The Storyteller

by Dave Grohl

  Courtesy of John Silva/SAM

  I had always known the day would come where I would be asked to cross this bridge, to move on with life after a year of mourning, but I wasn’t prepared for the catalyst to be something like this. I hung up the phone in the studio control room where I was standing with a guitar around my neck and got back to what I had been busy doing when the call came in: recording what would, unknowingly, become the first Foo Fighters record.

  After Kurt’s death, I was lost. We all were. With our world pulled out from under us in such a sudden, traumatic manner, it was hard to find any direction or beacon that would help guide us through the fog of tremendous sadness and loss. And the fact that Kurt, Krist, and I were all connected by music made any music seem bittersweet. What was once my life’s greatest joy had now become my life’s greatest sorrow, and not only did I put my instruments away, I turned off the radio, for fear that even the slightest melody would trigger paralyzing grief. It was the first time in my life that I rejected music. I just couldn’t afford to let it break my heart again.

  In those months after his passing, I felt like a fish trapped in a tiny bowl, desperately swimming back and forth all day long but never really going anywhere. I was just twenty-five years old with a whole life ahead of me, but in many ways I felt like my life had ended too. The thought of putting my drum set onstage behind just another face was more than unappealing, it was downright depressing. I was too young to fade away but too old to start again. Sure, I could just go out and join another band, but I would forever be known as “that guy from Nirvana,” and I knew deep down that nothing would ever compare to what Nirvana had gifted to the world. That sort of thing only happens once in a lifetime.

  After months and months of spinning my wheels in suffocating bouts of introspection, I decided that I needed to get away from Seattle and clear my head, so I traveled to a corner of the earth that I have always adored, a place of serenity and natural beauty where I hoped to find some healing from my broken life at home: the Ring of Kerry. A gorgeous, remote area in southwestern Ireland, the Ring of Kerry is a return to what the earth must have been thousands of years ago, before man carved it into concrete lots and crowded thoroughfares. With miles of the greenest fields overlooking coastal landscapes and seaside villages, there is a calm and tranquility there that I so desperately needed to reassess my life and start over. I had been there once before, spending a week with my mother and sister driving from Dublin to Dingle before Nirvana’s 1992 Reading Festival show (our last performance in the UK), and connected to that landscape in a way I had with no other part of the world. Maybe it was my mother’s Irish heritage, or maybe it was the pace of life, which was similar to that of the rural areas of Virginia where I would go hunting as a kid, but whatever it was, I felt at home in its quiet and isolation. I craved that now.

  One day, as I was navigating my rental car around the potholes and deep ruts of a faraway country road, I noticed a young hitchhiker in the distance. With his long, greasy hair and oversized parka, I could tell this kid was a rocker and, being miles from the nearest town, desperately needed a ride to his destination. As I grew nearer, I decided that I would kindly pick him up and give him a lift, until I saw something that immediately made me change my mind.

  He was wearing a Kurt Cobain T-shirt.

  A wave of anxiety hit me like a jolt from an electric chair, and I sped past with my head down, praying that he didn’t recognize me. My hands were shaking, and I felt like I was going to be physically sick, dizzy in the grips of a crippling panic attack. Here I was, desperately trying to disappear in the most remote area I could find and sort out a life that had been turned upside down only months before, and there was Kurt’s face staring back at me, almost as a reminder that no matter how far I ran, I could never escape the past.

  This was the moment that changed everything.

  I flew back to the States and decided that it was time to get back to work. Without a band or any real master plan, I retreated to the place where I always felt most comfortable: recording songs by myself. I learned to do this by default when I was twelve years old with the help of two cassette recorders, an old guitar, and some pots and pans. My method was simple: record a guitar part on one cassette, eject that tape and put it in cassette player number two, hit Play, record myself playing “drums” along with the guitar part on another cassette, and so on, and so on. I was essentially multitracking without even realizing it. I would write ridiculous songs about my dog, my school, and Ronald Reagan, but I was fascinated with the process, so I did it quite often. The best part? No one ever knew, because I was deathly afraid of letting anyone hear the shriek of my prepubescent voice.

  By the time I started hanging out and recording with my friend Barrett Jones on the eight-track machine in his Virginia basement studio, I was familiar with the concept of laying down all of the instruments myself, systematically layering guitars, drums, and vocals as I had done as a child, though now the RadioShack cassette players were replaced with Barrett’s professional reel-to-reel equipment. I never wanted to impose (and never had any money to pay him for engineering), so I would wait until the end of someone else’s session and shyly ask, “Is there any extra tape at the end of the reel? I want to try something . . .” Knowing that this was a big ask (and I had already smoked most of his weed), I would race from one instrument to the next as fast as I could, doing only one take on the drums, one take on guitar, and one take on bass so as not to waste any more of Barrett’s time or generosity. Then I would go home and listen to my little experiment over and over, imagining what I could do if I had more than fifteen minutes to record a song.

  Once Barrett moved out to Seattle and we found a house together, his studio was in MY basement, so I took advantage of its proximity and started writing songs that, although still primitive and not yet ready for the world to hear, were a bit more evolved. “Alone and Easy Target,” “Floaty,” “Weenie Beenie,” “Exhausted,” and “I’ll Stick Around” were just a few of the dozens of songs that we recorded in our little basement on rainy days, and I was slowly banking what would eventually become the Foo Fighters’ repertoire. Nirvana were in full swing at the time, and god knows we didn’t need any help in the songwriting department, so I kept the songs to myself, remembering that old drummer joke, “What was the last thing the drummer said before getting kicked out of the band? ‘Hey, guys, I wrote a song I think we should play!!’”

  With nothing to lose, nowhere left to run, I returned from Ireland and decided to book six days at a twenty-four-track studio down the street from my house in Richmond Beach, Robert Lang Studios, a state-of-the art facility built into the side of an enormous hill overlooking the Puget Sound. I had recorded there before, including Nirvana’s last session, where we’d tracked our final song, “You Know You’re Right,” earlier that year. The studio’s eclectic, oddball owner, Robert Lang, had decided to build a recording facility underneath his house in the early seventies and spent fifteen years digging deeper and deeper into the hill, hauling thousands of dump trucks’ worth of dirt away and creating what can only be described as a gigantic concrete bunker with a great collection of vintage microphones. But the biggest difference from other studios was the materials he chose to use in the tracking rooms: marble and stone. Rather than the warm absorption of natural wood and acoustically treated baffling, his rooms had the unforgiving reflection of hard stone, which lent a much more “live” sound. It was actually the dark green Chinese marble that made Nirvana choose to record there, as upon our first tour around the studio, Bob showed us a small slab that he was convinced held a vision of a saintlike figure, a halo, a dove, and of the resurrection descending. That was enough for Krist Novoselic and me to say, “Oh, we’re DEFINITELY recording here . . . this guy is WILD.” Not to mention, it was so close to my home, I could drive there on my lawn-mower-powered go-kart.

  I booked October 17 to 22, 1994, and started to prepare. I chose the fifteen songs that I considered the bes
t of countless recordings Barrett and I had made over the years, assembled the gear, and made a plan: four songs a day for four days, and the last two days for vocals and mixing. If I recorded at the pace I always had, running from instrument to instrument, doing only one or two takes before moving on to the next, I could actually pull it off. I made a calendar, deciding which songs to record on which days, and rehearsed like crazy, knowing there was little time to spare. Six days in the studio seemed like an eternity to me, but I needed to prove that I could meet the challenge I had set for myself, the entire reason for this new project.

  Barrett and I loaded in the gear that Monday morning, made coffee, got sounds, and were ready to hit Record by noon. A new song named “This Is a Call” was first up, and I blasted through the drums in one take, immediately strapped on the guitar, and finished that quickly before moving on to the bass for one pass. Within forty-five minutes, the instrumental was done. Next up was “I’ll Stick Around.” Same drill: drums, guitar, bass, and done in forty-five minutes. Then “Big Me,” then “Alone and Easy Target” . . . by the end of the first day, we had met our four-song quota with time to spare, and my lofty challenge didn’t seem so challenging anymore. I actually felt . . . good.

  This was more than just a recording session to me—it was deeply therapeutic. A continuation of life. This was what I needed to defibrillate my heart and return it to its normal rhythm, an electric pulse to restore my love and faith in music. Beyond just picking up an instrument and feeling productive or prolific, once again I could see through the windshield rather than look in the rearview mirror.

  By the end of the week, I had not only achieved my goal of finishing the fifteen songs (actually recording them in the sequence of the eventual album), but I had also agreed to play with Tom Petty on Saturday Night Live, which was a leap back into my former life but something I was no longer afraid to do. There was light at the end of the tunnel now. Neither of these things was considered as any permanent life direction, they were just small steps forward. There was no vision for what came next. Not just yet.

  I took the master tape of Barrett’s rough mixes to a tape duplication place in downtown Seattle, where I decided to make a hundred cassette copies of my new project, imagining that I would give them to friends, family, and anyone who had any interest in what “that guy from Nirvana” had been up to since the band ended. I had kept my songs secret for most of my life, but now I was ready to share them with the world because I was proud of them, more so than anything I had ever recorded before. It wasn’t just the sonic element of Barrett’s amazing production skills; it was more the emotional gratification. I had finally come to the surface with the exaggerated gasp of someone held underwater too long.

  Even though I had played every instrument on that cassette (minus one guitar track played by my friend Greg Dulli from the Afghan Whigs, who I handed a guitar to while he was visiting the studio one day), I was horrified at the idea of considering it a “solo” project. I couldn’t imagine “the Dave Grohl Experience” was a name that would have people running to the record stores, and quite honestly, I knew that the connection to Nirvana would certainly outweigh any listener’s objectivity. So, I decided to follow a more anonymous route, taking inspiration from Stewart Copeland, the drummer of the Police, and his 1980 “solo” project Klark Kent. At the time, the Police were an emerging band, so as not to disrupt the band’s career, Stewart decided to record under the pseudonym Klark Kent, playing all of the instruments himself, just as I had done. I loved the mystery of that. Having been a UFO fanatic my entire life, I took a simple phrase from a book I was reading at the time, Above Top Secret, which was a collection of UFO sighting reports and accounts from the military dating back to the early forties. In a chapter about unidentified craft over Europe and the Pacific during World War II, I found a term that the military used as a nickname for these unexplained glowing balls of light and thought it was just mysterious enough for me. Not only did it sound like a group of people, it almost sounded like a gang: Foo Fighters.

  I designed the simple cassette insert that would be stuffed inside the case with each tape, choosing the font and paper color, writing the credits and song titles, and left the tape duplication place feeling ten feet tall, knowing that my prize would be ready by the end of the week. I was walking on air. The reward was simple: I had done this myself.

  While I waited, I prepared to fly down to Los Angeles for my rehearsal with Tom Petty. I had been sent the two songs to be performed on the show, “You Don’t Know How It Feels” and “Honey Bee,” and was listening to them on repeat, trying to memorize all of Steve Ferrone’s sublime drum licks and lock into his perfect feel. My style was worlds away from his relaxed groove, so I focused on finding some sort of Zen to calm my usual anarchic method. But it wasn’t just the music that I was nervous about. I was about to meet the one and only Tom Petty.

  When I arrived at the massive rehearsal space in the San Fernando Valley just outside of Hollywood, a temple of paisley and incense with a massive totem pole at one end of the room, I was met with the most down-to-earth, genuine, and kind welcome by the band and crew. The Heartbreakers were the epitome of cool, with their relaxed swagger and faint Southern accents; they made me feel at home and appreciated, doing their best to disarm any nerves that they undoubtedly sensed I was experiencing. They were legitimate rock stars, after all, and I’m sure they had this effect on most everyone, but with their kindness and empathy they wanted to make me feel comfortable. I set up my drum set on the riser as we chatted, and gave my kick drum a strong WHACK, which made the entire room jump from its sheer volume, and they turned to each other and laughed, almost as if to say, “Holy shit, what have we gotten ourselves into?”

  And then, there was Tom. He was just as I had imagined him to be, totally laid-back and effortlessly cool, and when he said hello, that voice of a thousand high school dances flowed from his mouth like thick molasses. Within a few minutes, any nerves that I had from this rock and roll fantasy camp daydream had faded, and we began to play. I could hardly contain my excitement, so I think I was probably giving it a little more muscle than I normally would, because the band were practically wincing from the cannon-level volume of my drums. We spent the afternoon jamming, hanging out, and casually getting to know each other in between takes, and by the end of the day they made me feel like an honorary Heartbreaker. I felt like we were a band. And that was a feeling I hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

  We met a week later at the Saturday Night Live studios for soundcheck day, which is usually Thursday. This is when the SNL team gets the sound levels correct and does the camera blocking as well. First, you soundcheck and rehearse, playing each song two or three times to get the stage monitors dialed in and everything sounding right in the control room, then you break for lunch and return an hour later for camera blocking, where the director rehearses his camera angles and moves for when they go live. This is typically a simple affair, just a few takes, and they nail it with ease, having decades of experience behind them.

  But after the first take of camera blocking, the stage director walked up to my massive drum set and said, “Ummm, Dave . . . is there any way to move that rack tom just a few inches to the left? We’re having a hard time seeing your face.” Terrified and embarrassed in front of these heroes, I wasn’t sure how to respond. I didn’t want to rock the boat, as I was just a humble guest along for this most excellent ride, so why the fuck did they care about seeing me? This was a Tom Petty show! I looked over at Tom for guidance, and he gave me an expression that said, “Don’t let them tell you what to do, kid. Stand your ground,” so I nervously replied, “Ummm . . . no, that’s where it goes, I’d rather not.” Within seconds, a stagehand appeared with a smaller microphone for the drum, hoping that maybe that would give a clearer shot for the cameras. We ran through the song one more time, and the stage director appeared again, but this time he approached Tom. “Excuse me, Mr. Petty, is there any way we can move you just a few
feet to the right?” Now, this was sheer audacity. The balls on this guy. You could have heard a fucking pin drop on that legendary stage, a stage that Tom was certainly familiar with, having graced it four times before. “No, man, we worked all day to get it to sound good, and it finally sounds good. If you move anything it’s gonna fuck it all up.” The stage director begged and pleaded until Tom finally threw his hands up in the air and relented, saying, “Fine. But I’m telling you, it’s gonna fuck it all up . . .”

  They moved Tom’s monitors and microphone a few feet to the right, and we counted into the next take. As Tom approached the microphone to sing the first line, there was an ear-piercing squeal of feedback that was so loud it made us all immediately stop playing and plug our ears. Oh fuck . . . , I thought, here it comes.

  Tom was pissed, but in a way that only Tom Petty could be. He never for one moment lost his cool, he just looked at the stage director and said, “You. Come here.” The poor guy slinked up to the stage, knowing that he had perhaps made a career-defining mistake, and in his signature Southern drawl, Tom said, “What did I just tell you?” The director apologized and said he would immediately put the gear back in its original position, but Tom continued, “No, I want you to tell me what I just told you.” The director then proceeded to repeat Tom’s warning word for word, to which Tom then said, “That’s right, now put it back.” To me, it wasn’t a scolding, and it wasn’t a shaming, it was a man who had fought his whole life for what he believed in, facing countless adversities and demoralizing industry bullshit, letting the world know that you couldn’t fuck with him. I was proud to be his drummer in that moment—not the guy from Nirvana, but Tom Petty’s drummer. And as if I hadn’t already respected the guy enough, I now looked up to him even more.