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

The HG Hancock Band was a duo, a partnership between Grohl and North Springfield Elementary School classmate, and near neighbour, Larry Hinkle. Grohl viewed the group as nothing less than North Springfield Elementary’s answer to Southern rock heroes Lynyrd Skynyrd. Having discovered that the Jacksonville, Florida band had taken their name in mocking tribute to their former PE teacher Leonard Skinner, he and Hinkle borrowed the name of their own PE teacher Ms Hancock for their new outfit: the HG prefix stood for Hinkle/Grohl.

The pair shared classes together in fifth grade, and were now inseparable, always in and out of one another’s houses, forever hatching schemes and making mischief. Now a self-employed woodworker living in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Hinkle has fond memories of his time as Grohl’s partner-in-crime.

‘Dave was pretty funny, and fun to be around,’ he recalls. ‘We sat close to each other in class, he didn’t live too far away from where I lived, and he was just a good guy to hang out with.

‘We did do some things that weren’t too cool,’ Hinkle admits. ‘I used to spend the night at Dave’s house and we’d sneak out and go to this one road late at night and throw crab apples at cars and try to get them to chase us. That could have got us into a lot of trouble. Another time I remember we were teasing some girl on the school bus and we grabbed her purse and threw it out of the bus window. We forgot all about it until we were called into the principal’s office the next day. We weren’t bad kids, just kinda goofy.

‘But Dave was always really into music. He always had his guitar with him, a beat-up old acoustic with broken strings. Hanging out with him it was hard not to get into music.’

When they weren’t terrorising the local community, Grohl and Hinkle spent their free time listening to local classic rock station DC 101 with classmate Jimmy Swanson, sniggering at ‘shock jock’ Howard Stern’s gleefully puerile banter and playing air guitar to a soundtrack of AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Cheap Trick, Black Sabbath, Ted Nugent, Alice Cooper, Van Halen and, naturally, Lynyrd Skynyrd.

‘Dave played his guitar with the broken strings,’ says Hinkle, ‘and I played drums, which was made up of his mom’s knitting needles and laundry basket and pots and pans. His mom was always very welcoming, always really nice to us. But God only knows what she thought of the noises we were making.’

In truth, Virginia Grohl had long since learned to tune out the noises emanating from her son’s bedroom. Since a cousin had given him a copy of Canadian prog-rockers Rush’s 1976 album 2112, Grohl had been teaching himself how to play drums, using the furniture in his room as a crude approximation of a kit. Now the thump-thwack-thump-thwack coming from her boy’s bedroom was as natural to Virginia Grohl as birdsong, and scarcely more intrusive.

‘I had a chair that was next to my bed, and I would kneel down on the floor and put a pillow between my legs to use as my snare,’ said Grohl, explaining his rudimentary set-up to Modern Drummer magazine in 2004. ‘I would use the chair to my left as the hi-hat and use the bed as toms and cymbals. And I would play to these records until there was condensation dripping from the windows.’

Encouraged by the promise displayed in the first HG Hancock Band rehearsals, Grohl decided it was time to start committing some of his own original material to tape. The HG Hancock Band’s first song, ‘Bitch’, was a tribute to the Grohl family dog BeeGee. The second song presented to Hinkle by his musical partner was titled ‘Three Steps’.

‘In class this one day he gave me a piece of paper and said, “Here’s this new song I’ve wrote, let’s do it!”’ Hinkle recalls. ‘He played it for me and I said, “Wow, this is great!” And then later that afternoon he was feeling kinda weird about it and he admitted that he didn’t write the song, that it was a Lynyrd Skynyrd song, “Gimme Three Steps”. We wondered if we could get into trouble for playing it. We were kinda nervous for the rest of the day.’

‘I certainly didn’t consider myself a songwriter, they were just little experiments, little challenges,’ says Grohl of his earliest, non-plagiarised songs. ‘I honestly wasn’t aiming for anything. But I figured out for myself that I could record multitrack at home with two cassette players. I could hit Record on one cassette player, play the guitar, stop, rewind, take that cassette and put it into the other cassette player, hit Play, get another cassette to record on in the first one and sing over the top. And then you have a two-track recording. I would listen back to it and I didn’t necessarily like the sound of my voice but the reward was simple: proof that I could.’

In 2009, as part of the liner notes to Foo Fighters’ Greatest Hits album, Grohl laid out this primitive recording process in marginally more detail in a four-step mini essay entitled ‘How to Multitrack at Home’. The final step read simply ‘Start band’.

As the 1970s drew to a close, Dave Grohl’s life had settled into a familiar groove: school, soccer matches, small-scale vandalism, stereo-hogging. He was a popular kid in the neighbourhood, and a diligent student at school, even if his hyperactivity was a concern to his teachers: ‘They always said the same thing: “David could be a great student if he could just stay in his fucking seat,”’ he later recalled.

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.