing could be more sobering than waking up in a sleeping bag on a mud wrestler’s floor, praying that your band member didn’t leave you high and dry. Again.

  By six P.M., there was no sign of Skeeter, so we regretfully had to call and cancel the gig that we had booked for that night. Reality started to sink in. No Skeeter meant no show. No show meant no money. No money meant no food. And no tour meant no way home, leaving me to consider the nightmarish scenario of spending the rest of my life in the dismal desperation of America’s most glamorous city, wading through the filth as its latest victim. We had dug ourselves out of countless holes over the years, but this one seemed particularly deep.

  The days passed, and through the charity of our mud-wrestling roommates, who came home every night emptying their purses full of dollar bills into big piles on the living room carpet, we managed to survive like the strays that we were. Food was scarce, and the hunger soon set in. Our roadie, Barry the Canadian, was having his Social Security checks sent down to help keep us from starving, but they only lasted so long. To this day, I will never use the expression “doesn’t amount to a can of beans,” because I remember one day finding a can of beans in that kitchen and its actually saving my fucking life. Times were surely tough, but having been conditioned to survive any challenge from years on the road, I tried my best to keep my head up. It wasn’t easy.

  I eventually took a job tiling a coffee shop in Costa Mesa for some spare cash, but as time went by it became more and more evident that we weren’t heading home any time soon. Barry eventually went back to Canada after realizing that ours was a dead-end situation, understandably so. I was starting to feel hopeless and needed even a tiny sense of relief or rescue from our slowly sinking ship. Our gear was gathering dust in the downstairs garage of Sabrina’s house, but after a week or so I noticed something else gathering dust in that little garage: a black 1985 Honda Rebel 250 cc motorcycle. Like a Fisher-Price version of a Harley-Davidson, it was a glorious little machine, only one step above a moped, but perfect for darting around town. Having always dreamed of owning a motorcycle (literally a recurring dream throughout my life), I raced upstairs and inquired about who owned this glamorized minibike. Turns out it belonged to one of Sabrina’s mud-wrestling roommates, who said, “Sure, take it! Just fill it up with gas and it’s all yours!”

  MY LIFEBOAT WAS LOWERED.

  Without a license or helmet (headgear not required in those days), I waited for the sun to go down, filled the Rebel’s tiny tank with gas, and took off through the hills, avoiding any major thoroughfares for fear of getting pulled over and, well . . . because I didn’t know how to ride a fucking motorcycle. I left all of my troubles behind on the floor of that cluttered living room as I wandered aimlessly through the neighborhood around Sabrina’s Laurel Canyon house and spent hours driving through the winding maze of the affluent Hollywood Hills, looking down at the shimmering lights of the city below and looking up at the countless gorgeous houses nestled in the trees, dreaming of one day living in such luxury. Each one was no doubt occupied by a rock star, or a movie star, or a producer or director who had followed their dreams and somehow struck gold, and I wondered how it must feel to achieve that level of success, how it must feel to live in such comfort, and how it must feel to know where your next meal is coming from. The chasm between this fantasy and my reality was so wide, so unimaginable, it wasn’t even worth pondering. So, I just drove. This was my escape. This was my temporary rescue. This was my lifeboat from the ship slowly sinking in the distance. And as I sped through the night, I took stock of all the things that had brought me to this place, retracing my steps while trying to plan the next. Night after night I followed this routine, waking up every morning in my sleeping bag on the living room floor with my eyes practically swollen shut from the dust and dirt of the canyon roads, back to the reality of being a mud wrestler’s stray pet.

  AND THEN I HEARD THE FIVE WORDS THAT CHANGED MY LIFE FOREVER: “HAVE YOU HEARD OF NIRVANA?”

  On a phone call with an old friend who had grown up with the guys from Nirvana in the tiny town of Aberdeen, Washington, I was informed that they were in between drummers at the time and had seen Scream perform just weeks before on our ill-fated tour. Apparently, they were impressed with my playing, and I was given their phone numbers to call. Of course, I had heard Nirvana. Their debut album, Bleach, was a landmark record in the underground music scene, blending metal, punk, and Beatles-esque melody into an eleven-song masterpiece that would go on to change the landscape of “alternative” music (while coincidentally costing $606 to make). It had quickly become one of my favorites and stood apart from all of the other noisy, heavy punk records in my collection because it had SONGS. And that voice . . . no one had a voice like that . . .

  After a few more days of frustration and starvation, I decided to roll the dice and call the bass player of Nirvana, Krist, to inquire about the drummer gig. Having never met him, I introduced myself and explained that our mutual friend had given me his number, so we chatted awhile until Krist regretfully informed me that the position of drummer was already taken by their good friend Dan Peters from Mudhoney. It had been worth a shot, I thought, but it wasn’t the end of the world. I left my Los Angeles number with Krist and told him to keep in touch and give me a shout if they ever happened to come down to L.A., since it was beginning to look like the City of Angels was unfortunately now my permanent residence.

  That same night, the house phone rang. It was Krist calling back. Seems he had given the matter more thought. “Maybe you should talk to Kurt,” he said. Danny Peters, although an amazing drummer in his own right, had a very different style than mine, playing with a more sixties rudimental feel as opposed to my simplistic, Neanderthal disco dynamic, which seemed a bit more up Nirvana’s alley. Plus, Krist and Kurt felt a bit guilty taking Danny from Mudhoney, one of their favorite bands of all time. So, I immediately called Kurt and we talked music for a while. From NWA to Neil Young, Black Flag to the Beatles, the Cramps to Creedence Clearwater Revival, we found that we had a lot in common musically and that an audition might be worth pursuing. “Well, if you can make it up here, just let us know,” he nonchalantly said in a drawl the world now knows. We said goodbye, and I was now faced with one of my life’s most difficult decisions.

  From the day I’d joined Scream, I’d felt a part of a family. Though I was much younger than Pete, Franz, and Skeeter, they always treated me as an equal, and we became best friends, spending almost every day together, tour or no tour. I had spent the most important, formative years of my life with them, discovering music, discovering the world, and in turn discovering myself, so to move on and leave them behind in that sinking ship pained my heart in a way I had never felt, even more than saying goodbye to my own father when he disowned me for dropping out of high school. We had always been in this together, all for one and one for all, and we had overcome so much shit. But there was a finality to this new crisis that made me question my future. So, as I did whenever I questioned my future, whenever I needed a voice of reason or some words of wisdom, I called the one person who had never once in my life steered me wrong . . .

  My mother.

  On a collect call from the parking lot of a record store in Orange County, I tearfully explained my dilemma, and she understood entirely, because deep down she fel
t the same about Pete and Franz as I did. We had ALL become a family over the years, and she considered them to be much more than my bandmates; they were my brothers. To this day, I will never forget the sound of her voice giving me the advice that steered my life in its ultimate direction.

  “David . . . I know that you love your friends, but sometimes you have to put your needs ahead of others’. You have to take care of yourself.” Coming from a woman whose entire life was the exact opposite of that, this completely shocked me, but because she was the wisest person I knew, I hung up the phone and decided to follow her guidance, regardless of the consequences.

  I packed up my duffel bag, my sleeping bag, and my drum set into a cardboard moving box and headed up to Seattle, a town I had only visited once and where I knew virtually no one, leaving one life behind to start another one. I felt a loss that I had never experienced before. I missed my home. I missed my friends. I missed my family. I was now truly on my own, back to square one, starting over. But I was still hungry. And, having never been one to let my wheels spin, I had to keep going. After all, I was also still free, and there was adventure around every corner.

  I still drive past that old house, that sinking ship in Laurel Canyon, almost every day, and as the years have passed it has slowly collapsed under its own weight, disappearing under the surface in time. But the memories and lessons I learned during that period have yet to fade, and I now take my own lifeboat for a nighttime spin whenever I need to take stock, retrace my steps while trying to plan the next.

  BECAUSE EVERY DAY IS STILL A BLANK PAGE, WAITING TO WRITE ITSELF.

  It’s a Forever Thing

  “Do you mind if we take a break? I’ve never done a tribal tattoo before.”

  Believe me, these are not the words you want to hear from a man drilling a needle full of black ink a thousand times per second into your skin as you desperately try to endure the burning pain of being permanently branded without screaming like a newborn. But the beads of sweat running down his forehead and his squinting red eyes were surely not a good sign, so with a quick and painful wipe from a paper towel, I got up from my chair and retreated outside for a quick smoke. The intricate design I had personally drawn (based on the classic John Bonham “three circles” logo) needed to be razor sharp, with straight, even lines and perfect circles intertwined to make a piece that would wrap around my right wrist like a menacing Celtic bracelet. No easy task, even for a seasoned professional, but his weary frustration was certainly none too reassuring. Nevertheless, it had to be right, and at this point there was no turning back.

  AFTER ALL, IT’S A FOREVER THING.

  It was the fall of 1990 in Olympia, Washington, and I had just received my first check as a paid member of Nirvana. A whopping four hundred bucks, it was by far the biggest payday of my professional life up until that point. This much-needed advance from our newly hired management company, Gold Mountain, came at a time when Nirvana was being courted by every major-label record company known to man in an all-out bidding war, yet Kurt and I were literally starving and living in complete squalor. Our apartment at 114 NE Pear Street was the back unit of a dilapidated old house built around 1914, with one bedroom, one bathroom, a small living room, and a kitchen the size of a broom closet (ironically located just across the street from the Washington State lottery building). Versailles, it was not. “Unclean” doesn’t even begin to describe the carnage within. It made the Chelsea Hotel look like a Four Seasons. Whitney Houston’s bathroom turned upside down. A trailer-park-tornado aftermath of ashtrays and magazines. Most people would never dare to step foot in such a disastrous cave, but it was our humble abode, and we called it home. Kurt occupied the bedroom, while I slept in my sleeping bag on an old brown couch littered with cigarette burns, which fell far short of my six-foot frame. At the end of the couch sat an old table where Kurt kept a pet turtle in a putrid terrarium. A true lover of animals, Kurt had an intriguing, perhaps metaphorical appreciation for turtles, as their shells, the thing that most protected them, were actually quite sensitive. “Like having your spine on the outside of your body,” he once said. But as beautiful and anatomically poetic as that sentiment may have been, it eventually made no difference to me, as this goddamned reptile kept me awake every night by tapping its head against the glass for hours on end in an attempt to escape our shared den of filth. I couldn’t blame the poor thing. I often felt the same.

  Courtesy of the author’s personal archives

  At the time, I had figured out how to survive off a three-for-ninety-nine-cents corn dog special at the Ampm gas station across the street. The trick was to eat one for breakfast (at noon) and save the other two for a late dinner after rehearsal, holding me over until the hunger pangs set in again and I was forced to shamefully wander back into the fluorescent glow of the convenience store lights with another crumpled dollar bill in my hand. (Still to this day, I shudder at the sight of a battered frank skewered on a sharp wooden stick.) Purely sustenance, it was just enough to keep my twenty-one-year-old metabolism whirring, though sadly it lacked any real nutritional benefit. This malnourished diet, coupled with my penchant for playing the drums five nights a week with every fiber of my scrawny being, had reduced me to a virtual waiflike marionette, barely filling out the dirty old clothes that I kept in a duffel bag on the floor in the corner of the living room. It was more than enough to drive anyone back to the comforts of their mother’s home cooking with their tail between their legs, but I was 2,786 miles from Springfield, Virginia. And I was free.

  “I wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger,” sang Ronnie Wood on the Faces’ classic 1973 hit “Ooh La La.” Oh, Ronnie . . . if you only knew. Truer words have never been spoken. This four-hundred-dollar advance was by far the most money I had ever seen in my life! In my mind, I was now Warren fucking Buffett! I grew up as the son of a Fairfax County public school teacher, so my childhood was far from frivolous and I learned to live well within my means, working to make ends meet as best I could while finding happiness in the simple things in life. Music, friends, and family. Never had I made such a bounty mowing lawns, painting houses, prepping furniture for delivery trucks, or manning the cash register at a Tower Records in downtown Washington, DC. As far as I was concerned, this was the big time. I had finally hit the jackpot, but rather than save and budget this grand reward in an effort to ensure survival (imagine the mountains of corn dogs!), I did what most young musicians do with their first check: I blew it on bullshit.

  In hindsight, I now understand why I went straight to the Fred Meyer department store to buy a BB gun and a Nintendo console. Clearly, I was indulging in the childhood luxuries that I had fantasized about having when I was young but never received. Not to say that I was an unhappy or deprived child, but any spare money in my household was saved for more practical things like new shoes or winter jackets (there once may have been a fifty-dollar minibike, but that’s another story). My tireless mother worked multiple jobs to make ends meet: schoolteacher by day; department store clerk by night; estimate writer for a carpet cleaning service, Servpro, on the weekends. As a single mother with two young mouths to feed, she did everything she possibly could to keep us happy and healthy. And we were. A genuine altruist in every sense of the word, she raised me to need very little and to give very much. Her work ethic is deeply ingrained in me, and I undoubtedly have her to thank for where I am today. The nagging feeling that I need to be productive that keeps me up at night and wakes me up in the morning can be directly traced to those long nights she would spend grading papers at the living room desk under an old lamp, only to wake before the sun to ensure that my sister and I walked out the front door bathed, dressed, and fed. Granted, my job is nothing compared to her career as an educator, but I now understand the importance of hard work, thanks to her. So, four hundred dollars for playing loud, dissonant rock and roll? Free money!

  Soon, our afternoons in Olympia were spent shooting cartons of eggs from a distance in the backyard of our old
house and playing Super Mario World until the sun came up (we may or may not have taken a few potshots at the lottery building across the street in the name of the revolution). Our squalid den of filth was now transformed into an adolescent recreation center from hell. To me, this was Versailles. However, since I had no foresight or regard for practical spending, the money quickly dwindled, and I was left with just enough cash for one last ridiculous indulgence: a tattoo. Not my first, mind you. No, that was a self-inflicted masterpiece that I gave myself with a sewing needle, some thread, and a jar of black ink at the age of fourteen. After seeing the gritty homemade-tattoo scene from Uli Edel’s cinematic masterpiece, Christiane F., I decided to bedazzle my left forearm in that same DIY fashion with the logo of my favorite band at the time, Black Flag. Once I had assembled all of the necessary elements from the cluttered junk drawers around the house, I waited until everyone was asleep, set up a makeshift tattoo studio in my bedroom, and began my nefarious operation. Just as I had seen in the movie, I sterilized the sewing needle with fire from a candle, carefully wrapped the thin thread around the tip, and dipped it into the jar of ink, watching the fibers soak up the thick black liquid. Then, with a steady hand, I began. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. The sting of the needle as it punctured my epidermis sent chills down my spine, over and over again, and I stopped every now and then to wipe away the excess of blurred pigment and survey the damage. Kat Von D, I was not, but I persevered, digging the needle in as deep as my pain threshold would allow to ensure this meaningful image would never fade. If you’re familiar with the iconic Black Flag logo, you know that it is four thick, black vertical bars in staggered succession. A tall order for a derelict teen with his mother’s rarely used sewing kit. I somehow managed to make it through three of the four bars before I said, “Fuuuuck this shit!” and stopped. Not the pièce de résistance I was hoping for, but my heart was now ripe with a feeling of finality that somehow empowered me. A forever thing.