Book review: Dave Grohl’s debut The Storyteller, a top-tier music memoir
This is a top-tier music memoir from the Foo Fighters frontman, and one from which any fan of Grohl’s work behind the kit or the microphone will get plenty of kicks.
When the pandemic interrupted his usual routine of writing, recording and performing stadium-sized rock ‘n’ roll to audiences across the world, Dave Grohl turned to the written word.
Under the name Dave’s True Stories, the singer, songwriter, guitarist and drummer began publishing long-form yarns from his life in music on Medium.com.
There he opened up on jamming with Prince, playing heavy metal festival Ozzfest for the first time with his decidedly non-metallic rock band Foo Fighters, and cultivating an email relationship with David Bowie.
Given Grohl’s enduring presence near the centre of rock culture – first with Nirvana, then with Foo Fighters and Them Crooked Vultures, among other projects – the popularity of his stories was unsurprising.
After a short burst of activity in March 2020, Grohl was evidently pursued by major publishing houses, and this book – his first – arrived about 18 months later.
Its title of The Storyteller is apt, for much like the initial run of blog posts, this isn’t written as a narrative memoir; instead, the author picks about 25 incidents or chapters from his life and builds them into vignettes which, together, tell a fascinating story about one of the most popular and well-liked musicians working today.
The result is a wholly satisfying read packed with plenty of heart, emotion and vulnerability. It’s a top-tier music memoir, and one from which any fan of Grohl’s work behind the kit or the microphone will get plenty of kicks.
This early description of his love for “living out my innermost Freddie Mercury fantasies on a nightly basis”, once Foo Fighters had graduated from playing arenas to stadiums, gives a taste for Grohl’s aptitude for descriptive scene-setting:
“Hearing a time-delayed full-throated singalong ricocheting from the farthest rafters of a football stadium is an out-of-body sensation, one that becomes oddly addictive over time, echoing in a chorus of sublime connectivity. The open air, hitting you in gusts that give your hair a perfect Beyonce blowout while you inhale the aroma of sweat and beer that sometimes rises from the crowd in a foglike condensation. That roar of fireworks above your head as you take your final bow and sprint to the room-temperature pepperoni pizza waiting in your dressing room. Believe me, it is all that it’s cracked up to be and more.”
Along the way, we learn about plenty of Grohl’s idiosyncrasies. His pre-show ritual? Three ibuprofen tablets, three beers and a room full of laughter, followed by a “band prayer” before the musicians walk on stage together: a non-religious moment involving a shot of Crown Royal whisky while staring into each others’ eyes.
He learned to play drums by ear by hitting pillows in his bedroom, and developed an unusual – and orally damaging – habit of tapping out drumbeats using his teeth, a childhood quirk he shared with future bandmate Kurt Cobain. He was diagnosed with a crooked spine at age seven, and found that he came to like the feeling of being an outsider who wore different shoes to his peers.
Born to an English teacher mum and a journalist dad, Grohl had an adolescent falling out with his father; his old man’s warning that his early success in music wouldn’t last became the challenge that fired his ambition. (Late in the book, after becoming a dad himself, he writes with great self-awareness: “Perhaps I love so fiercely as a father because mine could not.”)
In vivid early scenes, he writes of joining Washington hardcore punk band Scream, followed by the life-changing decision to join Nirvana in 1990, a role he would hold until Cobain’s death by suicide in 1994. Grohl then shrugs off the shackles of a linear narrative in favour of zeroing in on memorable scenes and situations.
One of the very best of these arrives in the third chapter, where he recounts breaking his leg barely two songs into a planned two-and-a-half-hour set in front of 50,000 fans in Sweden.
This is where the above description of stadium rock appears, and his moment-by-moment recollection of the extraordinary efforts he undertook to get back on stage to finish the set is a thrilling read.
For Foo Fighters fans, there’s no satisfying deep-dive examination of that band’s discography, nor any detailed story behind its greatest song, Everlong.
The only mention of his first marriage appears in passing on page 208, the same page where he notes the band was on “shaky ground” while recording its second album, The Colour and the Shape, after he had made the executive decision to re-record drum parts laid down by the original drummer. Gee, Dave, I wonder why?
In the middle chapters, Grohl writes beautifully of becoming friends and bandmates with Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic. These sections sing on the page, and are certainly worth the price of admission for fans searching for untold anecdotes about that now-mythologised trio. Like this on page 140:
“Every rehearsal began with a ‘noise jam’, which became a sort of improvisational exercise in dynamics, ultimately honing our collective instinct and making it so that song structure didn’t necessarily need to be verbally arranged; it would just happen, almost the way a flock of blackbirds gracefully ebbs and flows in a hypnotic wave over a country field in the winter.”
It’s a gorgeous analogy and one I haven’t read before in a rock memoir, although its sheen is dimmed a little when the author repeats it on page 279 while describing playing with Them Crooked Vultures bandmate Josh Homme (“…whenever we played together, the result was always like the hypnotic wave of a murmuration of starlings, the music effortlessly flowing from one direction to the next with grace, never losing its tight pattern.”)
Grohl’s penchant for profanity is well-represented here: the episode where he gets arrested on the Gold Coast for drink-driving a moped after playing the Big Day Out probably maxes out the F-bomb counter.
The potty mouth generally works, though, even on the page, as in this instance near the end: “There is a reason why I still to this day have never done cocaine, because deep down I know that if I did coke the same way I drink coffee, I’d be sucking dicks at the bus stop every morning for an eight ball.”
Since the sudden and tragic end of Nirvana, the public sentiment toward Grohl’s presence in pop culture is one of extreme likeability. He fronts a much-loved band while giving off the distinct impression that he’d be just as happy in the mosh pit as conducting the show.
Yet one of the biggest revelations in The Storyteller – which, like a great punk rock band, comes across as rehearsed without being overly polished – is that his everyman act might be no act at all.
The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music
By Dave Grohl
Simon & Schuster, 376pp, $45.00
Andrew McMillen is The Australian’s national music writer and author of Talking Smack: Honest Conversations About Drugs.
