[applause]

Kelefa Sanneh: Hi, I'm Kelefa Sanneh, I'm a staff writer at the New Yorker Magazine and on behalf of the New Yorker Magazine and the New Yorker Festival. Thanks for coming out Whether you're with us--

David Remnick: Last fall, a crowd gathered in Brooklyn to hear from a very special guest.

Kelefa Sanneh: The guy I'm sitting next to has been destroying stages ever since the 1980s when he was a rambunctious punk kid playing with hardcore bands in the DC area. He --

David Remnick: Rock musician, Dave Grohl.

Kelefa Sanneh: It's true. He changed the world with Nirvana and then kept changing with Foo Fighters who were now 10 albums into one of the most epic rock and roll runs of all time. [applause]

David Remnick: Dave Grohl's epic run began as the drummer for Nirvana.

[music]

Then after the death of Kurt Cobain, Grohl became a frontman for his own band Foo Fighters.

[music]

On this Labor Day weekend, we wanted to take a break from the news of the world and bring you a conversation from last year's New Yorker Festival, Dave Grohl's recent memoirs called The Storyteller. He talked about the book, his early days, and so much more with staff writer, Kelefa Sanneh. They were on stage last October at the Skyline drive-in out on the Brooklyn waterfront, and as they talk, you might hear something creaking in the breeze, off the East River, but it's all good.

Kelefa Sanneh: Please freak out for Dave Grohl.

[applause]

Dave Grohl: Awkward.

Kelefa Sanneh: Dave, we're here at the New Yorker Festival, and we're here to talk about your literary career, which began at age 14, I think around there with a letter you wrote to your dad.

Dave Grohl: [laughs] Whoa. Well, both of my parents were writers. My mother was a public school teacher for 35 years. Yes, let's hear for the teachers.

[applause]

Kelefa Sanneh: Yes.

Dave Grohl: We love the teachers. She taught creative writing, and she was a forensics coach and a debate coach. My father was a speechwriter and a journalist on Capitol Hill. We grew up outside of Washington DC. Not only the written word but also spoken word in our house was valued. I don't know if I told you, but we would do these articulation drills at dinner.

Kelefa Sanneh: What?

Dave Grohl: Yes. My mother would give us a topic to speak about, and we'd have to speak for maybe three minutes without interrupted speech. It could be anything, it could be brownies, and you'd have to talk about brownies for three minutes without saying, um, or like, or you know. Also, they were great storytellers. Anyways, what you're referring to was my runaway note when I was 14 years old, where I finally ran away from my dad's apartment.

It was a defining moment in my life because at the time I was playing music, but I wasn't allowed to, because I was such a horrible student, and I was playing in punk rock bands. In these punk rock bands, you basically did everything yourselves. You made your own records, you made your own T-shirts, you booked your own shows, I had tried my hand at becoming a promoter.

Kelefa Sanneh: [laughs] How'd that go?

Dave Grohl: I made $100. It worked out okay.

Kelefa Sanneh: Did the bands get paid?

Dave Grohl: Everyone got paid, [laughter] and I made $100. It was great. Anyway, what you're referring to is probably that.

Kelefa Sanneh: Yes.

Dave Grohl: It was at that point where I was discovering independence. I talk about this sometimes that there's a golden window of opportunity in every child's life where independence and identity intersect. You're no longer just like arm candy, holding your parents' hand when you cross the street, you're allowed to become who you're going to become. At that point, I knew that I was going to be a musician and that I was going to have to do it all myself, and that was the beginning of that.

Kelefa Sanneh: You set this down, you set it down in an actual letter, it's like a manifesto. It was like, here's what my life's going to be like.

Dave Grohl: Yes. I was basically just saying if you only knew what I did last night and everything that I put into it. I did this all myself, and I'm proud of me. I think this is what I'm capable of, and if you don't have faith in me, then I'm just going to go do it on my own, and so I did.

[applause]

These kids stay in school, don't do drugs. [laughs]

Kelefa Sanneh: It seems like your story with music, there is this origin story involving the song You're So Vain.

Dave Grohl: Awesome. Both of my parents were also musicians. When my mother and I would drive around in our car, we would sing along to 70s AM Radio. There was one day we were driving around and Carly Simon's Euro You're So Vain came on, and we were both singing like; "You're So Vain" together. Then it gets to the chorus part. I was singing the Mick Jagger part and my mom was singing the car.

We break off in harmony, and it was in that moment that I realized and understood that two different notes form a chord. I'm like, "Wait a second. Hold on a second, and then the kick drum does that. Then the snare drum does that." I started listening to music, not just as a sound. I was like listening to music and the patterns. Some people experienced this condition called synesthesia where you can actually see sound, and it started happening to me.

I would imagine music in these Lego shapes in my head. Still to this day, if I hear a drum track, I'm like, I can hear it and see it in these shapes. It's great because I don't read music. That's how I memorize things in my head. If you play me a drum track or an arrangement of a song as I'm listening, I'm visualizing it, and then I can play it back for you like that. Yes, that was a huge moment, and that's when I fell in love with music.

That's when I went home and was playing with the Beatles records on the floor, playing drums with my teeth. Hold on a second. Let me see if I can do it. I don't know if the mics, I got it. All right. Let's see if I can do it. Ready? Okay. Hold on. Check, check. Ready. You're going to have to crank the mic for one second. Mr. Sound guy. Here it comes. Ready.

[applause]

Okay. It's not sound good. Anyway. It was so bad. I went to the dentist one time, and he's like, "Do you chew a lot of ice?" I was like, "No, why?" He's like, "Because you have an unusual amount of deterioration, and you're." I was like, "Oh dude, I can play drums with my teeth."

Kelefa Sanneh: As a writer, I don't always get to pick my own headlines or titles, but I did get to pick the title for this event, which was Maximum Rock and Roll. A phrase that describes your life and career, but was also the title of a magazine that was important to you as a kid.

Dave Grohl: Absolutely.

Kelefa Sanneh: A magazine that was like the punk Bible that helped kids find each other that were into punk rock, but that also had a reputation for being self-righteous, and obnoxious. What does that phrase Maximum Rock and Roll mean to you?

Dave Grohl: For people that don't know about the underground music scene that we grew up in listening to music. I discovered this punk rock thing in like 1983 through a cousin of mine that lived in Chicago. I had started playing music and I loved bands like Devo and the B-52's and things like that, the Beatles and Kiss and Zeppelin. I didn't realize that there was an underground network of bands and labels and magazines that was like this community.

Before anything online it was this really grassroots community of people that were doing it all themselves. It was also filled with this ethically suffocating punk rock manifesto. To be perfectly honest, I was more attracted to the independence and the musicality of what was going on or lack of musicality. It was just the energy of the whole thing I thought was very cool.

Kelefa Sanneh: In your book, you talk about those years and how you go from playing with Scream in DC to suddenly you're in a big band and your relationship with this punk rock world is changing.

Dave Grohl: It's difficult to join the two. When you're raised in that ethically suffocating punk rock scene, you're conditioned to reject any conformity, any sort of popularity, or whatever it is. Nirvana came from that same scene, but there was a problem is that Kurt's songs were so good. [laughs] That we never expected that we would become as big as we did, but it was almost inevitable with his songs, and his lyrics and his voice.

Then, once we became successful and popular, we felt conflicted in this way that we had betrayed the scene that we were raised in the underground when we really hadn't done anything differently than we had done before. It was just that now the songs were being heard.

Kelefa Sanneh: Did it feel slow at the time? Did it feel like this steady thing of like my band's getting bigger feel like--

Dave Grohl: No, it happened really quickly. The big moment was the first time we played on Saturday Night Live. That's where I grew up watching that show in the '70s, not only for the comedy and the brilliant cast that they had but for the music because that's where I saw live performance. I'd never seen a concert, but I saw The B-52's and I saw Peter Tosh and I saw Devo and I saw Fear and Bowie and things like that. When we went to go do that first SNL, just knowing that my drum set was in the same place that all of these legends had been I was just like crazy.

Kelefa Sanneh: Was there any trepidation, was there any sense of like I don't know if we want to be an SNL kind of band, or were you guys just like this is amazing let's do it?

Dave Grohl: There was once when we were meeting with all the record companies in New York, long before anybody really knew who Nirvana was. We were in the office of this guy named Don Lenner, who was the head of, I think Columbia records or something.

It was in this big high-rise office and he's behind this big Oak desk and he's a music executive guy. He goes, "What do you guys want?" Kurt goes, "We want to be the biggest band in the world." I thought he was kidding. It's weird. I think that there was some ambition there but I don't think anybody had any understanding or any real expectation.

Kelefa Sanneh: Would you guys talk about it? Would you talk, like strategy?

Dave Grohl: Fuck no.

Kelefa Sanneh: No.

Dave Grohl: We barely talked. No, we wouldn't even talk about writing songs. We would begin every rehearsal with this improvisational noise jam and just do this free-form freak-out thing. If it was a quiet part, I would sit there and I would watch Kurt's converse sneaker get closer and closer and closer to the distortion pedal. I was like, "Here it comes here, comes here, comes. Then right before he stepped on it, I go, [unintelligible 00:12:19]" and that's how we wrote songs.

I looked at his foot the entire time. We weren't discussing, like, "I think the bridge of this song should be at a minor key and go seven times," and said it was just I watched his sneaker the whole time.

Kelefa Sanneh: One of the amazing things about your book, I went through it to make sure that I didn't miss something. I did a global search through the text for the word Utero and it didn't return anything.

Dave Grohl: Yes, I didn't mention the Utero.

Kelefa Sanneh: I was like this guy made a record that sold like 15 million copies around the world and you've done so many things in your life that this is just another record you made.

Dave Grohl: Absolutely not. The biggest challenge in writing this book was deciding what to write and what not to write. The way I wrote it, I wrote it in this short story format. It all began last year when the pandemic hit and I had nothing to do. I started this Instagram page. Dave's true stories. I started writing these little short stories for this Instagram thing. Then once I realized that this was going to be more than just a few weeks, I'm like "It's time to write the book."

I had made a list of 30 or 40 stories for the Instagram page, and I signed a book deal and I gave my editor the list of the 30 or 40. I said just tell me what you want me to write. She would kind of shorter to cook me, like "Write about joining Nirvana, write about this and that." I could write a fucking book about every chapter of this book. It was like, I could write an entire book about Nirvana or Scream or the Foo Fighters.

I was 300 pages in, and I hadn't even mentioned the Foo Fighters yet. I was just like, oh my God my guys are going to fucking kill me if I don't at least say oh yes and then I start another band. It's just it was really difficult. At one point my editor was like, "Stop writing. You got to stop writing." I was like, "Really?" Okay, so I did. In Utero that was a difficult time after going through the success of Nevermind and being conflicted and at this ethical crossroads, we decide to continue and we make an album where the opening lines are, "Teenage angst has paid off well now I'm bored and old." It's actually kind of hard for me to listen to that record because it was a difficult time but also because it's so fucking real that record, that record's real.

Kelefa Sanneh: Did you ever second guess yourself and wonder whether this was what you actually wanted to do?

Dave Grohl: Music?

Kelefa Sanneh: Yes.

Dave Grohl: No.

Kelefa Sanneh: Even when things were at their darkest and weirdest with Nirvana.

Dave Grohl: After Kurt died, I was like I'm not playing music anymore. It's too painful. Then I eventually realized that music saved my entire life this is what's going to save my life again. No, I never. That's probably the only time I ever stopped playing music. Yes, I've never not needed it.

Kelefa Sanneh: How long did you stop for?

Dave Grohl: Oh, it was maybe six or seven months or something like that. I couldn't even turn on the radio. It was hard. Yes, and then I realized like, okay, I have to write my way out of it. Pick up an instrument and play it again, play the drums, and get my way out of this that way.

David Remnick: Dave Grohl, the musician, and author of a recent memoir called The Storyteller, talking with Kelefa Sanneh. Our conversation continues in a moment. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. This Is The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick. We've been hearing from Dave Grohl who first achieved global fame in the band Nirvana. In 1994, after Kurt Cobain's death Grohl went on to form Foo Fighters and he moved from the drums to frontman singing and playing guitar.

They took the name Foo Fighters from an old slang term, pilot slang from World War II that described UFOs. Let's pick up with Dave Grohl at last year's New Yorker Festival. He was speaking with staff writer, Kelefa Sanneh.

Kelefa Sanneh: As you probably know, people have ideas about drummers. Where people hear like, "Oh, the drummers got a new thing." They're like, oh, it's going to be this intense drum-driven thing but you turned out to be making these amazing demos as a singer-songwriter. Which is not whatever anyone was expecting

Dave Grohl: Nor was I. [laughs] No when I was young I figured out how to multi-track with these two cassette decks. I had to record something on this cassette, put that cassette in the player, hit play on that, put another cassette in there, hit record, and play drums along to it so now I have something with drums and guitar on it. I was always into the idea of that multi-tracking, that combination of elements, and the thing that I heard that first day in the car with my mom it was like a puzzle.

It was like a game. I would write and record these songs by myself, but I'm like, "This sucks." I was just banking all of these songs. While I was in Nirvana, I wasn't going to disturb the radical creative process we already had by going in. It's a famous joke. What's the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band, "Hey guys, I got a song I think we should play." When you're in a band like Nirvana and Kurt's writing songs, you're like, "This works the way it works."

Kelefa Sanneh: When did you start thinking like maybe I should share these songs that I've been making,

Dave Grohl: What I did on some funny punk rock compilations in the early '90s, I think right around the time I first joined Nirvana, but I don't even think I put my name on it. Anyway, after Kurt died and the band was over, I did a bunch of soul searching. I actually decided, okay, I'm going to disappear, I'm going to go to the most remote place on earth, I'm just going to get away from everything and figure it out.

I went to the Ring of Kerry in Ireland where I'd been before. It's so beautiful there. You really feel like you're just at the end of the earth and there's nothing serene. It's so beautiful. I was driving around in my rental car on a country road and I saw this hitchhiker kid and I thought maybe I'll pick him up. As I got closer to him, I saw that he had a Kurt Cobain t-shirt on. It was Kurt's face looking back at me in the middle of nowhere.

I realized like oh, I can't outrun this. I need to go home and get back to work. I did, I went back and I started recording these songs by myself and really just with the intention of continuing life. That's what I needed to do to survive and it helped a lot.

Kelefa Sanneh: When did you realize like, "Oh, these songs that I was maybe nervous to share, people really liked them?"

Dave Grohl: I recorded the first record by myself in six days and I made 100 cassettes. I was so [beeps] stoked that I could go to this cassette duplication place and I designed the insert, I picked the font.

Kelefa Sanneh: Did you give yourself credit in the liner notes?

Dave Grohl: Unfortunately, my name is nowhere in that thing at all. I called it Foo Fighters because I didn't want people to know it was me because of the baggage that came with that. Also, because it was plural, [chuckles] I imagine that if a band name is pluralized that they're like, "Oh, it sounds like a gang," whatever. It's the stupidest [beeps] band name in the world. I was literally giving this cassette to people at gas stations.

Then someone from a record company called and said, "Hey, we want to put out your record." I'm like, "The cassette thing? Okay. All right." Then this is the good part. This is the best part to me personally is that-- Then I call my manager, John, my lawyer, Jill. I don't think anybody expected much was going to happen. My lawyer said, "Listen, don't just give it to someone, that's yours. Start your own label and do everything yourself like you did when you were a kid."

I went right back to where I was when I was a teenager, starting my own label, recording my own songs, and we still to this day. I'm the president of our record company, Roswell Records.

[applause]

Kelefa Sanneh: When this thing, this Foo Fighter's thing that started as a demo tape is becoming real, and you're putting together a band, and the songs are getting played on the radio, and I'm sure people at the record company are all excited and kids are showing up to the shows, was there any trepidation of like, "Oh, I'm back in this rock and roll star machine again?"

Dave Grohl: No. It was different. I knew that if I had just-- I had offers to go play drums with other bands, but I knew if I just sat down at a drum stool that it would forever remind me of losing Nirvana.

Kelefa Sanneh: It's also more spotlight, right? You can imagine a different version of your life story where you're a working musician as opposed to the guy in the center of the stage with the spotlight on you and a guitar singing the songs, and the stadium is singing along.

Dave Grohl: I was born with a drummer mentality, which is just keep the beat and keep the people moving. It's a comfortable place to be. If I go to go record with someone, I don't walk in there like, "I'm Dave Grohl, I'm going to play like this." I walk in and I'm like, "What do you need? Tell me what you want me to do," and then I do it. "Is that cool?" I like that.

I like facilitating someone else's boogie. It's fun. It's cool. As a frontman, dude, it took me for [beeps] forever to get comfortable with doing that, a decade at least. Actually, another revelation, a big moment for me. There was ones where I was asked to go play at the White House. Paul McCartney was getting a Gershwin Prize, a Gershwin award, which is a huge honor. There was a performance in the East Room of the White House, and there were all these people invited to play Jack White, Elvis Costello, Stevie Wonder, performing in this tiny room, and the East Room was very small, and with Paul's band.

I got invited and I'm like, "Oh, cool, I'm going to play with Paul at this thing." They're like, "No, no, no, you're going to sing this to Paul and President Obama, who'll be sitting three feet in front of you, staring at you doing this thing." I was like [puking] I was so incredibly nervous. I remember being about to walk on stage thinking this might be the coolest thing I've ever done in my entire life.

Considering growing up in DC, being on the other side of the fence at the Rock Against Reagan concerts, now, I'm in front of President Obama and Paul McCartney. I was so terrified, I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to puke, I'm going to faint." It's like, "This is going to be the worst thing ever." Then I stopped and I'm like, "Hold on a second, this is the most extraordinary thing that's ever happened to me and I'm going to waste it on being scared? [beeps] that. I was like, "This is only going to last for five minutes."

[applause]

Dave Grohl: It really did. It changed me. I was terrified to come up here with you.

Kelefa Sanneh: [chuckles] It's on the same level, I'm sure. I'm going to take this moment to thank you-

Dave Grohl: Nice.

Kelefa Sanneh: -Dave Grohl.

Dave Grohl: All right.

[crowd cheering]

Kelefa Sanneh: Thank you.

Dave Grohl: Let's see you next time. Thank you.

David Remnick: Staff writer, Kelefa Sanneh Sanneh talking with rock musician, Dave Grohl. His recent memoir is called The Storyteller. Our conversation was recorded last fall at the New Yorker Festival. Since then, Grohl has lost another close bandmate, longtime Foo Fighters drummer, Taylor Hawkins, who died unexpectedly in March. The band has organized two tribute shows for Hawkins this month, one of which is in London this very weekend.

 

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