Paul Brannigan - This is a Call

On school holidays the family returned to Ohio to see James Grohl and his parents Alois and Ruth, and Virginia Grohl’s mother Violet. The whole family would rendezvous in Breeze Manor in Breezewood, ‘get a couple of rooms, eat fried chicken and swim in the pool for the weekend’. These were happy, uncomplicated times: ‘I had it made,’ Grohl later reflected.

But as a new decade dawned, young David was given a glimpse into an alternate reality. On the evening of 26 January 1980 he snuck out of his home to hang out with his big sister, who was babysitting for a neighbourhood family. With her charges tucked up in bed, Lisa Grohl was watching Saturday Night Live , the nation’s most popular comedy and variety television show. Dave joined his sister on the sofa. As SNL host Terri Garr introduced the night’s musical guests, however, he almost tumbled from his seat in astonishment.

The band on TV were weird , seriously weird. The skinny singer in the oversized jacket was talking gibberish, the big-haired girls – one blonde, one a redhead – were shrieking and wriggling as if, quite literally, they had ants in their pants, the guitarist was playing with what sounded like just two out-of-tune strings, just as Dave himself had done before he mastered basic chord shapes. The noise they were making was all wrong, twitching and jerking like an anaphylactic shock. To add to the tumult, after two minutes on-screen the singer and the blonde girl simply fell over and lay twitching on the studio floor like they’d been shot. The Grohl children were witnessing Athens, Georgia’s New Wave heroes The B-52s in full flight.

‘I remember that moment like some people remember the Kennedy assassination,’ says Grohl. ‘When the B-52s played “Rock Lobster”, honestly, that moment changed my life. The importance and impact of that on me was huge. That people that were so strange could play this music that sounded so foreign to me and for it to be so moving… growing up in suburban Virginia, I had never even imagined something so bizarre was possible. It made me want to be weird. It just immediately made me want to give everyone the middle finger and be like, “Fuck you, I wanna be like that !”

‘A big rock ’n’ roll moment for me was going to see AC/DC’s Let There Be Rock movie, because that was the first time I heard music that made me want to break shit. Like after the first number. Larry Hinkle and I went to see it at some theatre downtown in Washington DC and they had a club PA in the movie theatre, and it was the two of us and two people smoking weed in the back, and that was it. And that fucking movie was so loud… honestly, that was maybe the first moment where I really felt like a fucking punk, you know, like I just wanted to tear that movie theatre to shreds watching this rock ’n’ roll band. It was fucking awesome.

‘But the B-52s thing really had an impact on me, because it made me realise that there was something powerful about music that was different. It made everything else seem so vanilla. I didn’t shave a mohawk in my head, and I still loved the melodies and lyrics in my rock ’n’ roll records, but that sent me on this mission to find things that were unusual, music that wasn’t considered normal.

‘Those guitars! Two strings! How cool! Those drums! Slap slap slap! Dead easy! The women looked like they were from outer space and everything was linked in – the sleeves, the sound, the clothes, the iconography, the logo, everything. I think when you’re a kid that’s what you’re after, a real unified feel to a band, and that’s what the B-52s offered. Their songs were so easy to learn, they got me into playing really easily. This was definitely the first thing after Kiss or Rush that totally absorbed me like that.’

Virginia Grohl rewarded Dave’s continued interest in music by buying him his first ‘real’ guitar, a 1963 Sears Silvertone with an amplifier built into the guitar case, as a Christmas present in 1981. Grohl received another gift in the form of two Beatles albums – The Beatles 1962 – 1966 (aka ‘The Red Album’) and The Beatles 1967 – 1970 (aka ‘The Blue Album’). Opening with the giddy euphoria of ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘Please Please Me’ and winding down with the stately, elegiac ‘Across the Universe’ and ‘The Long and Winding Road’, these two extraordinary compilations served not only to document the Fab Four’s astonishing creative evolution, but also provided an inspirational blueprint for artists seeking to redefine the rock ’n’ roll landscape on their own terms. A young musician could have no finer template upon which to build.

‘Around that time too my mother bought me this songbook, The Complete Beatles , that was all their songs transcribed with chord charts,’ recalls Grohl. ‘I can’t read music, but I could read chord charts, so I’d put on those records and start to play along. And at that age everything was a puzzle, like any child now with a video game you just want to conquer that level and get to the next. So for me it was really about figuring out a song so I could move on to the next: maybe I could do “Day Tripper” but I hadn’t figured out “A Day in the Life”. So from then on if I wasn’t outside walking around the creeks and the back yard looking for crawfish, I was inside with a guitar. That was my entertainment.’

Following the dissolution of the HG Hancock Band (which fell apart when Larry Hinkle moved away from Springfield to live in Maryland with his father, following his parents’ divorce), Grohl was on the lookout for a new musical foil, a Lennon to his McCartney. Fortunately, he would not have far to look or long to wait. Living just a few blocks from Kathleen Place, at the age of thirteen Nick Christy was already a competent guitar player and a fine singer, blessed with a sense of self-confidence and self-possession rare in young men of his age. A fan of The Who, The Beatles and Rolling Stones, Christy was looking to put together his own band, and invited Grohl over to his parents’ basement to jam. The two clicked immediately.

‘After that we were always in that basement, always looking for an audience and more people to join us,’ recalls Christy, now president of an award-winning landscaping company and a part-time musician back in his native Massachusetts. ‘We played in a lot of little projects together, and just started bands with whoever we could find. We would throw our own parties in my basement, or in his house, and invite all our classmates just to have a party so we could play in front of people.

‘We’d also do little duets, just the two of us. Dave’s mom was amazingly supportive, just the best, and she would take us out to a local restaurant called Treebeards, where there were open mic nights on a Wednesday night and we would perform in front of people. There’d be people in their twenties or thirties performing and then these two eighth grade kids popping up to play their stuff.’

‘It’s hard to book gigs when you’re twelve years old!’ Grohl says with a laugh. ‘Usually we’d just play in our own back yards, and like six or seven people would watch. But I’d find out that the kid two blocks away played the bass and I’d be like, “ That kid plays the bass? Really? Because Alex has a drum set: tell Alex to bring the drum set over to Nicky’s house on Sunday at two.” It was twelve- and thirteen-year-old kids in a basement, man, it was great, totally fun. It was better than stealing cars!’

‘When we would rehearse, Dave was just a wildcard,’ remembers Christy. ‘He was the funniest guy you’d ever meet. He had so much energy and drive. But I was always that A-type personality, I wanted to lead the show and I’d be saying, “Okay, this is what we’re doing next” – but he’d be going a mile a minute, wanting to do this and that. He was the lead guitar player and I was rhythm, but he’d be jumping on the drums any chance he could get, like in between songs. He’d just start whaling on those frigging drums, and it was annoying as hell, because I wanted to practise. I’d be saying, “Cut the shit, dude, we’ve gotta practise and you’re not a fucking drummer.” If he’d listened to me he’d never have been a drummer. If he’d listened to me, he might not have got anywhere…’