Books |
The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music
Dave Grohl
By
Published: Sep 11, 2022
Category:
Entertainment
I want you to stop your life and watch what is easily the best video of the year. The scene is a tribute concert, honoring Taylor Hawkins, who was the Foo Fighters drummer for 15 years. In Bogotá, Colombia, on March 25, 2022, he complained of chest pains. Medics rushed to his hotel room. He was unresponsive.
The band canceled concerts and grieved. Six months later, there were two tribute concerts. In the video you’re about to watch — at volume, please — the drummer is Shane Hawkins, Taylor’s 16-year-old son.
The song is “My Hero.” It typically brings crowds to their feet, singing along.
There goes my hero
Watch him as he goes
There goes my hero
He’s ordinary
If you’re puzzled by “He’s ordinary,” it’s because you don’t know what Foo Fighters fans do — it’s a celebration of Average Joes (and Janes) who act with purpose and courage, then return to their lives. It’s a slam on people who do good thing things for media attention and personal advancement.
Pay particular attention to 5:00 to 5:40. It’s a drum solo. Why does the director keep cutting to the guitarist and singer? Because he’s Dave Grohl, leader of the band. As someone commented on YouTube: “That look from Dave Grohl to Shane…He’s looking at the kid but he’s seeing Taylor. Might be the most moving thing I’ve ever seen on a rock n’ roll stage.”
Agreement is universal. In the 5 days since it was posted, the video has been viewed almost 9 million times.
Watch the video of the song here.
Dave Grohl’s book is thrilling in exactly the opposite direction.It’s quiet, reflective, intimate. [To read an excerpt, click here. To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
When he was 16 years old, living in a small town near Washington, D.C., Grohl told his mother he wanted to quit school and join Scream, a punk rock band. “She said, ‘You better be good.’ I think the reason why she allowed me a lot of this freedom was because she was a public-school teacher for 35 years. So she had a deeper understanding of how the mind of a child works.” His father disowned him. Need I say his parents were divorced?
Drugs? Grohl never did cocaine, though he did drink five pots of coffee a day. There was an intervention: his doctor suggested he switch to decaf.
The best reason to read this this book is the integrity of the author. You saw it in the video: he loves to make music. The star-making machinery? Not so much. He was in Nirvana, and he saw close-up what sudden fame did to Kurt Cobain. Grohl’s blue-collar, regular: “The foundation of everything I’ve done is this simple practice of playing music, and then going on tour in a van and spending years with my friends, playing squats and sleeping on floors and eating corndogs from gas stations — that really makes you appreciate all of the things that come after.”
Why the book?
“When the pandemic hit and everything shut down, I was left with nothing to do, and I never have nothing to do, and I panicked. Foo Fighters had just finished making a record and videos and documentaries, and I was left sitting there. I’m creatively restless, always looking for something to do, so I started this Instagram page called “Dave’s True Stories,” with just the intention of writing these funny little anecdotal stories about crazy things that have happened to me, not only to give me something to do, but to give the reader maybe four or five minutes of happiness, or just a giggle.”
“Once I realized the pandemic was going to last a while, I approached my manager and said, ‘Hey, maybe it’s time to write a book.’ It was a lot like making a record: You have a collection of songs, you start recording, you start to hear the tone of the album, and then it’s a matter of finding the perfect sequence from beginning to end. That’s what happened as I was writing these stories: I started to realize what was the first song, what was the last song, what was Side A, what was Side B, what I needed, what I didn’t have, what I had too much of — like, I got 350 pages in and I hadn’t mentioned the Foo Fighters yet.”
The way Grohl looked at Shane Hawkins — that deep appreciation is the spirit of “The Storyteller.” That might explain why the book debuted at No. 1 on the hardcover nonfiction list… and stayed there for a few weeks.
