Engaging, funny, wild: Dave Grohl was rock ‘n’ roll’s coolest guy. But that image is increasingly showing dents and cracks

Your neighbor may be a nice guy, but do you really know him? Always joking, up to date with the latest cool bandscharming, tough, the kind of eternally young that is only given to a small group of people in their fifties. The perfect neighbor, uncle or schoolyard father. And then you find out there’s more. He cheats, struggles with alcohol and drugs, acts like a dick to his colleagues.

That’s kind of how Dave Grohl came into the news in recent years. His image was almost untouchable, the nicest guy in rock ‘n’ roll who, as a wild drummer in Nirvana, provided the piles and fireworks for the soul’s sorrow. Kurt Cobainand then (still) one of the most successful rock bands ever started: Foo Fighters. In interviews he is always engaging, incredibly funny impersonation of Christopher Walken and the video about his coffee addiction („fresh pooooots!“) are more highly recommended than some of his albums. A Furry Duracell Rabbit, or Animal from the Muppets. Just tried to hate it.

But Grohl is only human, and his image as a friend to everyone has slowly developed more dents and cracks in recent years. We knew that he had treated the first Foo Fighters drummer, William Goldsmith, like dirt: when he wasn’t paying attention, Grohl himself had re-recorded all the drum parts for the second album. He had apologized for it, but last year another drummer had to deal with corporate Dave, when Josh Freese was fired barely two years after he was announced with much fanfare as the replacement for the suddenly deceased Taylor Hawkins. „No reason was given :(„, Freese posted on Instagram (in which he didn’t forget to tag the big rock magazines). And things were already messy on a personal level. In September 2024, Grohl announced that he was having another child. But… not with his own wife, he had cheated.

These are stains on the reputation of the nicest man in rock. But, without justifying his behavior: Grohl made his best work in times of crisis. He pulled Nirvana from the mid-table after being stranded homeless and out of work in Los Angeles. He made the first Foo Fighters album in 1995, withdrawn into a pool of directionless mourning after the death of Kurt Cobain. And also But Here We Are (2023), the Foo Fighters’ best album since their debut, is a mournful album in which Grohl mourns the death of both his mother and drummer Taylor Hawkins into text and sound and banging very hard on a drum set.

Tak-tatak-tatakkatakkatakkatak

During that first crisis, Grohl was involved punk rock band Screamwhen bassist Skeeter Thompson suddenly appeared to have run away. They were on tour and were supposed to play in Los Angeles that evening, but that was canceled. And neither did the shows afterward. They stayed there for a month, sleeping on the couch of the sister of one of the Scream band members, completely devastated. And then Grohl received a tip from Melvins frontman Buzz Osbourne that grunge band Nirvana was looking for a drummer.

Grohl knew the band, he had Bleach and loved it. “It had everything I loved in music. You could hear the Beatles influence in ‘About a Girl,’ and they also had hard-hitting songs like ‘Paper Cuts’ and ‘Sifting.’” He realized that Kurt Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic were cut from the same musical cloth. “We loved Neil Young and Public Enemy. From Celtic Frost and The Beatles. We all came from divorced families. We discovered punk rock and listened to Black Flag, but also John Fogerty.”

There is one famous video of a conversation between Grohl and musician and producer Pharrell Williams, in which Grohl explains how he stole all his tricks from the disco. Takke-tatakke-tatakke-tatakke – just hear how he joins in on ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ on Nevermindhis first album with Nirvana, and then listen to ‘Early in the Morning’ by The Gap Band. But more than stealing a rhythm, Grohl made something new with it by playing it in a punk rock idiom and, importantly: hard and hard.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/eBG7P-K-r1Y

Extremely tight, versatile and rock hard

He himself said that he could only play the drums in two ways: on or off. „You’ve got to beat the shit out of the drums“, according to Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, was the secret to being able to play Grohl’s parts. Take ‘Everlong‘. The way Grohl plays the drums is so instantly recognizable: twice the speed and intensity that anyone else would dare in such a subdued song. Without Grohl’s drumming, ‘Everlong’ might as well have been a Coldplay song.

That’s how he learned it from his teachers: the punk records he listened to in his room. Thanks to his cousin Tracey, he grew up on a diet of Misfits, The Germs, GBH, Minor Threat and Dead Kennedys. “Everything I knew about music until then could be thrown into the trash,” he says in his strong story book The Storyteller (2021) about the discovery of those punk bands, with which he started playing drums on his pillows in his room. But when, at the age of about fifteen, he took a lesson from a jazz drummer, it turned out that he had been holding his sticks the wrong way all along. “It seemed to me that the thick end of the sticks gave much more sound, which suited the Neanderthal technique I used.”

But it turned out fine. Punk, jazz, disco and grunge took him around the world with Nirvana, a band in which he came of age. Until Kurt Cobain, with whom Grohl lived for a while, could no longer cope with life. The grief ate Grohl from the inside out, he tried to escape everything that reminded him of Kurt or even music and barely dared to play the drums. But when he tried to pick up a guy hitchhiking in a remote part of Ireland, he saw that he was wearing a Kurt Cobain shirt and he knew: I can’t escape this. He left the boy on the side of the road and went home to the studio. Online there is a video in which that Irish (now) man proudly explains how he apparently founded Foo Fighters. „That was David Grohl! Nobody believed me.”

A kind of dreaminess

Back in Seattle, “This is a Call” is the first song he records. This is a calling. A way to let the world know that he didn’t want to be Nirvana’s drummer for the rest of his life. He played everything himself, but came up with a band name to remain somewhat anonymous. But it soon became known that he was behind Foo Fighters fed up. Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder was so excited about a first demo that he played two songs on his radio show and told them it was Grohl. “I’m just going to release these songs. They are really good.”

The sound on the self-titled debut that was released in 1995 was in line with what Nirvana did. That dynamic: loud choruses, soft verses. But there was more air in Grohl’s songs, a kind of dreaminess. Grunge, but without the existential lead suit. With a band built around his idea, he played in venues that were becoming increasingly larger, in Europe as far as Lowlands.

With the arrival of drummer Taylor Hawkins (after Grohl had ruined the relationship with William Goldsmith), the band’s sound became bigger and Foo Fighters continued to grow into a stadium rock band album after album. Grohl became a beloved rock mascot who proved to have his animalistic drumming style in all his limbs, even more charismatic and infectious at the front of the stage than at the back. The way he delivers his anecdotes in TV programs and interviews – pulling a lock of hair from his face, leaning forward, a lot fucking fuckslots of hand gestures – everyone won for him. He made a horror-comedy film, wrote down all his anecdotes in a full-fat way in a book, broke his leg at a Swedish festival and continued to play with a splint on a chair, and on several occasions hilariously portrayed the homophobic Westboro Baptist Church. And there are the hits: after ‘Everlong’ came ‘Learn to Fly’, then ‘All My Life’, ‘The Pretender’, ‘Best of You’, ‘Long Road to Ruin’, ‘Aurora’ – classic stadium rock anthems.

The next big crisis

The next big crisis. In 2022 Taylor Hawkins passed away suddenlyjust before a concert in the Colombian capital Bogotá. Dave Grohl had formed an irresistible tandem with that blonde surfer dude. Not long after his death, cause still foggy, wrote Rolling Stone that Hawkins had indicated to Grohl that touring was too much for him, that he wanted to slow down. Grohl denied this conversation ever took place.

Grohl’s feelings were also painfully audible in new music, on the album But Here We Are (2023). Grief turned into rock. It brought expressiveness back to the music that had become formalistic on the last handful of please rock records, built on effect. It seemed as if Grohl had started writing for the stadiums.

Zoom in

They played a surprise set with it at the Glastonbury festival in England, with the new drummer Josh Freese and apparently a new era. But it didn’t take long before old patterns emerged. Freese was fired after one tour without notice became why. And on the new Foo Fighters album, Your Favorite Toythey fall back into sweet, smooth and predictable stadium rock. „‘Amen, Caveman’ lends itself well to a roaring moment on the Pinkpop festival grounds this summer”, NRC wrote about it. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it’s also not really deeply felt.

Grohl has recently, he said recently in The Guardian (in an interview in which nothing was asked about Freese), attended therapy six times a week. “I’m not the best communicator,” Grohl admitted. But according to his bandmates, things have changed since he publicly announced his infidelity. You can’t say that he doesn’t try to figure out what’s going on in his head, and that’s a good thing: I’d rather have salty albums than just another worn-out rock hero, of course. We are not going to wish him any more suffering so that we are left with a nice picture. Hopefully he will also find out along the way how to separate his undeniable talent from his tendency to please musically.

Give a gift





Part





Email the editor