The Storyteller

by Dave Grohl

  The darker side of music was something I was always attracted to sonically, but I began to realize that it wasn’t who I was as a person. Music had always represented light and life to me. Joy, even. I wanted to celebrate that we had found a way out of the tunnel. I wanted to let my freak flag fly. I didn’t want to hide away. I could understand how others might veer in the opposite direction, perhaps revisiting past unresolved traumas, but I finally felt emancipated from mine, and that felt good. Whether in the sand dunes of North Carolina or the tranquility of Virginia’s sleepy suburbs, I needed to find peace, and with this newfound freedom that success had afforded me, I was going to spend my time looking for it.

  The rest of my days in Los Angeles were passed bouncing around town in a rented white Volkswagen Cabriolet convertible (yes, I had a thing for convertibles at the time), swimming in strangers’ pools, jamming with friends, and calling the airlines every few days to change my return ticket to Seattle, extending my stay on Pete’s scorching-hot floor for a little more summer and a little more distance before heading back to the gray skies up north. I think, deep down, I knew what was waiting for me there.

  Finally, at the very last minute, I decided it was time to go and threw all of my belongings into the back of the Cabriolet with no time to spare, racing to LAX in the hope I would make my flight on time. I knew basically nothing about the tangled web of busy highways that crisscrossed the massive city, so I blindly started racing through the Valley at a dangerous speed, hoping that I was moving in the general direction of at least one entrance ramp. As I came screaming around a corner, I saw one only meters ahead of me, so I cranked the wheel to the right as hard as I could and . . . BAM!

  I slammed head-on into a tall curb at forty-five miles per hour, which not only dragged the front axle out from beneath the car but also triggered the airbag (which I didn’t know it had), which exploded ten inches from my face like a stick of dynamite. I spilled out of the car, bruised and battered, coughing from the smoky powder that shot out as it hit me in the face like a canvas bat, and called a tow truck. (Don’t be fooled by those safety commercials, ladies and gentlemen. An airbag, although a lifesaver, is not a soft silky pillow. That shit will fuck you up like a right uppercut from Mike Tyson.) After the truck arrived and the driver surveyed the damage, the welt on my left eye began to swell like a giant balloon, and he declared the car totaled.

  I called a cab and slithered back to Pete’s house with a black eye and my tail between my legs for another week’s stay, having completely destroyed a perfectly good Cabriolet convertible that cost only $12 a day. The extra week in Los Angeles gave me time to nurse my black eye but also time to think about what lay ahead. That divide between the three of us, and whether we could close it this time. The world had opened its ears to Nirvana. We were the unconventional freaks that the world was now watching. Could we survive?

  News came that Kurt was in a rehab facility in Los Angeles. Though concerned, I was not surprised. I took this as a good sign. As I was on the other side of town reconnecting with my old friends, maybe he was finding some light and peace of his own. Having never known anyone who had been to rehab, I naively imagined it to be a quick fix, like an appendectomy or having your tonsils removed. Outside of my father’s struggles with alcohol, I didn’t understand the true nature of addiction. I didn’t know the depths of Kurt’s, to be sure. I had yet to realize that the healing required to free yourself from the grips of this kind of sickness is a lifetime of repair—if you can hang on and stay out of the darkness.

  THERE WAS STILL SO MUCH TO LOOK FORWARD TO. WE HAD ONLY JUST BEGUN.

  Part Three

  The Moment

  Courtesy of the author’s personal archives

  He’s Gone

  Courtesy of the author’s personal archives

  “He’s gone, Dave.”

  My knees gave out and I dropped the phone as I fell to my bedroom floor, covering my face with my hands as I began to cry. He was gone. The shy young man who had offered me an apple upon our first introduction at the Seattle airport was gone. My quiet, introverted roommate who I’d shared a tiny little apartment with in Olympia was gone. The loving father who played with his beautiful baby daughter backstage every night before each show was gone.

  I was overcome with a more profound sadness than I had ever imagined. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t breathe. I could only picture his face, knowing that I would never see him again. I would never see his strange, flat fingers, or his skinny elbows, or his piercing blue eyes. Because he was gone. Forever.

  Moments later, the phone rang again. Still on the floor, I answered, barely able to speak through the tears and hyperventilation.

  “Hold on . . . he’s not dead. He’s still alive . . .”

  I jumped up from the soft carpet with my heart racing wildly. “Wait . . . are you sure??” I asked frantically.

  “Yes . . . he’s still in the hospital, but he’s gonna make it, Dave! He’s gonna make it.”

  In the course of five minutes I had gone from the darkest day of my entire life to feeling born again. I hung up the phone. I was in shock. I was numb. I wanted to laugh, or cry, or have a complete nervous breakdown. I was in a state of emotional limbo. I didn’t know what to feel.

  This was my first brush with death, and I was left utterly confused. I now knew the shattering pain of loss, but only for a brief moment before it was pushed aside like a hideous prank. My process of mourning was forever changed. From that day forward, losing someone close to me became a complicated exercise in waiting for that call to tell me that it was all just a mistake, that everything was fine, and then begging the pain to come to the surface when the phone never rang.

  You cannot predict a person’s sudden passing, but there are certain people in life that you prepare yourself to lose, for whatever reason. You foolishly try to protect yourself by building a wall around your heart as a sort of preemptive defense mechanism so that when you get that call, you are prepared somehow. Like being emotionally vaccinated, you have already built up an immunity to their inevitable passing.

  But this never works.

  It was March 3, 1994, when I woke up that morning in Seattle to the news that Kurt had overdosed in a hotel room in Rome. I immediately turned on the news and saw images of him strapped to a gurney as he was being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, so I frantically began calling everyone on our team to see what was going on, praying that it was just another accidental overdose, something that had happened before. There was confusion and conflicting reports; some were painfully dire, some were encouraging, but no matter how much I wanted to be there, I was five thousand miles away feeling totally helpless. After all, I had just seen Kurt two nights before in Munich, playing what would tragically become the last Nirvana show.

  From that day forward, I built my walls higher.

  And thirty-six days later, they closed in.

  News of Kurt’s death came early in the morning on April 8. Though, this time it was real. He was gone. There was no second phone call to right the wrong. To turn the tragedy around. It was final. I hung up the phone and waited for that same shattering pain to bring me to my knees again . . . but it didn’t come. It was stuck somewhere deep within me, blocked by the trauma from a month before when I had been left in a state of conflicted emotional confusion. I don’t remember much of that day other than turning on the news and hearing his name over and over again. Kurt Cobain. Kurt Cobain. Kurt Cobain. Each time his name was said, it slowly chipped away at the armor that I had designed to guard my heart. Kurt Cobain. Kurt Cobain. Kurt Cobain. I waited for the armor to be pierced, sending me to the floor one more time, but I wouldn’t let it. I fought back, too afraid to feel that pain again. Kurt was more than just a name to me; he was a friend, he was a father, he was a son, he was an artist, he was a human being, and over time he became the center of our universe, the point that our entire world orbited, but he was still just a young man wi
th so much to look forward to. WE had so much to look forward to.

  That night, we all joined together at his home to somehow try to comfort each other, but that comfort was hard to find, because no matter how many brushes with death he may have had, no one had imagined it would be like this. At least not me. There was shock, followed by despair, followed by remembrance, returning to shock. I looked around the living room full of people, all the different lives that he’d touched, each in a different way. Family members, lifelong friends, and more recent acquaintances, all mourning in their own ways. Life would never be the same for any of us, and we were now all forever bonded by this devastating event, a wound that would certainly scar. For years, I couldn’t drive within a mile of that house on Lake Washington without being shaken by crippling anxiety, remembering the sound of those cries.

  The next day, I woke up, walked to my kitchen, began to make coffee, and it hit me. He’s not coming back. He’s gone. But . . . I am still here. I get to wake and live another day, no matter how good or bad. It made no sense. How could someone just . . . disappear? It seemed unreal. And unfair.

  Life soon became a long series of firsts. My first cup of coffee since he disappeared. My first meal since he disappeared. My first phone call. My first drive, and so on and so forth. It seemed that every step I took was a step away from a time when he was alive, a succession of moments in which I had to relearn everything. I HAD TO LEARN TO LIVE AGAIN.

  “Empathy!” Kurt wrote in his suicide note, and there were times where I would beg my heart to feel the pain he must have felt. Ask for it to break. I would try to wring the tears from my eyes as I cursed those fucking walls I had built so high, because they kept me from the feelings I desperately needed to feel. I cursed that voice on the phone that had told me he had died prematurely, leaving me in this state of emotional confusion without a way of accessing the reservoir of sadness I needed to purge. I was held down by the weight of it, knowing that grief was eating me alive, even if it was buried deeper than I could reach. I was anesthetized when all I wanted was to feel the surgery required to cure me.

  I felt ashamed at times that I could not feel, but eventually I accepted that there is no right or wrong way to grieve. There is no textbook, no manual to refer to when in need of emotional guidance. It is a process that cannot be controlled, and you are hopelessly at the mercy of its grip, so you must surrender to it when it rears its ugly head, no matter the fear. Over the years, I have come to terms with this. To this day I am often overcome with that same profound sadness that sent me to the floor the first time I was told Kurt had died.

  Is it time that dictates the depth of your grief when losing someone? Is the emotional relevance simply determined by the number of days that you spent together? Those three and a half years that I knew Kurt, a relatively small window of time in the chronology of my life, shaped and in some ways still define who I am today. I will always be “that guy from Nirvana,” and I am proud of it.

  But without my childhood best friend Jimmy Swanson, I never would have even made it to Seattle, and his passing bored a hole in my life that is entirely different.

  I learned of Jimmy’s death from the bedside phone in my Oklahoma City hotel room on the morning of July 18, 2008. He had passed in his sleep in the same North Springfield house where we had discovered the world of music together as kids, on the same couch where we would watch MTV for hours, dreaming of someday experiencing the lives of the famous musicians we admired.

  I hung up the phone, opened the shades in my room, looked into the sky, and spoke to him. Where we’d once passed notes to each other in the high school hallways between classes, we now were left to communicate through spirit and prayer.

  A part of me died with Jimmy. He was more than just a person to me, he was my home, and though I could never let go of him, I had to let go of who I was with him when he died. And so began another process of firsts, but this time they proved to be more difficult, because Jimmy and I had shared so many of life’s firsts together. As if we were two conjoined twins separated after sharing a body for years, it was like I was alone, questioning who I was now that I was on my own. I looked up to him, followed him, and envied his ability to live life exactly as he wanted, fully as himself. Jimmy was loved by everyone, because there was no one on earth like him. We both discovered individuality, together, but embraced it in our own ways. As much as we both loved music—and Jimmy tried his hand at playing too—he was never inspired to follow through like me, preferring to stay in the background, cheering from the sidelines.

  I felt Jimmy’s absence to my core. At the time of Kurt’s passing, I was only twenty-five years old, not yet equipped to handle the challenges that followed. But Jimmy died when I was thirty-nine, and by then I had a much broader understanding of life, which in turn gave me a better understanding of death. By that time, I had become a husband, a father, and the leader of a new band, accepting all of the countless responsibilities that came with those roles. I was no longer just a skinny little boy hiding behind a mane of hair and a giant drum set. As my emotions became more mature, they also became more focused, more intense. I could no longer just push everything down, not allowing myself to feel. I knew there were no magic phone calls coming. I knew that death was final. I knew that grief was a long road, and an unpredictable one. IN A WAY, LOSING KURT PREPARED ME FOR LOSING JIMMY FOURTEEN YEARS LATER. Though two entirely different relationships, they were almost equally formative, and both made me the person that I am today.

  Though Kurt and Jimmy were not “family,” I invited them to be, and that invitation can sometimes be even more intimate than the connection to any blood relative. There was no biological obligation here; we were bonded for other reasons: our parallel spirits, our love of music, and our mutual appreciation. You cannot choose family, and when you lose family, there is a biological imperative that implies a built-in type of mourning. But with friends, you design your own relationship, which in turn designs your grief, which can be felt even deeper when they are gone. THOSE CAN BE ROOTS THAT ARE MUCH HARDER TO PULL.

  Courtesy of the author’s personal archives

  These deaths still resonate like a long echo throughout my life, and not a day goes by when I don’t think of Kurt and Jimmy. There are simple reminders: A song on the radio that Jimmy would air-drum to while driving his old, beat-up Renault car. The pink strawberry milk that Kurt would sometimes buy at the gas station as a treat for himself. The smell of the cheap Brut cologne that Jimmy would douse himself in each morning, for no one to enjoy but himself. The Elmer Fudd hat that Kurt would often wear to hide his face from the public, and the white-framed Jackie O glasses that became his trademark. It seems that everywhere I turn there is a reminder to be found, and I have come to a place where they no longer break my heart; they make me smile.

  But it’s when I sit down at a drum set that I feel Kurt the most. It’s not often that I play the songs that we played together, but when I sit on that stool, I can still picture him in front of me, wrestling with his guitar as he screamed his lungs raw into the microphone. Just like staring at the sun will burn a spot into your retinas, his image will forever be burned in mine when I look past my drums to the audience before me. He will always be there.

  And every time I return to Virginia, I feel Jimmy. He is in the trees that we climbed as children, within the cracks of the sidewalks that we followed to elementary school every morning and every fence that we jumped to take shortcuts through the neighborhood. There are times when I speak and they are his words, though it’s my voice. And when I see him in my dreams, he hasn’t changed a bit. He is still my best friend.

  Though they’re no longer with us, I still carry these people wherever I go.

  And the walls are finally gone.

  The Heartbreaker

  Courtesy of the author’s personal archives

  “Dave, there’s a phone call for you.”

  The studio engineer passed me the handset at the end of the long, curly cor
d, and to my surprise it was none other than Ron Stone calling, an associate of my manager we would always refer to as “Old School” from his days of working with legendary artists like Bonnie Raitt and Neil Young. We technically had never worked together, so it was unusual for him to call me directly, but even more unusual was the news he’d called to share.

  “Tom Petty wants to know if you’ll play drums for him on Saturday Night Live . . .”

  Bewildered, I replied, “Wait, what? Why me? The man could have any drummer in the world, and he’s calling me?” I mean, this is Tom Petty we’re talking about, America’s favorite Floridian, the embodiment of grassroots, working-class cool, the voice behind decades of classic rock hits, like “Breakdown,” “American Girl,” “Refugee,” and “Free Fallin’.”

  His music was the soundtrack to a thousand hickeys, songs that oozed with feel and groove, and he was calling the guy who only knew how to play the drums one of two ways: on or off? It made absolutely no sense.

  At the time, Tom was gearing up to release what would become one of his most celebrated solo records, Wildflowers, and had recently parted ways with original Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch, so he needed someone to fill the drum stool for a promotional Saturday Night Live performance. Any invitation to visit the fabled television studios of SNL, my favorite show, was an honor (fun fact: as of this writing I have been on fourteen times, more than any other musician), but still, I didn’t quite get it. Petty was one of my favorite artists ever, a musical hero to millions of young suburban misfits like me, so the fact that he even knew my name was a lot to take in. Not to mention I had barely touched a drum set, much less played live, since Nirvana had ended. I hemmed and hawed, taken aback by such a flattering request, and politely asked for a day or two to think about it. My head was in a much different place at the time, to say the least. I DID NEED TO THINK THINGS THROUGH.