Paul Brannigan - This Is a Call - The Life and Times of Dave Grohl

In September 2009 I had lunch with Foo Fighters’ frontman at West Hollywood’s chic Sunset Marquis hotel. As he picked at a Caesar salad, Grohl, modern rock’s most convincing renaissance man, described the early days of his life’s journey as being informed by a ‘sense of adventure’, of ‘not knowing what lay ahead’.

‘In that dream I had so far to go,’ he said, ‘and I was going so slow, but I was moving.’

Los Angeles is a city which holds memories both good and bad for Grohl. A decade ago he would tell anyone who’d listen that he hated this town, hated the Hollywood lifestyle, and hated pretty much everyone he met here:

‘It’s kinda funny for a while,’ he conceded, ‘then annoying, then depressing, finally it gets terrifying because you start wondering if these people are rubbing off on you. It’s like one giant frenzy of aspiration and lies.’

But now Los Angeles, or more specifically Encino, 15 miles northwest of Sunset Boulevard’s celebrity haunts, and a neighbourhood Grohl once defined as a place where ‘porn stars become grocery clerks and rock stars come to die’, is his home. Here, overlooking the San Fernando Valley, Dave Grohl literally has Los Angeles at his feet.

Grohl bought his house, a tasteful four-bedroom 1950s villa set on almost 4,000 square feet of prime Californian real estate, for $2.2 million in April 2003; four months later, surrounded by friends and family, he married MTV producer Jordyn Blum on the tennis court at the rear of the property. And it was here that Grohl elected to record Foo Fighters’ seventh studio album Wasting Light in autumn 2010, eschewing digital studio technology in favour of tracking to analogue tape, a process largely viewed as antiquated within the modern recording industry.

From the outset, it seemed like a curious move, verging on the perverse: Grohl has his very own state-of-the-art recording complex, Studio 606, in Northridge, California, not ten minutes’ drive from his home, and though his house in Encino also contains a compact home studio built around a 24-track mixing desk, the set-up is very much that of a family home, not some rock star bolthole. In contrast to houses in Los Angeles’ more fashionable zip codes, there are no high fences surrounding the Grohl residence, no signs warning of armed security guards patrolling the perimeters: a plaque on the left-hand side of the driveway simply reads The Grohls. When you step inside the front door there are no gold or platinum discs on the hallway walls, no framed magazine covers, no posed portraits with celebrity friends, nothing to signpost the road Dave Grohl has travelled to get here: instead there are family snapshots and brightly coloured crayon-drawn abstract artwork tacked to the walls, the work of artists-in-residence Violet Maye Grohl and Harper Willow Grohl, Dave and Jordyn’s young daughters.

In November 2010 I was invited to the Grohl family home to interview Foo Fighters about their work-in-progress. I arrived to find the man of the house in his garage, holding up scuffed album sleeves and fingerprint-smudged CD cases from his personal record collection to a webcam delivering images for a 24/7 live stream on Foo Fighters’ website. Among them were Bad Brains’ Rock for Light, Metallica’s Master of Puppets, AC/DC’s Back in Black, Thin Lizzy’s Live and Dangerous, Ted Nugent’s Cat Scratch Fever, Pixies’ Trompe Le Monde and Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, each album a strand of Grohl’s musical DNA, each one a part of the soundtrack of his life. Behind him, producer Butch Vig stood splicing two-inch analogue tape on a 24-track Studer A800 reel-to-reel tape machine. In the room next door, eighteen of Grohl’s guitars stood erect in flight cases, tuned and ready for use. In the adjoining garage, usually reserved for Grohl’s Harley Davidson motorcycles, Taylor Hawkins’s drum kit sat encircled by mic stands.

‘It gets fucking loud in there,’ said Grohl, closing the door with a smile.

Upstairs in the studio control room, band members Pat Smear, Chris Shiftlet, Nate Mendel and Hawkins sat sharing cartons of take-away food. Around them Grohl strode animated, enthusing about his belief that Wasting Light would be Foo Fighters’ definitive work. And as he spoke, his decision to record here began to make sense, indeed began to look inspired.

‘It only seemed like a good idea to do it here,’ Grohl insisted. ‘I wasn’t nervous about it at all. What we’re doing here is in some ways making sense of everything we’ve done for the last fifteen years.

‘It all came together as one big idea. Let’s work with Butch, but let’s not use computers, let’s only use tape. Let’s not do it at 606, let’s do it in my garage. And let’s make a movie that tells the history of the band as we’re making the new album, so that somehow it all makes sense together in the grand scheme of things. I feel like you can actually hear the whole process in the album.’

For Grohl, the notion of time, its passing, its deathless march and the value and importance of seizing precious moments, is central to Wasting Light. But later that night, as I played back the cassette recording of the day’s conversations, it struck me that the process unfolding in Encino was perhaps more personal than Dave Grohl would care to acknowledge explicitly: as he spoke of garage demos and life-changing albums, of collaborations with heroes and friends, of teenage desires and adult responsibilities, it seemed that in making Foo Fighters’ seventh album Dave Grohl was seeking not merely to define his band’s career, but also to make sense of his own life to date. And who could blame him? For his has been a journey more dramatic than that adolescent dreamer back in Virginia could ever have imagined.

Between 1880 and 1920 almost 24 million immigrants arrived in the United States, the majority of them from Southern and Eastern European nations. Pursuing his own dreams, Dave Grohl’s great-grandfather was among their number.

Born in Slovakia, then a part of the powerful Austro-Hungarian Empire, John Grohol was admitted to America in 1886, the same year in which the Statue of Liberty was erected on Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor. Like the vast majority of Slovaks who boarded dangerously overcrowded, unsanitary steamer ships for the twelve-day voyage to America’s eastern seaboard, Grohol was an economic migrant: without a trade to his name when he arrived in the USA, he was drawn to the state of Pennsylvania by the promise of unskilled labour in the region’s coalfields and steel mills. The state was a popular destination for Slovak immigrants: when Grohol made his home in the small town of Houtzdale in Clearfield County, he was just one of approximately 250,000 Slovaks to put down roots within the borders of the Keystone State between 1880 and 1920. This influx of new labour engendered a certain amount of tension in the region.

Racist attitudes towards the settling Eastern European community were laid out in the bluntest terms by a report commissioned by the US Immigration Commission, published in 1911. Presented to Congress by the Republican Senator for Vermont, William P. Dillingham, Volume 16 of the Reports of the Immigration Commission: Immigrants in Industries dealt with studies into communities built around ‘Copper Mining and Smelting; Iron Ore Mining; Anthracite Coal Mining; [and] Oil Refining’ in Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania, and concluded that white, American-born workers were being displaced by ‘the more recent settlers of the community’, referred to elsewhere in the report as ‘the ignorant foreigner’.

One excerpt of Dillingham’s report stated:

The social and moral deterioration of the community through the infusion of a large element of foreign blood may be described under the heads of the two principal sources of its evil effects: (a) The conditions due directly to the peculiarities of the foreign body itself; and (b) those which arise from the reactions upon each other of two non-homogeneous social elements – the native and the alien classes – when brought into close association. Among the effects under the first-named class may be enumerated the following: