Dave Grohl, The Storyteller: How the former Nirvana drummer reinvented himself after Kurt Cobain's suicide

In The Music That Made Us, senior journalist Lakshmi Govindrajan Javeri chronicles the impact that musicians and their art have on our lives, how they mould the industry by rewriting its rules and how they shape generations of musicians into the people they become. * Stuck at home during the lockdown last year, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl started to write true short stories based on his life, or what he called: “… sharing some of the most ridiculous moments of my life." Posting them periodically on his Instagram handle @davestruestories, Grohl wrote candidly, in his trademark humorous style that we have come to expect from rock and roll’s proverbial ’nice guy.’ Kind-hearted with a potty mouth, Grohl’s legend has only grown over the years with the drummer-frontman acquiring near statesman level respect and adulation from both fans and his peers. As his autobiography The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music, a collection of these stories that he has been writing, is set for international release today on 5 October (on Amazon and Kindle in India), now is a good time as any to recognise what a force of nature Grohl has been, and why so many younger and newer musicians over the years continue to call him My Hero. Every hero has had to live a life quite ordinary until they are hurled into unprecedented situations and experiences, forcing them to harness strength and courage they did not think they possessed. Dave Grohl is the most appropriate hero by that account, and has a huge body of work and stories to become a highly engaging chronicler of the 1990-2000s. From being that teenager who filled in as drummer for a fledging grunge outfit to becoming a member of one of the biggest bands in recent history, to dealing with creative existentialism and then rising to create one of the greatest rock bands even, Grohl has drummed up a lifetime of experiences. Like most teenagers of his time, Grohl had no intentions of making a career out of being a musician. The Led Zeppelin- and KISS-influenced kid simply wanted to cut class, dye his hair, and wear leather jackets, as he wrote in The Guardian earlier this year: “All I wanted to do was leave school, jump in a van, and tour shitty basement clubs with my punk band.” The lack of professional training did not matter but the will to use his heavy legs and bang the drums as loudly as he could eventually got him through his life. That he eventually became part of a grunge behemoth should have been the most historic step in the life of a musician whose work albeit very loud, echoes a personality of patience and grace. Drumming for Nirvana meant raging and snarling, screaming and banging away angst and anxiety to reach the pinnacles of superstardom.

Grunge became mainstream with Nirvana, and Grohl became instrumental in giving teenagers a voice, validating their dark emotions and rooting for them in their most helpless times.

Bandmate and frontman Kurt Cobain’s death by suicide when Grohl was 25, and riding an incredible popularity wave as a Nirvana member, rudely yanked him out of a career high that he was experiencing. Like he mentioned in one of The Storyteller evening sessions recently: “There are some people in life that you emotionally prepare yourself to lose… like some sort of defence mechanism. But it doesn’t work. It never works.” Grunge is replete with stories of suicide and suicide attempts, stemming from years of depression, living life in the public, alcohol, and substance abuse and overdose. While songwriting and compositions are extraordinary outlets for the inner struggles, being in the midst of all this can be extremely hard for a musician trying to separate his art from his life. The list of grunge deaths by suicide include some of the genre’s loudest advocates: Kurt Cobain (Nirvana), Layne Staley and Mike Starr (Alice in Chains), Chris Cornell (Soundgarden, Audioslave), and Scott Weiland (Stone Temple Pilots) among others. Losing a bandmate, watching how so many contemporaries have gone in similar ways can be undoubtedly nerve-wracking, yet Grohl remains that smiling star with a wicked sense of humour. His ability to bounce back has held him in good stead: following Cobain’s death in April 1994, Grohl scheduled a studio session in October the same year, to record a 15-track demo where he played all the instruments by himself, barring a guitar bit in one song. Caught in the dilemma of becoming a drummer for a major artist (he had already drummed for Tom Petty by then) to putting together a band of musicians with him as the focal point, Grohl eventually settled for the latter. His 15-track demo was given professional refurbishment, thus becoming the debut album for Foo Fighters. [caption id=“attachment_10024551” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Dave Grohl[/caption] If the demo was the only instance of Grohl driving himself to play all the parts, let me remind you how representative the ‘Learn To Fly’ video is of his proclivity to wear all the hats! Even the soundtrack for Touch had Grohl perform all the instrumentation and vocals, barring one by Veruca Salt. A keen backer of his own creative versatility, Grohl admits this self-belief comes from the grunge principle of doing all the music, mixing, burning by yourself because no one in the mainstream gave you much attention until you demanded it. Foo Fighters was not grunge. It was, as he wrote on Instagram: “My version of post-grunge, alternative rock.” Grohl in the 2000s did not want to sound like a once popular band of the ’90s, something so many musicians and bands struggle with: their perception of their identity. Grohl’s collaborations with the who’s who of music (read Brian May of Queen, Tom Petty, AC/DC, Iggy Pop, Joan Jett et al) has contributed largely to his evolving sound. From feeling like misfits for being the “smiley, smirky, candy commercial dorks… the rock n’ roll Revenge of the Nerds” who were scouring through their catalogue to look for any song without “love or George Harrison style slide guitar” as they followed Pantera’s set at Ozzfest, Grohl and his band of Foo Fighters have come a long way in establishing their distinctly loud, decisive sound. A sound that has inspired legions of rhythm-influenced bands and musicians starting from Queens of the Stone Age, Alter Bridge, Wolfmother, and Audioslave to Nothing But Thieves, The Struts, Yonaka, and Royal Blood.   Grohl has often approached guitar riffs like he would his drumming: rhythmically. So even the construction of the melodics bits would go through his assigning each string a rhythm part. The band’s vast influences, their own punk rock beginnings, and grunge journey have meant that while their sound continues to evolve, the approach to rhythmic song writing has remained the same. Grohl also remains a courteous, self-aware frontman who towers over his peers and his genre as that good guy with a snarl.   That you can be a rocker with good manners (but shoddy vocab) is a lesson for generations of rockers to come. That all it takes is the courage to follow through with an idea is a crucial learning from observing Grohl’s trajectory. Or like he says, “I’ve never been one to back down from a terrible idea. I’ve practically made a career of it!”