by Dave Grohl
It was January 2000, and Foo Fighters were Down Under for Australia’s biggest annual tour, the Big Day Out, a festival that began in 1992 with a Sydney-only show that saw Nirvana playing alongside the Violent Femmes, and eventually grew to a massive three-week, six-city extravaganza hosting up to a hundred bands each year. Set in the scorching heat of the glorious Aussie summer, it was the highlight of any touring band’s itinerary, given the easy pace of six shows in three weeks, making it more of a vacation in the sun than the usual grueling pace we were all used to. “The Big Day Off,” we called it, and we took advantage of every moment offstage.
My girlfriend had flown down from the States for a quick visit, and her heart was set on visiting a renowned French psychic who lived in an apartment complex outside of Sydney. Apparently, she had visited her before on another trip to Australia with her own band years ago, and according to people familiar with this phenomenon, this lady was the real deal. Our old friend/promoter Stephen Pavlovic had taken other mystical musicians to her over the years as well, all returning home with glowing reviews of her intuitive powers.
I myself had never seen a true psychic, for no other reason than I had no interest whatsoever. Other than one silly card reading in a New Orleans souvenir shop during the peak of Nirvana’s success where I was told by a woman with a bone in her nose, “Don’t give up, someday you’ll make it!,” I had managed to steer clear of any contrived psychic introspection. Not that I didn’t believe in the idea that some people have the ability to read your mind and see the future, I just didn’t care to know what they saw. In a way, I preferred to keep the future a mystery for fear that I would alter it by following someone’s faulty prediction. I thought that life should take its natural course, a journey with no road map to refer to in the event that you get lost.
This woman’s method was simple: you were asked to bring a photograph of yourself, any photograph, and she would quietly inspect it as she traced her fingers along your figure, receiving some kind of otherworldly information with her touch before revealing her psychic opinion. You have to remember, this was not an appointment I had made for myself, but rather for my girlfriend, who had prepared for this meeting by bringing her own portfolio of pictures, including one of me. Steve and I were just acting as chaperones/chauffeurs to deliver her to this woman’s apartment for the session, so we ran out to grab a coffee while they made contact with the other side.
Upon our return, my girlfriend looked a bit exhausted from her reading, and the psychic quickly turned her focus on me, as I unfortunately must have been a difficult topic of discussion while we were away. The fact that she spoke very little English and needed translation made for quite an awkward dynamic between my girlfriend and me, as I relied upon her (a Montreal native) to translate the psychic’s most intimate revelations, no matter how uncomfortable they may have been for her to hear.
After inspecting my photograph for a few minutes, the psychic reached out and took my hands, holding them gently as she surveyed the lines and calluses from years of abuse.
“Tu as beaucoup d’énergie . . . ,” she said.
I turned to my girlfriend for translation, and she replied, “She says you have a lot of energy.”
Ah! She’s off to a good start! “Yes, I’m kind of hyperactive,” I replied in English, hoping that she understood, which she did with a little help from my girlfriend.
“Non, tu as beaucoup d’énergie psychique . . .”
For this I did not need a translator. She was telling me that I had psychic energy. I lit up with great surprise. This was getting good.
“Tes mains brillent . . . elles ont une aura . . . c’est bleue . . . très puissante . . .”
According to my new, clairvoyant best friend, my hands glowed with a powerful blue aura. Whether I believed her or not, I was overjoyed, and dare I say flattered, by this psychic declaration. How could I not have known this? I thought. I could have been using my powerful blue aura all this time! Then she looked up at me and asked if I saw ghosts.
This was a difficult question to answer. Had I ever been visited by the stereotypical floating apparition, crossed over from the other side to stake a claim to its former territory in a cliché haunting? No. Had I experienced a series of unexplainable events where I felt I was in the presence of something that was neither alive nor dead? Yes.
At the height of Nirvana’s success, I was still living in a tiny room with only a dresser, a night table, and a futon mattress on the floor, as the band became so huge so fast that I didn’t have time to assimilate into this new life of rock stardom. In reality, I felt no desire to go out and take advantage of my expanding bank account because I felt perfectly comfortable with the way things were. I never had much, so I never needed much, and this living arrangement felt perfectly natural. But, beyond anything, it was fun. Sitting around watching MTV while eating Totino’s Party Pizzas together with my friends on a rainy afternoon was my idea of “making it,” so why change anything?
It was my father (my default financial adviser) who eventually told me it was time to invest in a house of my own in Seattle for the sake of equity (and to keep me from blowing all of my money on Slim Jims and cigarettes), so he flew out and we started the search together. A local real estate agent had gathered some listings around town, and we spent a few days walking through houses, looking for the perfect fit. Most were either too old, too weird, or too far away from amenities, but there was one that stood out from the rest, a newly built home in a northern suburb of Seattle called Richmond Beach. Just blocks from the beautiful Puget Sound, it was nestled in tall pines at the end of a dead-end street, a rather modest and inconspicuous house at first glance. Upon entry, however, you were met with an architectural masterpiece. Multiple levels of landings and rooms framed in gorgeous wood, all flooded in natural light from the skylights built into the tall ceilings and huge windows that overlooked the thick forest outside. Because the house stood at the top of a hill, it looked like only one level from the driveway, but the back of the house was carefully built down the terraced property behind, with decks and landings that faced the giant evergreens out back. It was hard to imagine living alone in such a cavernous space, but I was drawn to its warmth and design, snatching it up quickly and moving my dresser, my night table, and my futon in with ease.
The first night in the house, I was watching my new television (true rock and roll excess!) as I sat on my old futon with my back against the bedroom wall. The rain was coming down in sheets, and I was feeling a bit tense about being alone in this massive residence, when all of a sudden the house shook with a huge BANG! It wasn’t lightning or thunder, and it wasn’t an explosion from somewhere outside. This sounded like an eighteen-wheeler had crashed into the wall that I was propped up against, jolting my body forward as if I had been rear-ended. I immediately hit the mute button on the remote and sat perfectly still, rendered motionless in absolute terror. Eventually, I gathered the courage to step outside my bedroom and look down from the small landing into the empty living room, scanning the dark space for any moving shadows or signs of an intruder. I had goose bumps up and down my body from fear as I tiptoed quietly from one room to the next, expecting some evidence of a break-in, but I found absolutely nothing. Returning to bed, I kept the TV on mute and slept with one eye open the rest of the night.
After a few months in the house, I realized that it was the downstairs where things felt a bit . . . off. Walking through the winding hallways that snaked through the lower levels, I always sensed that there was someone behind me, like I was always being closely followed. The skin on my neck and back would warm from the proximity to this invisible force, sending the tiny hairs on my spine straight up, and I would race to my destination as fast as I possibly could before running back upstairs to the safety of my kitchen. I had never experienced this feeling before and convinced myself that it was only my wild imagination—that is, until I found that I was not the only one to experience this frequent and most frightening occ
urrence.
Eventually, I settled in and began to fill the house with modest furnishings, at least enough to invite some friends over for a Halloween dinner at my new dining room table. After dinner, we decided to tell ghost stories over cocktails, some firsthand, some not, but I kept my suspicions of this brand-new house to myself. But when one friend said, “You know . . . it’s weird . . . whenever I’m downstairs in your house, I feel like someone is right behind me, following me from room to room, so much that I have to announce myself whenever I’m down there to let whatever it is know that I’m coming . . . ,” I practically choked on my drink. As much as I was relieved to hear that I wasn’t the only one to have this feeling, that maybe I wasn’t crazy after all, I took this as confirmation that this amazing first house I’d bought was fucking haunted. I wasn’t moving out anytime soon, and though I hadn’t minded sharing a house with my old friend Barrett, sharing a house with a ghost was not what I had signed up for.
The feeling grew stronger and stronger over time, so much that I started to avoid the downstairs at any cost. And before too long the feeling crept upstairs, too. At night, I would fall asleep with my face at the edge of the bed (something I have always done, as I hate the claustrophobic feeling of my own breath on my face) and I would sense someone else’s face only inches from mine, staring at me with glaring eyes as I clenched my eyelids tightly shut, terrified of what I might see if I opened them. It became a recurring visitation, happening night after night as I lay paralyzed with fear, making it impossible to sleep.
And then the dreams began.
It was always the same woman, dressed in an old, tattered gray sweater with a dark blue wool skirt. Disheveled and covered in stains from soil, her brown, wiry hair was knotted and unkempt, and she just stood there barefoot, never saying a word, staring at me with her piercing eyes and an expression of deep sorrow. In the first dream, I walked out of my bedroom onto the landing above the stairs and looked down into the living room, where she was standing motionless, looking up at me from a distance. I woke up in a cold sweat. The following dreams were just as horrifying but took place in other areas of the house, which signaled to me that maybe this house wasn’t mine after all. Maybe it was hers.
A Ouija board came out a few weeks later on Thanksgiving night, which coincidentally was my first time meeting Mr. Nathan Gregory Mendel, future Foo Fighters bassist, who had come to dinner with a mutual friend. Let’s just say that, whether you believe in that shit or not, I came to the conclusion that my dream house was now more along the lines of the Amityville Horror. But I continued to live there for years and gradually got used to the sound of footsteps on the hardwood kitchen floor, the motion detectors going off for no reason, and the occasional door opening by itself. Friends sent me piles of sage to cleanse the house of unwanted spirits, but it remained untouched, as I wasn’t falling down that rabbit hole, and frankly, it smells like cat piss.
To make things simple, I told the psychic that I did not necessarily “see” ghosts.
She then asked if I saw UFOs. Now, this was something I was obviously fascinated with. After all, I had named my band the Foo Fighters after the World War II slang term for unidentified flying objects; our record label imprint is named Roswell Records after the 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico; and my publishing company moniker is MJ Twelve Music, a reference to the alleged secret committee of scientists, military leaders, and government officials assembled by Harry S. Truman to recover and investigate alien spacecraft. So I was well versed in the world of UFO conspiracy, though I had sadly never witnessed one myself.
“No,” I said. “But I dream about them quite often.”
She looked me in the eyes and with a warm smile said, “Ce ne sont pas des rêves.”
I TURNED TO MY GIRLFRIEND FOR TRANSLATION, AND SHE INFORMED ME, “THOSE ARE NOT DREAMS.”
I immediately flashed back to the countless vivid dreams I’d had since I was a child of being visited by extraterrestrials, which I can still clearly remember to this day. From an early age, I would dream that I was floating through my neighborhood, looking down at the rows of tiny houses below from the window of a small craft, silently hovering and shooting through the air at unimaginable speeds with ease, undetectable to the human eye. In one, I was lying in the wet grass of my front yard, staring up at the night sky filled with stars, desperately trying to summon a UFO to take me away to another world. As I stared into space, I suddenly realized that I was actually staring back at the reflection of myself in the grass, mirrored by the smooth metal underbelly of a saucer-shaped craft hovering only meters above my head. And then I woke up.
But there is one dream that I will never forget, a dream so intense and deeply involved that I still can’t shake the feeling of it.
It was a beautiful early evening in a coastal town in southern Europe, and the sky was a perfect shade of cerulean blue in the twilight hour between sunset and full night. I was casually walking a steep, grassy knoll, taking in the warm summer air while looking down at the harbor below filled with cafés and people in white clothing strolling hand in hand along the promenade. The stars were just barely visible, becoming brighter with each moment as the sun fell behind the ocean, when all of a sudden the sky imploded in a blinding flash, knocking me to the ground. I looked up and saw that the stars were now replaced with thousands of UFOs darting across the sky, different sizes, different shapes, different colors, and I sat there in shock, taking in this incredible event while looking around at the incredulous faces of thousands of others doing the exact same thing. Time stood still.
A booming voice came thundering into my head by some form of telepathy. “THE EVOLUTION OF MAN,” the voice sounded as animated diagrams were projected into the sky, explaining how our species was helped along by beings from a distant corner of the universe. Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing Vitruvian Man was projected on the left side of the sky, and to the right, a map of the world with all of our borders and territories redrawn, while the voice declared this event to be the “DAWN OF A NEW ERA.”
I woke up knowing this was more than just another dream but continued on with my life, not letting it sink in enough to send me down the unfortunate and common rabbit hole that some UFO conspiracists never recover from, spending the rest of their days waiting for “full disclosure.” I was definitely moved, but the most traction this dream ever got in my life was as the inspiration behind the Foo Fighters’ video for our song “The Sky Is a Neighborhood,” which I directed and which features my two daughters Violet and Harper. A wonderful dream, I thought, but just a dream. Until now. According to the psychic, this was no longer my imagination, this was real.
After a few more favorable revelations, including the specific dimension I’m from, she then proceeded to tell me things that absolutely no one on earth could have known. This wasn’t spitballing; she told me things about my life that were so detailed, so intimate, and so right on that I was entirely converted. I was now a believer. Whether she had “postcognition” (the ability to supernaturally perceive past events) or an advanced form of intuition, I was totally convinced that this woman was the real deal.
We finished my session, said goodbye, and left her tiny apartment for the long drive back to Sydney. I felt emboldened by these revelations, wondering if this power was something I had been born with, and thinking of all the moments where I could have called on my psychic ability to help me.
Including the week before, in the Gold Coast.
The Gold Coast, a coastal town in Queensland just forty-five minutes south of Brisbane, is Australia’s equivalent to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Beach bars overflowing with flaming, neon-colored drinks, blond-haired surfers with their wetsuits half off at every turn, and yes, a Sea World theme park for the more family-oriented vacationers. Any visit to this resort paradise was always an adventure, so we milked every second in this bronzed wonderland for every last drop of mischief we could find, and since we were down to play the Big Day Off tour, we had plenty of time t
o take advantage of its juvenile trappings. Upon arrival, Taylor and I decided to rent scooters so that we could buzz around town during the day, beach to beach, for the three days before our massive show at the Gold Coast Parklands, a greyhound racing track only a few miles from the city. Our hotel, the Sheraton Grand Mirage, had become one of our favorites over the years, with its totally eighties cocaine-white motif and its gluttonous dinner buffets that overlooked chlorinated pools full of displaced swans. If Tony Montana from Scarface were ever to take a vacation, it would undoubtedly be here. It was like walking through a Nagel painting in flip-flops.
Fortunately, the hotel was just a few miles from the gig, a straight shot down the Smith Street Motorway, so rather than take the overcrowded shuttle to the show with the other bands, Taylor and I thought we would drive ourselves on our ridiculous little scooters, getting in as much Easy Rider action as we could before we had to return them and leave the next day. With no helmets (or licenses), we set off on our little trek, laughing at the absurdity of two famous musicians about to play for fifty thousand people zipping down the road on battered minibikes. Just as most days were back then, it was pure comedy.
We arrived at the entrance, and the local security guards looked at us suspiciously, like we were two sunburned American tourists who had somehow stolen backstage passes from the actual Foo Fighters. After much cajoling and unintelligible walkie-talkie chatter, we were finally rescued by our tour manager, Gus, and sped through the backstage compound, weaving around the picnic tables full of bands, who pointed and laughed at us as we flew past. Other than Blink-182, we were without a doubt the nerdiest, goofiest, most annoying band on the bill. I mean, there were real heavyweights on this one—Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nine Inch Nails, Primal Scream, just to name a few—and I can safely say that none of those dudes would ever be caught dead riding around on those dork-mobiles in broad daylight.
As we prepared for the show, I came up with another ridiculous idea: I was going to drive my scooter onstage during our show and rev the engine like Rob Halford from Judas Priest had always done, though with a massive Harley-Davidson motorcycle, to pay tribute to the heavy metal god himself. As I sat and wrote the set list over a few beers, I found the perfect spot in the show where I could come bounding onstage like Evel Knievel, wind out the puny 50cc engine in a cloud of smoke, and continue playing while the audience doubled over. Anything for a laugh, I thought, and my plan was put into action. It went off without a hitch.