Dave Grohl: The Waterstones Interview

dave a lot of people wouldn't look at us and think that we would have a lot in common but i'm here to tell you that we do have at least one thing in common which is that we have fallen off stages in front of large audiences um yours was a little bit more than mine tell me about gothenburg and sweden and well we were on a stadium tour and we were there in gothenburg uh we had a sold out show it's a beautiful night um 50 000 people and i couldn't wait before the show someone from the promoter's office said said um well you must be very good tonight because the last time bruce springsteen played here he cracked the foundation of the stadium so you've got a lot to live up to i was like okay no pressure so i went back to my dressing room and had a couple drinks and ran on stage we started playing the first song the audience went wild best case scenario go into the next song and you know those stadium stages are they're big they're tall and wide so any movement if you're going to run to this side of the stage it's a good 50-yard dash and then you got to run back to the microphone so i i turn to run to this side of the stage and i trip over some cables and i'm kind of doing this i'm rolling up the windows and i i saw that the lip of the sage was right in front of me so i thought well i'll just jump that'll look cool that won't be embarrassing i'm not falling i'm jumping and uh it was a good 12 feet whatever it was and i hit the ground so hard felt no pain uh just embarrassment and i stood up and my ankle was dislocated and i'd broken this bum so it was like a it was like a sack of mashed potatoes there was nothing there the most disgusting feeling so i immediately sat down the band can't see me because they're on stage they're still playing our song i look at my security guy i'm like i broke my leg everything stops medics run up um the gurney comes out i say give me the microphone and i say uh hey everybody i just broke my leg i'm gonna go fix this and i'll be right back that's out of my mind i looked at the band i said play a queen song just keep playing they keep playing the audience is like what the is going on right now what if they pulled me to the side he takes off my shoe my foot falls this way he said your ankle's dislocated i got to put it back in right now so he pushes it back in i get a big cup of whiskey and i ask him okay if i sit down can i continue the show he says if i let go of your ankle it's just gonna fall out and i said um well then you're coming up on stage with me and he sat in front of me and held my ankle and then put a brace on it and you know we finished the show and uh yeah we played for another two and a half hours and um and then i came here to london to have surgery and it you know to be we had 65 more shows on that trip we designed this weird throne thing that i sat on which had lasers and smoke and you went around the stage so in a way it was my favorite tour i've ever done and that was my favorite show we've ever played because it sort of proved to me and the band that no matter what we could actually sort of push through obstacles and you know challenges and it was it was about the perseverance and not how we do things but why we do them you know that's that adrenaline rush that obviously kept the pain away for the duration of the show and probably disappeared sometime afterwards but how does that compare to i guess the adrenaline rush that you would get on any night when you're performing are those two things that are related for you well it's funny as i was writing this book i started to realize that i have a funny relationship with pain i don't really feel physical pain as much as i feel emotional pain and yeah i mean if you add some adrenaline to that type of disaster um you're fine until you're left alone on the couch with a cast and a warm beer and you think oh god this hurts and you know and it was a long recovery but um you know i think that when we get up to play shows it's definitely adrenaline but more than just physical adrenaline it's the it's the excitement and the pure joy of of sharing that experience with so many people because it really is the communal tangible element of live music that um that's exciting and reassuring in a way it's like oh we're all human beings you know it's easy to think like the face on the tv or on the sound on the radio is coming from somewhere else when really it's just another human being um pouring their heart out to you and so that that's i don't get nervous anymore to jump up on a stage i just get excited for that feeling um and when it was taken away when the pandemic hit uh it it was um it was devastating like you i really felt this void like how how am i gonna how can i bring that joy back how can i bring the joy to the people how can i feel that connection again at the height of i suppose your your fame with food fights is standing in front of those massive stadiums with those groups of people you've sort of said how did we get here how did this actually happen and uh reading your book it's a really good question because in your very first actual drum lesson you discovered that you were actually holding the drumsticks the wrong way around so how did you get from holding the drumsticks the wrong way to knowing so much about drumming and rhythm and music and all the rest of it well i learned everything by ear so um i took maybe a few guitar lessons just to figure out how to put my fingers on the chords but you know i didn't want to become a classical guitarist i wanted to play ac dc songs you know i wanted to play songs by the rock and roll bands that i love ramon songs and things like that um no i think i you know i i i think about that almost every day like how did i get here what am i doing like when i wrote a book like i was i've been in a band i've played shows um but the drumming thing you know i grew up with this really tiny house that wouldn't even fit a drum set and so i kind of i would listen to albums and i could decipher or determine each piece of the drum set okay that's the kick drum that's the snare that's the ride symbol these are the toms and all i needed to do was figure out the physicality of how to put those things together to make a beat and i would do that on pillows on the floor and i had these like big marching sticks that i stole from a friend they were really fat and i would sit there and play along to my favorite records on pillows which actually kind of it almost ruined drumming for me because when you're playing on pillows there's no there's no give you're just hitting as hard as you can on something it's like running in the sand so if i if i got to a drum set i would just destroy the thing i was just like beating it like thor like it was just out of my mind but anyway so my mother used to take me to this jazz club in washington dc where i grew up every sunday they had this jazz workshop where there was a house band um and they would play a set and then if you were a local musician you could write your name down on a piece of paper and they'd call you up to jam with them so we went on my mother's birthday one year and she said you know what i want for my birthday i want you to go play with the band and this is jazz yeah and i've been playing on pillows punk rock records so i was nowhere near in the same like bandwidth or universe or as these guys but i did it because it was my mother's birthday and i i realized that day like oh my god i'm not a drummer i'm just a fool of pillows you know in his bedroom listening to punk rock records so i asked the house drummer if he'd give me a lesson he came over to the house and um started playing he sat down at the drum set did some wicked solo and then he said let me see what you can do and i kind of did my greatest hits of all the crap that i'd learned from listening to records i think the first thing he said was okay first of all you're holding your sticks backwards and i don't know if i'd realize that so he spun them around and had me on this practice pad just going right left right right left right left left right left right for thirty dollars an hour and i just like it's it's gonna it's gonna cost a million dollars for me to play like lanie robinson so that that's the only lesson i ever had you managed to work out how to play the drums well here's the thing i honestly think that in not having anyone tell me how to do it what to do or what not to do um i kind of developed my own way of doing it and i think with um with drumming you know i i appreciate and respect that the technical and rudimental uh aspect of like proficiency but to me the most important thing is feel and a signature sound so when you hear charlie watts rest in peace from the rolling stones 20 seconds of him you know like oh that's charlie watts or that's ringo starr that's john bonham well that's keith moon um you know whether any of those things are considered like rudimentary or technically correct shouldn't necessarily matter it's it's whether the person's personality is coming out in their playing and i hope that it does in mine and i i'd like to think that because no one like would slap my wrist with a ruler when i made a mistake that it's those mistakes that uh that that develop like some sort of signature sound you mentioned ac dc and you you're you're a musical sort of omnivore i can see from either book how many different types of music you have sort of gorged on and there's a fantastic story where which involves ac dc the preservation hall jazz band and paul mccartney and it seemed to me a really clear indication of how wide your music taste is but tell me a bit about how those three people or bands came together there was one year where i was asked to present an award at the grammys not to perform just to present and i kind of hate those after parties where it's like music industry and people wanting selfies and stuff i was just like here man let's just just go have a dinner so i called pat our guitarist and our drummer taylor and i said hey why don't we like get the wives and we'll go to some nice restaurants so we book a table paul mccartney was coming into town and when he comes to los angeles we usually say hello and have a dinner and his wife texted my wife and said what are you doing after the grammys she said wow we're just going to go to this restaurant and nancy said well do you mind if we tag along so my wife texts me and she says hey do you mind if paul and nancy come to dinner i'm like no that'll be great this will be fun so now we've got four couples then paul bumps into ac dc in the lobby of the hotel or in the gym or something like that and they say well what are you doing after the show because ac dc was performing paul said well we're going to dinner with foo fighters guys you want to come so then i get a text from my wife she says hey do you mind if ac dc comes to dinner now this was huge to me because i really was a huge ac dc fan when i was young and the thing about ac dc is you never see them unless they're on stage you know it's not like you see them walking the carpet at a movie premiere it's like the only time you see them there's like walls of amplifiers and cannons and explosions and so to see them in the flesh offstage in the wild i was like this is gonna be amazing it blew my mind it was such a huge deal i was i was a huge fan and really influenced by them when i was young they had a tour film called let there be rock and this is the first time i saw a rock and roll band with like no frills just a few lights on stage then my friend ben jaffe from the preservation hall jazz band which is a new orleans swing band um legendary says what are you doing after the show i'm like oh my god ben i'm having dinner with mccartney and ac dc you got to come and he says well can i bring the whole band with me there's like 10 of these guys you know they march like a marching band down streets like in a parade you know it's the best it's my favorite type of music i love new orleans jazz so much it's i love it so much so um i said well let me see if i can get a bigger table and i booked the back room they said if you want we'll march down the street through the restaurant and into the room playing i was like this is going to be the greatest night of my life so we kept it a secret we didn't tell anyone and we're all hanging out in this back room with ac dc and paul and we're sort of sitting there and then you could hear the music coming down the street you could hear and it's loud dude i mean it's tubas and trombones and trumpets and bass drums coming through the restaurant into the room and everybody's face is just like what the is going on right now and uh and i got to swing dance with ac dc it was insane i mean by the end of the night i i honestly you know as with a lot of the stories in this book i just think like i can't this must be happening to someone else it's like having an out-of-body experience i'm just like i can't believe this is my life this is happening to me because i surely don't consider myself in the like lofty god-like ranks or status of paul or acdc i still feel like a kid on my bedroom floor but here i am like you know getting high with the new orleans jazz band and drinking whiskies with ac dc while you know paul's dancing behind me it's like this is awesome it never grows old you're just like i can't believe it's great looking back i hadn't real because it's the 30th anniversary of course i've never mind and i hadn't realized how short actually the career of that band was how intense that whole experience was and it sort of made therefore much more sense looking back on it and and you do talk about the the shock of what happened with kurt and how that affected you but actually you talk about another death that actually probably affected you more which was that of your your best friend jimmy yeah and you talk often in the book about how your life flashes before your eyes sort of every day you're constantly revisiting moments and that something like those those griefs those are things that you do still process as we're going along now yeah i mean that chapter that was actually the last piece i wrote for the book because i was kind of scared to write it and so i'd written all these other things some of them were like deep and heavy emotional there were like lighthearted anecdotes and things but i knew i had to write that part and so to me i didn't i knew what people wanted me to write i knew what nirvana fans wanted me to write i knew what people might expect me to write and i didn't want to write that i thought okay maybe i'm just going to write about you know to try to explain a much more broad piece about loss and mourning and how how grief is determined or measured like is it measured by time do you do you do you feel the loss of someone more if you've known them your entire life or less if it's in such a short period of time and um i don't think time has anything to do with it i think it has to do with uh the depth of the emotional relevance of that relationship so um yeah i mean with jimmy my best friend i've known him since i was about six years old and we were inseparable we were like siamese twins and i am very much who i am today because of him and i really looked up to him um we were inseparable we were best friends and when he died he died of a drug overdose when he died um like my life there was just something huge was missing um it was the same with kurt even though we knew each other for a much shorter period of time the life that we lived in those three and a half years i mean that was almost a lifetime in itself and so much had changed and we were young and it was just this crazy turning point in our lives and because of everything that had happened in that three and a half years it it hurt more you know um and i also talk about how there's some people in life that you sort of emotionally prepare yourself to lose and so you kind of you kind of build these walls around your heart um in some kind of like self-defense mechanism or or it's like being emotionally vaccinated so that when uh you know so that you'll be immune to the pain but it never works it doesn't work that way and there's no there's no there's no textbook or instruction manual on how to to to grieve or mourn the loss of someone so as i was writing it was like i was i was figuring it out as i was writing it and it was very therapeutic um and as i also say like i still carry these people with me everywhere i go every day every time i go on stage i'll think about these people every time i wake up in the morning i think about these people so even they're they're even though they're not here with us they're very much here um with me one of the things that's clearly helped i suppose dealing that has been your family and the way that you talk about your family in this book is really heartwarming um as the father of daughters it's really interesting to hear you talk about that relationship the extraordinary lengths that you have been to like around the world twice for one of your daughters but how has it been to sort of involve them in your life as a sort of rock star because obviously some might think those two things are really hard to bring together but you clearly have i used to think that i mean first of all when nirvana became popular my father said um you know this isn't gonna last right this will not last and uh i said of course like i thought it would only last a year or two and then i'd have to go back to normal life and i always imagined like i'd do this for a little while it would end and then i'd meet a nice girl have family get some sort of job i suppose and just right off under the sunset but as the albums kept coming and the audiences got bigger and things kept going i thought wait a second i'm not i might be in this for the long haul you know and we went to this uh we were invited to play at this benefit concert for neil young who's uh whose child had uh cerebral palsy and there was a school for for for kids um who needed like an alternative uh learning and the first night of the bridge school benefit you would go to neil's house for dinner and i expected it to be this like really fancy rock star catered event he lives in like a redwood castle in the middle of the forest in california it's unbelievable i mean it's like part swiss family robinson it's part harry potter but it's i mean it's you know 8 000 acres or something to himself he lives in this like valley and we got there we knocked on the door and i look and opens i open the door and i see his wife like in the kitchen cutting vegetables and then i look over here and i see another family and all the and i started to realize oh these things can co-exist you just have to make it work and you know i think most people have this idea that music and rock and roll is really all lasers and dragons and private planes and champagne and it is sometimes like the other part of it is you know i'll go like blow up a stadium for three hours and ah you just feel like zeus you know you're like and then i'm up at six in the morning packing lunches and driving my kids to a bus stop in a minivan and that's real that's how it works and i love that about it um i think it's what balances the whole thing and it keeps you going um and you know with kids i also write a little bit about it you know i think it's i think one of the reasons why musicians love their children so much is because you spend so much of your time showered with this superficial love right people tell you i love you you're a legend you're a genius you're right like things like that feels pretty good but it's kind of like a sugar high it wears off really quick and you just kind of crash so then you're you know you begin to question love like does this person love me or do they love like the thing do they love me or do they love the guitar like what is it you don't have to question that love with a child like with my kids it's like oh they love me like i'm their dad and if they think i'm cool it's because i'm their dad honestly they could give a about all this other stuff they happen to think it's quite boring and so you know um so i think that of course as i love being a dad i really do i love being a father i have great kids they're all smart and weird and uh eccentric and polite and fun and so if i have time away from this i wanted to be with them and yes i would fly around the world twice just have a few hours with them and i've done it more than once if anyone who has ever watched you on youtube telling a story will know that you are an excellent storyteller there are so many in this book and i could talk to you all day about them but i won't because we want to leave something but thank you so much for your time today thanks man that's fun you

Channel: Waterstones

Views: 142,347

Keywords: Waterstones, Dave Grohl, Foo Fighters, Nirvana, Nevermind, Kurt Cobain, Paul McCartney, AC/DC

Id: GzR0csV9A9U

Length: 22min 32sec (1352 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021