by Mick Wall
Yet not so firmly planted that he didn’t let his mind roam free. He loved comic books and aliens and space travel. ‘I used to sit on my porch and stare at the skies and fucking pray I would see a UFO,’ he said. ‘Even as a child, I just couldn’t understand why anyone would be so close-minded as to think there was no life anywhere else but our tiny, ignorant planet.’ Dreams of UFOs full of friendly ET-like beings coming in to land, offering him the chance to just fly away, were also to do with notions of escape, of course, of fleeing a normal rural life, whatever normal really means. Dave didn’t even pretend to know the answer to that. Not as a kid with his eyes fixed on the sky. It was like he said: ‘Every kid wanted their own spaceship. You wished you could get in it and fly above your school and look down at your friends. I used to sit on my lawn and wish I could see a UFO and that it would land, and that little aliens would come out.’ He paused, reflected. ‘When you’re being pushed down by everything around you, you can fantasise about a UFO coming from somewhere you have never been and from somewhere you have never seen or heard of … or never knew there was.’
It was this same sense of wanting to leap beyond the bounds of reality that found him joining his sister, Lisa, at the dressing-up box. ‘When I was young, I would put on a show for the family,’ he remembered. ‘I was always the comedian.’ Except for when he cried. He’d dress up in ‘clothing we had in the attic, something as outlandish and ridiculous as possible,’ then prance around the living room in front of his mother and her friends, acting the clown, just as he would years later in Foo Fighters videos, like the one for ‘Learn to Fly’, where he dresses in drag as a goofy flight attendant.
Later he would suggest his behaviour was down to being ‘hyperactive – extremely’. His teachers at school did not disagree. His old school report cards are remarkable for the number of requests for meetings with his mother to discuss her son’s seeming inability to simply sit down and shut up. ‘They always said the same thing: “David could be a great student if he could just stay in his fucking seat.”’
Music – fast-as-fuck rock’n’roll music, fucker! – was more than an emotional salve, it was the older brother Dave never knew he had. ‘Drums, to me, always seemed like the greatest toy,’ he said in an early interview. ‘You didn’t have the nicest bike in the neighbourhood, you didn’t have a tennis racket, you had a drum set. Drums are strange. Drums are for idiots. I am the idiot, and I’m comfortable with that. Drums are great, because nobody expects anything from you.’
Before drums, he’d played guitar – after a fashion. His father had left behind an old nylon-string Spanish guitar that Dave drove his mother so crazy with, she eventually begged him to get lessons. He did – for a while and with zero enthusiasm, but he couldn’t handle the terrible tedium of one-string-at-a-time learning, so shut himself up in his room, kerranging along to anything he could get onto his record player that was loud, thumping and hot. His father had once played flute, his mother had briefly sung in acapella groups. Maybe it meant something. The first instrument he’d actually tried to play had been the trombone – like a flute, maybe, but with a much deeper, gravelly voice. But he just felt ridiculous. You couldn’t join a high school rock band playing the fucking trombone, man. So Dave went for guitar, even though he couldn’t name you a single chord, and by the time he was 12 he was thrumming along like he knew what he was doing, disguising his lack of ability with sheer exuberance.
The closest he came to an actual band was when he and his best pal Larry hooked up to record some songs they’d made up together about school friends and Dave’s dog. Dave would plonk away on one string of the guitar while Larry used knives and forks to play ‘drums’ on his mother’s kitchen pots and pans. They even had a name for their group: the HG Hancock Band. It was a laugh while it lasted, but it didn’t last long and that was all.
He was a freshman at Thomas Jefferson High, in nearby Alexandria, a smart-ass in a bunch of genuinely smart kids. ‘I was able to get along with anybody. I got along with the stoners, I got along with the geeks, I got along with pretty much everyone.’ Music was the common denominator. And with the music came weed and with that came rock wisdom, mid-twentieth-century style. It all went together, dude: Zep and Sabbath and weed and feeling fine; tripping on The Who and Judas Priest and bong water and foot-long doobies.
None of this was remotely punk. This was teenage heartland America in the early Eighties, where rock with a capital ‘R’ ruled, alongside The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac and REO Speed-wagon on date-nights – if you could ever find a date. Which you could not, be real, dude. Looking back on those days, in 1997, Dave recalled getting ‘pretty good grades until I got into high school. Then I started smoking pot and I couldn’t give a shit about anything.’
It was Dave and his best pal Jimmy Swanson – ‘we were like brothers’. Jimmy was a born metal freak. Didn’t matter if it was Venom or Def Leppard, as long as they had guitars and kick-ass drums and they fuckin’ rocked like a bitch – and sounded even better when you smoked pot. ‘I was such a burnout,’ Dave would say, shaking his head, years later. ‘I was smoking all day long. My best friend was the bong. My friend Jimmy here – we both dropped out of high school and sat around and smoked pot and listened to King Diamond all day!’ Then there was Sabbath, Jimmy prompted him, then ‘… Venom, Overkill…’ Dave shook with mirth. ‘Jimmy and I actually went to see [Venom’s singer] Cronos, his solo project.’
The real turning point came, though, when Dave was 13 and he and Lisa spent a summer vacation with their cousin Tracy. Tracy’s family lived in Evanston, Illinois, within spitting distance of Chicago – the big city. The Grohl family would drive up every July. But then, in 1982, ‘we showed up and Tracy was not the old Tracy we knew. She was now punk rock Tracy. And it was fucking wild, man,’ said Dave. ‘I’d only seen punks on TV, never in real life. She was part of this unbelievable underground network that I totally fell in love with.’
The first gig Tracy and her bondage pants took Dave to was Naked Raygun at the Cubby Bear, a local sports bar in Chicago, across from Wrigley Field, home of the Cubs baseball team. Originally known as Negro Commander, and fronted by Jeff Pezzati, who went on to become the bass player in Big Black (the Chicago-based band belonging to the future Nirvana and Foo Fighters producer Steve Albini – keep up, dude!), Naked Raygun played true-blood, all-American white punk stuff. Dave was so entranced that when he came home from the gig with punk Tracy he decided to become punk Dave. ‘She took me to see a punk rock show and from then on that was it,’ Dave would later testify. From then on we were totally punk. We went home and bought [the punk fanzine] Maximumrocknroll, and tried to figure it all out.’
Before the trip with Tracy to the Cubby Bear, Dave’s mom hadn’t even let him go to a Kiss concert (he had a giant poster of them on his bedroom wall). After being shown the light by Tracy, though, nothing could stop him. He still kept up his love of rock and metal, becoming an early adopter of Metallica and Slayer, and the whole thrash metal scene. (‘I bought the first Metallica album [Kill ’Em All] on cassette from a mail-order catalogue in 1983,’ Dave recalled. ‘It blew my fucking mind. It was like someone had sent me the Holy Grail.’)
Now, though, thanks to punk rock Tracy, at the same time as Dave was getting John Bonham’s entwined triangle of circles logo tattooed onto his wrist, his horizons expanded to include original Brit-punks like The Damned and The Clash (the Damned’s drummer, Rat Scabies, ‘was one of the first people to do that crash cymbal/hi-hat thing. That’s who I learned that from’) and the latest hardcore American punk bands like Bad Religion, who mixed their street poetics with time-changes, guitar solos and – gulp! – occasional three-part vocal harmonies; The Germs, fronted by the already dead Darby Crash and a strikingly effeminate guitarist, now turned Hollywood bit-parter, named Pat Smear; Circle Jerks, a weak LA version of The Clash featuring a classically trained guitarist and a jazz-literate drummer who nonetheless achieved domestic punk godhead with their debut album, Group Sex, which fea
tured 14 tracks with a combined running time of just 15 minutes; and DRI – short for Dirty Rotten Imbeciles – from Houston, Texas. Their first release, in 1982, was the Dirty Rotten EP, which featured 22 tracks, totalling 18 minutes, spread across two sides of a seven-inch vinyl EP. Only 1000 copies of the EP were ever pressed, making it now a highly sought-after collector’s item. Dave and Jimmy owned one of them, which they shared. Most of all, Dave loved local punk heroes Bad Brains, a punk fusion – rock and reggae – outfit that had grown like a musical tumour from the jazz-funk origins of a mid-Seventies Washington, DC outfit called Mind Power.
‘I started listening to Killing Joke or Hüsker Dü or Bad Brains and all these bands where the music was just a distorted melodic mess with these sweet harmonies over the top,’ Dave later recalled. ‘It’s still the kind of music that I enjoy the most.’
He took to playing snatches of Circle Jerks and Bad Brains over the school Tannoy system every morning. But Jimmy wasn’t feeling it and the two friends began to go their different ways. ‘I discovered the B-52s and Devo,’ Dave told Rolling Stone, ‘he was going off to Loverboy and Def Leppard.’ When Dave drew a comic strip in class featuring a character named Devo aiming his space gun at a character called Loverboy, Dave was pulled out of class and sent to see the school shrink, who asked him, ‘What are you going to do with your life?’ Dave replied that he’d like to find some sort of a career in the music business. ‘And her first reaction was, “You only want to do that because you know where the drugs are.”’
It couldn’t last and it didn’t. Dave’s mother, appalled at her stoner son’s unrepentant lust for marijuana, pulled him out of Thomas Jefferson and got him transferred to Bishop Ireton High, an all-male Catholic school known for its strict discipline, its tough love. Dave was there for two years before Virginia took pity on him and allowed him to transfer to the more liberal Annandale High School, known for its emphasis on racial and cultural diversity and the quality of its student newspaper. And for its freethinking, kickass, motherfucking students. Yeah, buddy!
The first band Dave played in was at Annandale and it was called Freak Baby. He was 15 and had recently become a regular face at the 9.30 Club, the local stopping off point for alternative and punk rock scenesters in the mid-Eighties: a black-walled, weirdly shaped sweatbox on the ground floor of the nineteenth-century Atlantic Building in sleazy downtown Washington. ‘I went to the 9:30 Club hundreds of times,’ he would boast. ‘I was always so excited to get there, and I was always bummed when it closed. I spent my teenage years at the club and saw some shows that changed my life.’
One of the guys his age Dave used to bump heads with there was named Brian Samuels, then playing bass in Freak Baby. When the band decided to add a second guitarist, Dave faked his way through an audition, playing random chords as loudly and as fast as possible. Giving it loads with the goofy smile and the bug eyes. The band only lasted six months but it was during rehearsals one night that Dave decided to have a go on the drummer David Smith’s kit. He got so carried away he didn’t hear Samuels telling him to quit it until the irate bassist dragged him by his nose off the drum stool and onto the floor. Not digging this at all, the others told Samuels to get the fuck out. No problem, he railed, and stormed out never to return. The only other Freak Baby member that could do a reasonable impersonation of a bass player was Smith – which left the band looking for a drummer. Enter: our hero in battered 501s with a sore nose.
The change in line-up demanded a change in name and Freak Baby became Mission Impossible. True to their punk spirit, when Mission Impossible went in to make their first – and only – demo, at the Laundry Room Studio, in 1985, the seven tracks they recorded – half old Freak Baby material, half new stuff – were all barely a minute long but filled to bursting with frizzy guitars, choked vocals and – lo and behold – some surprisingly busy and accomplished-sounding drums. The demo did the trick and Mission Impossible began to get gigs. They even got a track onto a split single with another local DC punk act, Lunch Meat, released on the indie Dischord label. Things were moving fast, the music was moving faster. So they changed their name to Fast. Then stood around smoking cigarettes and bitching as everything slowed to a grinding halt.
When the bandleaders, the singer Chris Page and guitarist Bryant Mason, graduated from high school and headed off to college, the two Davids – Grohl and Smith – vowed to keep the faith and soldier on, which they did for more than a year with another local ‘visionary’ named Reuben Radding improvising vocals and guitar over the top of whatever fists of fury the two Davids could summon between them. They called the new trio Dain Bramage – geddit? Ha, yeah. Amped up on coffee and weed they jammed for all of one night in the living room of Dave’s mother’s house. As dawn came creeping like a sick friend through the windows, they found they had half a dozen not-at-all-bad punk songs that would later become the basis of a ten-track album titled I Scream Not Coming Down – released on Fartblossom Records, the deal struck just moments after Dain Bramage had completed their first ever gig at the 9.30 Club. ‘It was already the greatest night of my life,’ Dave remembered with that special glow. ‘As a kid growing up in the DC punk rock scene, your first show at the 9:30 Club might as well have been Royal Albert Hall or Madison Square Garden.’
Only snag: Dain Bramage may have been several steps further up the musical ladder than anything he’d been involved in before – definite echoes of art-punk pioneers like Television and The Voidoids – but the regular 9.30 crowd was left cold. ‘Everybody just hated us.’ And the euphoria of getting a record deal lasted only for as long as it took Dave to find himself a bigger, better gig to play. The way he saw it, he had no choice. It was sink-or-swim time and, as he would demonstrate again and again throughout his minefield career, Dave was not a sinker.
He’d finally dropped out of high school at 16, worked briefly at a succession of hard, dull jobs (furniture warehouseman, manual labourer, general dickweed) and had secretly considered becoming a professional session drummer, learning to read music and earning enough money to put himself back through school. By now he was regarded, in Springfield, at least, as a proper kickass drummer. He’d actually found something he could excel at and he knew it, felt it every time he got behind the kit and taught it to fly. At the same time, he had smoked enough weed and played in enough whoop-de-doo punk rock outfits by the mid-Eighties to have developed a highly fatalistic attitude to his future. ‘When I was twelve,’ he once confessed, ‘I thought for sure that I would die before I was sixteen, because sixteen is when you get your driver’s license. When I was sixteen I thought I’d be dead before I was twenty-one, because when you’re twenty-one you’re old enough to drink.’ He couldn’t ‘imagine myself being fifty years old’. He just couldn’t ‘see that far into the future’. Who the hell could? No one Dave knew, or wanted to know.
He couldn’t even see himself ever leaving Springfield, Virginia, not unless he joined the army, as so many unskilled local guys did. And then it happened, his big break, the offer to join the best-known, most influential punk band on the Washington scene – Scream. Three albums, all on Dischord, all highly regarded, all highly cool, and a national touring schedule that would, they told him, take them to Europe, fabled land across the shining, shit-filled sea, and home to the kind of punk that rocked as only gobbing, pogoing, tattooed skinhead second-wave punk music can. Especially in the UK, which Scream weren’t yet going to but never mind that, you coming or what the fuck, man?
It was March 1987 and the 17-year-old Dave Grohl didn’t need to be asked twice. He quit Dain Bramage on the spot. Reuben and the other David decided to try and continue on without their brilliant but recalcitrant drummer. But fuck, man, it just wasn’t happening. As Reuben ruefully noted, years later, ‘After you’ve spent a couple years with Dave Grohl as your drummer it’s easy to feel like no other drummer exists.’
3. A Loud, Sharp, Piercing Cry
Scream was a crazy dream, shared by two brothers: Peter and
Franz Stahl. Peter was the good-looking singer who wrote lyrics. Franz was the enigmatic guitarist who wrote music. There were two others, the drummer Kent Stax and bassist Skeeter Thompson. But Scream was all about the brothers. Kent was good, solid and reliable, and knew how to fuck-up his drums. Skeeter was a river-deep bass note bouncing off the walls. The brothers had been born at the crossroad – Bailey’s Crossroads, in Fairfax County, Virginia – but behind the scenes it was Skeeter who did most of the devil’s work; beginning with weed and wine before escalating to crack cocaine. But as Franz says now, speaking from his home in Los Angeles, ‘Everybody has their moments.’
Scream were hardcore American punk at a time when the genre looked like it was screamed out; the last street serenaders of an age when playing loud and fast on instruments you had barely mastered was considered as far out as you could ever need to be. Peter and Franz fancied themselves a kind of Midwestern American collision between The Clash and The Damned, without the visual theatrics, but with the same almost clownish musical aplomb.
‘We got to do two nights with The Dammed at the 9.30 Club,’ says Franz, ‘which was like playing in the World Series, for me.’ He recalls with delight Kent leaning over to Rat Scabies and asking, ‘Could I bum a cigarette off of you?’ And Rat turning around and telling him to fuck off. ‘I ran into Rat years later at the Viper Room and told him that story and he was all apologetic and I was like, “No, no, no! That’s what punk was about to me!”’
Scream had the moves, the ideas, and even the momentum, each of their first three albums building on the last. And if they’d come along five years earlier – or five years later – they might have become the band they always felt they should have, could have, would have been. Instead, in 1987 bands like Scream were being supplanted in cutting-edge American youth culture by the new generation of thrash metal bands, led by Metallica, whose recent album, Master of Puppets, had actually made the US Top 30, something Scream would never come close to achieving – though not for the want of trying.