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| ISBN-13: | 9781784187552 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bonnier Books UK |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2016 |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.70(d) |
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Dave Grohl
Foo Fighters, Nirvana & Other Misadventures
By Martin James
John Blake Publishing Ltd
Copyright © 2015 Martin JamesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78418-765-1
CHAPTER 1
FROM FREAKBABY TO FUMBLE
What's the difference between a chiropodist and a drummer? A chiropodist bucks up your feet.
In 1969, the Stooges released the definitive collection of punk classics with their eponymous debut album. A series of three-minute songs that punched, spat and kicked against the pricks, but above all pointed an accusatory finger at the middle-class indulgences of the West Coast's hippy scenesters and the arty habits of Warhol's Factory fops and their New York cool.
In the Stooges' unique world was Iggy Pop, a singer who could move like a tiger on Vaseline (as Bowie would have it) and croon like Sinatra on amphetamines. Legend has it that the Stooges got their deal after Iggy jumped on a Sony Records boss' desk and delivered his finest Sinatra rendition. "I'm not sure if he signed us because he was impressed or scared," Iggy told me in 1999.
With that debut album, the Stooges delivered a blue-print in trail-blazing, guitar-frenzied punk rock attacks. "It's 1969 OK, war across the USA," sang Iggy. The war he referred to had little to do with Vietnam. It had nothing to do with the fight that Dr Timothy Leary and the rest of the élite intelligentsia were embroiled in by attempting to liberate LSD. The Stooges war was all about society's real outsiders versus the mainstream middle-class, the middle Americans that dominated the culture of the time. This was the punk rock manifesto. A celebration of the outsider, a body of people who would eventually be defined as Generation X.
In the same year eulogised by the war-mongering Iggy and his Stooges, a young couple from Warren, Ohio called James and Virginia Grohl had a son. It was their second child. The first, Lisa, was born three years earlier. Their new addition was given the name David Eric. He was born on January 14.
The Grohl family moved to Springfield, Virginia when Dave was three. Thanks to his parents' shared love of music, their young son quickly developed a desire to play an instrument. His mother had been a singer in a band and his father was an accomplished flautist, and so making music was a normal part of Grohl family life. There was always a guitar lying around the house, so by the time Grohl was ten he'd already started to pick out tunes like Deep Purple's 'Smoke On The Water'.
"I was always really good at figuring out songs by ear," Grohl said in 1995. This natural aptitude was complemented around the age of eleven by formal guitar lessons. He also spent hours practising with his friend, Larry Hinkle. The duo called themselves the H G Hancock Band.
"I always had a guitar wherever I went around my house growing up. Sitting on the couch watching TV, I'd always have it in my hands," he explained to Eric Brace of unomas.com. "My mom was like, 'Put down that guitar and do your homework!' I'd play along to records on this portable record player my mom would borrow from the Fairfax County public schools. We'd bought a few Beatles records and this K-Tel album that had Edgar Winters' 'Frankenstein' on it, which I thought was the coolest thing in the world. That was my favourite."
James and Virginia separated when their son was only seven. Dave Grohl's father was a journalist for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain. Following the spilt he moved back to Ohio, with the children staying with their mother in Virginia. "I was so young I didn't understand it (his parents' divorce). And by the time I got a hold of the situation, it was too late for me to have a freak-out," explained Grohl. "It just seemed abnormal for all my friends to have a father. I thought growing-up with my mother and sister was just the way it was supposed to be."
Following the divorce, Virginia took on three jobs to support Dave and his sister Lisa. She worked as a High School teacher and also in a department store at night. On the weekend she did estimates for a carpet-cleaning company. "She worked her fingers to the bone just to make sure we survived," says a proud Grohl.
Grohl got his first electric guitar for Christmas when he was twelve. It was a 1960s Silvertone with the amp built into the case. A classic in fact. Unfortunately, the young Grohl's hyperactive personality soon saw to the end of that guitar. While messing around one day, he dropped and broke it. It was only a few months old. The heartbroken youngster soon got a replacement however, this time in the shape of a black Memphis Les Paul copy.
With the discovery of distortion pedals and a growing confidence in his own ability, Grohl soon joined a local covers band specialising in faithfully recreated copies of songs by The Who and The Rolling Stones. When the band was invited to perform at a local nursing home, Grohl was to experience for the first time the adrenalised joy of performing live. One song that stands out in his mind from this show was their version of 'Time Is On My Side', simply because the audience actually danced.
A seed had been planted in Dave Grohl's psyche that would grow with increased rapidity over the following years. At first this newly focussed love of being in a band manifested itself with him having drum lessons at high school. However the first subcultural focus for Grohl's rock 'n' roll aspirations came when he was thirteen. It was the summer of 1982 and his family took their annual holiday to Evanston, Illinois to visit his cousins. In the year since they'd last visited, Grohl's cousin Tracey had undergone an image transformation that would leave Dave speechless. In twelve short months, she had become a fully formed punk rocker.
"I was greeted at the front door by Tracey," he explained in 1995. "But this wasn't the Tracey I had grown to love, this was punk Tracey. Complete with bondage pants, spiked hair, chains, the whole nine yards. It was the most fucking awesome thing I had ever seen."
This unassuming family holiday subsequently made an indelible mark on the fledgling rock icon's view of the world of music. Through Tracey, a door to an entirely new world had been opened. Until then punk rockers had been something that Grohl had only ever seen on television and in the media. They were alien to his hometown, simply not a feature of his life and consequently, as was the case for so many people living through this period, punk rock had taken on an almost virtual image. A scene that existed somewhere else entirely.
Until that was, the day he saw Tracey. With her outlandish looks and feisty passion, punk rock was suddenly wrenched out of the TV screen and crash-landed into the reality of Grohl's life. His previously blinkered eyes began to feast upon the huge network of underground labels, fanzines and bands as slowly he began to relate to the innate sense of alternative culture and history that punk represented.
In addition to this Tracey had amassed a huge record collection from all over the world. During that summer break, Grohl developed a love of the sounds that would remain with him throughout his musical career. Indeed, many of these seminal records in Tracey's collection would later be regularly referenced by Grohl in his own bands.
Perhaps more significantly for an artist who would make his name as an invigorating performer, it was during this time that Grohl took in his first live show. It was at a venue called the Cubby Bear and featured Naked Raygun and R.O.T.A. (two Big Black-affiliated punk bands from Chicago). The gritty, in-your-face rawness of this low budget gig filled the gig virgin Grohl with intense wonderment. He felt an immediate affinity with the surrounding vibe and any thoughts of continuing with covers bands and playing live in nursing homes left his mind. His ambitions instantly converted to a punk-rock-only currency. However, at this stage, he didn't even have a band.
By the time Grohl had discovered punk rock, the subculture was already eight years old. US bands like The Ramones had delivered the paradigm of the three chord, high speed attack as far back as 1975, while the UK had developed the style via a group of art students and their friends a year later, reaching its zenith with the Sex Pistols (but therein lies another tale!).
In 1983, however, the punk dream was all but dead in the notoriously fickle UK. New Romantics, techno pop and the hip hop/electro movement had dominated the limelight since the turn of the decade, although the post-punk alternative rock scene proudly continued the DIY ethic. Punk's angry dream was still encompassed by political activist groups like Crass, but generally the punk scene was by this time largely derided as a stagnant movement fuelled by cheap strong cider, bereft of its original fire.
By contrast, the US had continued to develop its own unique scene, spawned by a myriad of underground fanzines and disseminated by people with a fervent energy. Where early US punk inspirations like The Ramones, Patti Smith and Television had delivered respectively the high speed rush, the unorthodox poetry and the edgy dissonance that would herald the arrival of punk rock, it was with bands like The Cramps, Black Flag and Dead Kennedys that the US truly started to reclaim the punk crown from the UK.
Grohl had started travelling further afield to root out his favourite punk bands. Luckily, Washington DC was within easy reach of his hometown and he quickly hooked into that city's burgeoning scene.
Washington DC had been one of the earliest US cities to develop its own distinct style – indeed, it had already been noted as early as 1979 by figures like Dead Kennedys' Jello Biafra as being far more extreme in its approach to punk than other cities.
One of the most influential DC bands was Bad Brains, a group of Rastas who combined The Clash's political fury with hard and heavy rock songs, laced with a strong reggae vibe. Bad Brains emerged from the ashes of jazz funk outfit Mind Power in 1977. Inspired by the Sex Pistols' Never Mind The Bollocks album and The Clash's early experiments with punk and reggae the four piece became an almost immediate success within the DC punk rock fraternity, essentially delivering a blueprint for the fast and tight sound known as hardcore that was to follow.
Having read about The Clash's intention to play free gigs on estates in the UK, Bad Brains started to arrange impromptu gigs in Washington's poorer neighbourhoods. Their actions brought fans from all walks, but also attracted intense interest from the police who even started a surveillance operation on their house.
When the police saw one of the band shooting rats with a small air pistol, they used it as their excuse to storm the building. All they found was that air pistol and a lone marijuana plant in the living room! Disgusted by the police's actions, Bad Brains decided to relocate to New York where they would have an equally huge impact on bands such as the Beastie Boys and also the nascent Big Apple hardcore scene.
Prior to leaving DC however, Bad Brains recorded a demo at Don Zientara's home-based studio, Inner Ear in Arlington, Virginia (Zientara would go on to engineer and/or produce most of the early records on Dischord). These demos eventually saw the light of day in 1996 as the Black Dots album on Caroline Records. In 1981 they delivered an album for the legendary ROIR cassette series, which showed both the band's intensity and also their newfound Rastafarian faith. 1983's Rock For Light showed the band introducing a greater reggae influence, while the following years I Against I has become regarded as one of the defining moments of US hardcore, thanks to its super-tight, high speed arrangements and eclectic approach to sound.
Although Bad Brains would never again reach the same level of blistering intensity (their last for Caroline, Quickness was nearing mainstream rock, while major label albums for Epic and Maverick saw them delivering blanded-out versions of punk and reggae), their influence on the international punk and hardcore scene cannot be over-stated. Certainly their initial three years of intense gigging in Washington DC had a huge and lasting effect on the area's growing mass of young punks.
Subsequently, Washington DC quickly marked itself out as a punk capital, albeit not through the radical politics of Bad Brains, but through the emergence of a highly motivated so-called 'teen-punk' scene. These punks, too young to go to the club venues, had taken a stance that was in direct opposition to the older generation of punk rockers, many of whom were derided for their neo-hippy, drug-taking lifestyles. These teen-punks were staunchly united in their anti-drug stance.
With this teen punk scene – marked out by an 'X' written in marker pens on their hands and uniformly shaven heads – there was a near-rejection of the values upheld by the punk originals. Furthermore, these DC teenagers would stand their ground through any means necessary – which invariably meant violence at the gigs.
At the forefront of this scene was The Teen Idles who counted among their numbers one Ian MacKaye, a hyperactive skate kid who respected rock legend Ted Nugent for his total rejection of drugs. He quickly recognised a similarly contrary stance in punk and increasingly adopted the musical ideologies of bands like the Sex Pistols.
The Teen Idles split when MacKaye decided he wanted to be the main songwriter – however their posthumously released eponymous single did mark the beginning of the famous Dischord label, which became a ground zero for hardcore fans. MacKaye immediately returned to the limelight as vocalist in the seminal hardcore act Minor Threat – so called because they were all below twenty-one years of age and because their threat to the status quo was considered negligible.
The teen punk scene did represent a threat to the punk hegemony however. Their ethos was more on the edge, more confrontational more ... harDCore – as the DC teens punks started to spell the word. By 1980, the violence that surrounded the Washington DC harDCore scene had begun to overshadow the music itself. However, in bands like Minor Threat, there was something quite unique and different from the punk that was being created elsewhere. Sure there was a heavy influence from the UK scene, especially The Clash's debut album, but they were delivering their sound at breakneck speed, with clear and precise dynamics.
With the arrival of the debut eponymous Minor Threat EP, the third release on Dischord, there also came an ideology which marked out the DC teens. The eight track EP included the cut 'Straight Edge' which, although not intended to provide a philosophy for the scene, succeeded in doing exactly that. Straight Edge thus became signified by the 'X' mark (as previously used to identify the teen punk scene and used on every Dischord release to date) and represented an ideology that embraced anti-drugs and anti-alcohol beliefs, even the abstinence from underage sex. The DC teen punks were flying directly in the face of the easy liberalism of the 1960s' hippy generation.
Ironically, however, the Straight Edge harDCore scene didn't regard itself as political. Lyrically the songs of Minor Threat et al were far more about personal beliefs and observations. Inevitably, this meant that their fury was vented in the direction of small targets. Thus the older generation of punks would get it in the neck, as too would the venues that didn't admit underage punks. On the surface then, this hardly appeared to be an establishment-scaring manifesto, but it was a stance that became crucially important to this increasingly élitist group of teens.
The Straight Edge philosophy found its way into MacKaye's lyrics for Minor Threat's second and final EP in 1983 – In My Eyes – specifically on the title track 'Out Of Step' which found the vocalist proclaiming "Don't smoke/Don't drink/Don't fuck/ At least I can fucking think". It was a totalitarian philosophy that by this time had unfortunately found favour with right-wing skinheads. Straight Edge was turning into a major threat.
Following Minor Threat's split, MacKaye ventured to England to roadie for Black Flag (in support of clueless punk band Chelsea and proto-Oi! band Exploited). Here he met Crass and was introduced to a much wider political viewpoint. During this period he was able to redress many of his earlier beliefs, but remained nonetheless extreme in his standpoint.
By late 1983 then, when David Grohl first started to venture to Washington DC, there was a vibrant scene that was gaining an international reputation. MacKaye and friends had continued with their Dischord label putting out the definitive harDCore compilation Flex Your Head in 1982 as well as later records in 1983 by bands including Scream, SOA, Faith, Void and Marginal Man. Minor Threat's Out of Step EP also heralded the start of a partnership with John Lober of Southern Studios in London (who had also put out the Crass records).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dave Grohl by Martin James. Copyright © 2015 Martin James. Excerpted by permission of John Blake Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Dedication,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,
A DRUMMER JOKE,
INTRODUCTION,
FROM FREAKBABY TO FUMBLE,
MTV MELTDOWN: SELLING PUNK TO THE MASSES,
RECLAIMING PUNK FROM THE MTV MASSES,
ALONE AND AN EASY TARGET,
WHAT HAVE WE DONE WITH INNOCENCE?,
THERE IS NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE,
DONE, DONE AND THEN I'M ON TO THE NEXT ONE,
LOOKING FOR RELIEF IN YOUR MISERABLE LIFE?,
ALWAYS WAS THE LUCKY ONE,
WHAT IF I SAY I'M NOT LIKE THE OTHERS?,
DESERVE THE FUTURE,
THESE ARE MY FAMOUS LAST WORDS,
IF I WERE ME,
IN THE CLEAR,
POSTSCRIPT ... A REFLECTION,
DISCOGRAPHY,
ABOUT THE AUTHOR,
Plates,
Copyright,
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