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

‘Virginia Grohl was a great teacher,’ recalls Chet Lott, a student at Thomas Jefferson High from 1981 to 1984. ‘She was the type of teacher that took an interest in you personally, and got to know everyone, and she was definitely one of the stand-out teachers in my whole schooling. She was very cool, a very nice lady.’

In private, though, things were not going quite so well for the Grohls. Behind closed doors, and out of earshot of their children, James and Virginia Grohl’s marriage was slowly falling apart. In 1975 James Grohl walked out on his wife and young family. Virginia Grohl faced what would have undoubtedly been a difficult, stress-filled time with dignity and admirable stoicism, shielding her two children from both the harsh realities of separation and her own fears and concerns for the future.

‘Of course it caused a lot of pain and it caused a lot of struggle, but I don’t think I really understood what was going on,’ Dave would later recall. ‘By the time I got a hold of the situation, it was too late for me to have a freak-out. 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.’

On a practical level, Virginia Grohl quickly realised that her $18,000 salary as a high school teacher in the Fairfax County public school system was never going to cover the cost of raising two children single-handedly. To supplement her income she took on part-time work: week-day evenings were spent working in a department store, while weekends were occupied by administration duties for a local carpet cleaning company.

In order to keep her children occupied and entertained while she was working weekends, Virginia Grohl would allow Lisa and Dave to listen to her record collection on a stereo borrowed from Thomas Jefferson High School. One day while the family were out shopping in a local drugstore Dave nagged his mother into buying him an album of his own, a K-Tel compilation which had been heavily advertised on television. Released in 1976, Block Buster promised ‘20 original hits by original stars’, and featured some of the biggest anthems of the era, from KC and The Sunshine Band’s ‘That’s the Way (I Like It)’ to Alice Cooper’s ‘Only Women Bleed’. Back home at Kathleen Place, Dave commandeered the stereo for the next few weekends, bugging the shit out of his big sister by lifting the stylus every three and a half minutes to play one particular track over and over and over again.

The Edgar Winter Group’s ‘Frankenstein’ was one of the 1970s’ more unlikely Number 1 singles. Originally a sprawling live jam, allowing the Texas-born Winter to demonstrate his virtuosity on a variety of instruments on his 1972 album They Only Come Out at Night, ‘Frankenstein’ was a spacey, synthesiser-led, progressive rock instrumental, featuring a spiralling saxophone solo and mid-song drum duel. The following year the track was used as the B-side of the band’s ‘Hangin’ Around’ single, but as disc jockeys nationwide began playing the track in response to listener requests, Winter’s label Epic flipped the seven inch and began plugging ‘Frankenstein’ as the single. In May 1973 the song reached Number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, eventually selling more than one million copies. As track nine on the Block Buster compilation, it would change one little boy’s life forever.

‘To me that was just the best sound I had ever heard in my life,’ Grohl later enthused. ‘To this day [it’s] still one of the most amazing songs you’ve ever heard in your life. Every time I hear “Frankenstein” it reminds me of being that young, just rocking out in my bedroom.’

On the wall of that bedroom, Grohl had tacked a poster of the cockpit of a 747 aeroplane. At the time the young man dreamt of becoming a pilot, of leaving Springfield behind and escaping to new places, experiencing new things. But if his next musical discovery taught him anything, it was that he didn’t actually need to leave his small bedroom in order to escape the realities of day-to-day life.

For American teenagers from Long Island to Long Beach, and all points in between, obsessing over Kiss was a rite of passage. On 31 October 1976 the quartet from New York stomped onto ABC’s The Paul Lynde Halloween Special in Kabuki make-up and stackheels, and proceeded to pout and prance through lip-synched versions of ‘Detroit Rock City’, ‘Beth’ and ‘King of the Night Time World’ for a national TV audience that numbered millions. For a generation of wide-eyed, awestruck young viewers this was their ‘The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show’ moment, only with added flashbombs.

Kiss were four cartoon superheroes – Starchild, The Demon, Space Ace and Catman – both larger and louder than life; figures who breathed fire, spat blood, fired rockets from their guitars and made rock ’n’ roll seem like the most impossibly exciting vocation. A self-confessed ‘show-off’, fond of dressing up in clothes ‘as outlandish and ridiculous as possible’, the seven-year-old Dave Grohl thought they were just about the coolest thing he’d ever seen. Soon enough, Virginia Grohl was pestered into buying Rock and Roll Over (and later Kiss Alive II), but in truth Dave spent more time looking at the album sleeves than actually listening to the vinyl within. The true magic lay elsewhere. Kiss breathed fire! They spat blood! They played guitars that fired rockets! A poster of the band posing atop the Empire State Building soon occupied pride of place on Grohl’s bedroom wall. It was surely no coincidence that his interest in playing guitar started soon afterwards.

‘My mother bought my father a nylon string flamenco-type guitar when I was three or four years old,’ he recalls. ‘He never learned to play so it just sat around the house, and by the time I was nine I’d broken four of the six strings on it. But with the two left I’d learned how to make a chord and learned [Deep Purple standard] “Smoke on the Water” … very Beavis and Butthead. And that was how I started playing guitar.’

While Grohl was getting to grips with his first powerchords, his mother’s new boyfriend, Chip Donaldson, a fellow English teacher and Vietnam War veteran, moved into the family home. Far from resenting this new alpha male presence, Grohl was in awe of the new arrival, and Donaldson’s arrival started the fledgling guitarist’s musical education in earnest.

‘Chip was a fucking brilliant man, who I totally looked up to,’ he told me in 2009. ‘He was a real wild, “outdoors man” guy, who was just as book smart as he was at home in nature: we would go on these crazy nature walks, and he taught me to hunt when I was ten. He moved in with us for a few years and brought his record collection with him. Our living room went from being a conservative suburban Virginia home living room to crates of albums on the walls, and maybe deer antlers, and a gun rack … it basically turned into a hunting lodge, with really good music.

‘I learned a lot from his record collection. It was everything from Jethro Tull to the Grateful Dead to the Rolling Stones to Phoebe Snow to Zeppelin to Jefferson Airplane to Dylan, all late sixties and seventies shit. Lynyrd Skynyrd was another big one. I remember listening to “Freebird” when I was ten years old and thinking, “God, if some day I could just play a solo like that …” and Chip saying, “Well, if you practise, maybe some day …” But I knew with all my heart he was wrong, that even if I practised for years I’d never be able to play that guitar part. And I still can’t play that guitar part!’

Pleased that Dave had a hobby that was keeping him out of trouble, Virginia Grohl paid for guitar lessons for her son, until after a year the student pronounced them ‘boring’, and quit. In place of these lessons, Dave Grohl calmly revealed that he had formed a band.