This is a Call (4 page)

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.

‘But the B-52s thing really had an impact on me, because it made me realise that there was something powerful about music that was different. It made everything else seem so vanilla. I didn’t shave a mohawk in my head, and I still loved the melodies and lyrics in my rock ’n’ roll records, but that sent me on this mission to find things that were unusual, music that wasn’t considered normal.

‘Those guitars! Two strings! How cool! Those drums! Slap slap slap! Dead easy! The women looked like they were from outer space and everything was linked in – the sleeves, the sound, the clothes, the iconography, the logo, everything. I think when you’re a kid that’s what you’re after, a real unified feel to a band, and that’s what the B-52s offered. Their songs were so easy to learn, they got me into playing really easily. This was definitely the first thing after Kiss or Rush that totally absorbed me like that.’

Virginia Grohl rewarded Dave’s continued interest in music by buying him his first ‘real’ guitar, a 1963 Sears Silvertone with an amplifier built into the guitar case, as a Christmas present in 1981. Grohl received another gift in the form of two Beatles albums –
The Beatles 1962 – 1966
(aka ‘The Red Album’) and
The Beatles 1967 – 1970
(aka ‘The Blue Album’). Opening with the giddy euphoria of ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘Please Please Me’ and winding down with the stately, elegiac ‘Across the Universe’ and ‘The Long and Winding Road’, these two extraordinary compilations served not only to document the Fab Four’s astonishing creative evolution, but also provided an inspirational blueprint for artists seeking to redefine the rock ’n’ roll landscape on their own terms. A young musician could have no finer template upon which to build.

‘Around that time too my mother bought me this songbook,
The Complete Beatles
, that was all their songs transcribed with chord charts,’ recalls Grohl. ‘I can’t read music, but I could read chord charts, so I’d put on those records and start to play along. And at that age everything was a puzzle, like any child now with a video game you just want to conquer that level and get to the next. So for me it was really about figuring out a song so I could move on to the next: maybe I could do “Day Tripper” but I hadn’t figured out “A Day in the Life”. So from then on if I wasn’t outside walking around the creeks and the back yard looking for crawfish, I was inside with a guitar. That was my entertainment.’

Following the dissolution of the HG Hancock Band (which fell apart when Larry Hinkle moved away from Springfield to live in Maryland with his father, following his parents’ divorce), Grohl was on the lookout for a new musical foil, a Lennon to his McCartney. Fortunately, he would not have far to look or long to wait. Living just a few blocks from Kathleen Place, at the age of thirteen Nick Christy was already a competent guitar player and a fine singer, blessed with a sense of self-confidence and self-possession rare in young men of his age. A fan of The Who, The Beatles and Rolling Stones, Christy was looking to put together his own band, and invited Grohl over to his parents’ basement to jam. The two clicked immediately.

‘After that we were
always
in that basement, always looking for an audience and more people to join us,’ recalls Christy, now president of an award-winning landscaping company and a part-time musician back in his native Massachusetts. ‘We played in a lot of little projects together, and just started bands with whoever we could find. We would throw our own parties in my basement, or in his house, and invite all our classmates just to have a party so we could play in front of people.

‘We’d also do little duets, just the two of us. Dave’s mom was amazingly supportive, just the best, and she would take us out to a local restaurant called Treebeards, where there were open mic nights on a Wednesday night and we would perform in front of people. There’d be people in their twenties or thirties performing and then these two eighth grade kids popping up to play their stuff.’

‘It’s hard to book gigs when you’re twelve years old!’ Grohl says with a laugh. ‘Usually we’d just play in our own back yards, and like six or seven people would watch. But I’d find out that the kid two blocks away played the bass and I’d be like, “
That
kid plays the bass? Really? Because Alex has a drum set: tell Alex to bring the drum set over to Nicky’s house on Sunday at two.” It was twelve- and thirteen-year-old kids in a basement, man, it was great, totally fun. It was better than stealing cars!’

‘When we would rehearse, Dave was just a wildcard,’ remembers Christy. ‘He was the funniest guy you’d ever meet. He had so much energy and drive. But I was always that A-type personality, I wanted to lead the show and I’d be saying, “Okay, this is what we’re doing next” – but he’d be going a mile a minute, wanting to do this and that. He was the lead guitar player and I was rhythm, but he’d be jumping on the drums any chance he could get, like in between songs. He’d just start whaling on those frigging drums, and it was annoying as hell, because I wanted to practise. I’d be saying, “Cut the shit, dude, we’ve gotta practise and you’re not a fucking drummer.” If he’d listened to me he’d never have been a drummer. If he’d listened to me, he might not have got anywhere …’

But the journey had already begun.

This is a call

The whole night was like a scene from
Lord of the Rings
where there’s twelve people that have to fight their way through an army of orcs, and there’s just no way they can possibly win – that’s how it felt to be a punk rocker in the middle of five million rednecks in Washington DC on the 4th of July. I had just discovered punk rock, and it was so unbelievably moving. It was like our own personal Altamont, our Woodstock. And that’s when I said, ‘Fuck the world, I’m doing this ...’

Dave Grohl

It was 3 July 1983, Independence Day weekend, and America was in the mood to party. The sun was shining in Washington DC and Irene Cara’s hit single
Flashdance … What a Feeling
, sitting pretty at the summit of the
Billboard
Hot 100 for a fifth consecutive week, blasted from every shopfront, souvenir stall and boombox in the nation’s capital. The stately tree-lined avenues around the National Mall were a bustle of colour, movement and noise, as tens of thousands of tourists and DC metropolitan area residents jockeyed for the best vantage points for that evening’s celebratory fireworks display.

Chatting and laughing, Dave Grohl and Larry Hinkle weaved their way through the crowds, heading towards the Lincoln Memorial, in whose shadow a free concert was being held. Timed to coincide with DC’s annual pro-marijuana legalisation Smoke-In event, the Rock Against Reagan concert had been organised by the Youth International Party, a leftist counter-cultural collective, and boasted a line-up featuring some of the finest American hardcore bands of the day, among them Reagan Youth, Crucifucks, Toxic Reasons, M.D.C. (aka Millions of Dead Cops) and headliners Dead Kennedys.

As they neared the concert site, Grohl and Hinkle sensed a change in the atmosphere. There were DC police
everywhere
, some patting down concertgoers against squad cars, others patrolling the site on horseback, dozens more sitting in buses in full riot gear. In a field adjacent to the Lincoln Memorial 800 punk rockers watched Houston’s D.R.I. hammer through their hate songs in E minor, with vocalist Kurt Brecht railing against American consumerism, the military-industrial complex and the evil deathmonger in residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, over guitarist Spike Cassidy’s filthy, gnarled, slamdance-on-a-dime riffs. When the band finally stopped to draw breath, an impressed Dave Grohl immediately walked over to their tour van and bought a copy of their self-titled 22-song seven-inch EP from the sweating, panting Brecht.

As the sky darkened, so too did the mood on the Mall. The punks grew mouthier, the tourists more bellicose. There were catcalls, confrontations and scuffles, raised voices and raised fists. Drunken college students pushed beer kegs around in shopping trolleys and stoned, naked hippies frolicked in the Reflecting Pool. The police got edgier and the bands played on, harder, faster, louder. As the sun dipped below the skyline, the Dead Kennedys walked on stage to face pandemonium.

‘I get chills just thinking about it,’ says Grohl. ‘There were police helicopters going around with their lights on the audience and cops on horseback just fucking billy-clubbing punk rockers. Dead Kennedys are playing “Holiday in Cambodia” and Jello Biafra is pointing at the Washington Monument with its two blinking red lights and he’s saying, “With the great Klansman in the sky with his two blinking red eyes …”, it was unbelievable, it was like
Apocalypse Now
. The whole night was like a scene from
Lord of the Rings
where there’s twelve people that have to fight their way through an army of orcs, and there’s just no way they can possibly win – that’s how it felt to be a punk rocker in the middle of five million rednecks in Washington DC on the 4th of July. I had just discovered punk rock, and it was so unbelievably moving. It was like our own personal Altamont, our Woodstock. And that’s when I said, “Fuck the world, I’m doing
this
…”’

Music historians will argue forever about the origins of punk rock. Some lay the blame at the feet of Ann Arbor, Michigan’s The Stooges, blank-eyed degenerates who channelled desperation and isolation and boredom and violence and sex and confusion into brutish, nihilistic numbskull anthems. On ‘1969’, the opening track of their self-titled début album, released in the year of Dave Grohl’s birth, vocalist Iggy Pop looked outside his window to see ‘war across the USA’, before turning his disgust inwards, mocking his own sullen self-pity (‘
last year I was 21 / I didn’t have a lot of fun
’) with a deceptively throwaway, infantile bubblegum-pop lyric – ‘
I say Oh-my and a boo-hoo
’ – positively dripping with sarcasm and self-loathing. Every bit as combative and confrontational as the cold, hard stares of the four lank-haired thugs glaring out from the cover artwork,
The Stooges
was also music to beat
yourself
up to, a recurring theme in punk rock to the present day.

Other music critics see the form as pre-dating The Stooges, with its roots in the primitive, animalistic poundings of The Sonics,The Seeds, The Wailers and a thousand more unsung hooligan-blues heroes of the early 1960s who never meant jack-shit outside the bare brick walls of their own suburban garages. These bands took the thrust-and-drag dynamics of The Kingsmen’s 1963 version of Richard Berry’s deathless rock ’n’ roll standard ‘Louie Louie’ and The Kinks’ 1964 hit ‘You Really Got Me’ and amplified them with brute force and ignorance, getting high on volume and fuzz and speaker-hiss and adrenaline. Drawn together on
Rolling Stone
writer Lenny Kaye’s seminal 1972 compilation album
Nuggets
, bands such as The Barbarians and The Mojo Men and The Amboy Dukes made a forceful case for being the true defenders of the spirit of rock ’n’ roll.

In the early seventies, though, rock critics seemed keen to label just about anyone punk. To
New York Times
writer Grace Lichtenstein, Alice Cooper was a punk. To England’s
New Musical Express
Gene Vincent was a punk, as was Eddie Cochran. To
Zigzag
magazine Bruce Springsteen was ‘a rock ’n’ roll punk’. To Greg Shaw of
Rolling Stone
magazine, fifties teen idol Dion was ‘the original punk’. As English rock writer Mick Houghton cannily observed in 1975, ‘the term “punk” is bandied about an awful lot these days. It seems to describe almost any rock performer who camps it up to any degree, on or off-stage, or who displays an arrogance and contempt for his audience.’

By consensus, however, New York and London are generally acclaimed as the parent cities of the modern punk sound. The New York punk scene revolved around the CBGB club on Bowery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a scuzzy, graffiti-covered fleapit which, from 1974, played host to nonconformist, experimental artists such as Ramones, The New York Dolls, The Heartbreakers, Suicide, Blondie, Television, Talking Heads and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. London’s vibrant scene, centred around the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned, X-Ray Spex, The Slits and The Adverts, kicked in two years later, in 1976. But it was the latter scene which first received mainstream press coverage in the US, when
Rolling Stone
writer Charles M. Young was dispatched to London in August 1977 to write a cover story on the Sex Pistols, then still unsigned in America.

The Sex Pistols were England’s most notorious rock band, even before their first single, the electrifying
Anarchy in the UK
, débuted in the UK charts. In their very first press interview guitarist Steve Jones commented, ‘We’re not into music. We’re into chaos,’ words that would prove astonishingly prescient. Following a fractious appearance on primetime television show
Today
on 1 December 1976 – where the Pistols responded to host Bill Grundy’s goading putdowns by calling him a ‘dirty fucker’ and a ‘fucking rotter’ – the band graduated from the covers of Britain’s four weekly music papers –
New Musical Express
,
Melody Maker
,
Sounds
and
Record Mirror
– to the nation’s sensationalist, scandal-thirsty tabloid newspapers, who gleefully set about portraying the young Londoners as dangerous revolutionaries hellbent on destroying the very fabric of British society. The band’s inflammatory decision to release their caustic second single,
God Save the Queen
, in the run-up to Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee only heightened their infamy.

Charles Young was not met with open arms in London. Initially, in fact, he was not met at all, for Malcolm McClaren, the Sex Pistols’ mischievous, maverick manager, simply ignored the writer’s phone calls during his first two days in the city. Though
Rolling Stone
took pride in its roots as a counter-cultural magazine, by the mid-seventies it was firmly part of the establishment, in thrall to Laurel Canyon songwriters and MOR superstars: cover stars in 1976 included Neil Diamond, Jackson Browne, Paul Simon, Peter Frampton, teen pinup Donny Osmond and Christian crooner Pat Boone. When McClaren finally deigned to receive Young at his central London flat, he regarded the journalist as one might regard a ball of phlegm hacked up in a porcelain sink.

‘This band hates you,’ he loftily informed Young. ‘It hates your culture. Why can’t you lethargic, complacent hippies understand that? You need to be smashed.’

When he finally met McClaren’s charges, Young was horrified and fascinated in equal measure by the ‘four proletarian kids’ who’d provoked such outrage and revulsion in the UK. In a beautifully written article, titled ‘Rock Is Sick and Living in London’, the writer sketched out pen portraits of the men behind the myths: in his eyes, guitarist Steve Jones was a brash, lairy Jack The Lad who revelled in his band’s ‘bad boy’ status, drummer Paul Cook was thoughtful and unassuming, while cartoon-like bassist Sid Vicious was a somewhat pitiful, childlike, self-abusing simpleton.

Young found the band’s witheringly sarcastic frontman Johnny Rotten a more complex character to categorise. Despite Rotten doing his level best to be as obnoxious as possible to the visiting scribe,Young was impressed by the singer’s passion and obvious intelligence, and found the 21-year-old a not entirely dislikeable character.

On 19 August Young travelled to Wolverhampton to see the Pistols in concert. When the band took to the stage of Club Lafayette at the stroke of midnight, the writer was transfixed by the chaotic, violent spectacle in front of him and by Rotten in particular, whom he later hailed as ‘perhaps the most captivating performer I’ve ever seen’. He was convinced that the Pistols could be just the wake-up call that the moribund US music scene was crying out for.

‘Kids destroyed schools to the tune of $600 million in the U.S. last year,’ he noted towards the end of his article. ‘That’s a lot of anger that the Southern-California-Cocaine-and-Unrequited-Love Axis isn’t capable of tapping.’

By the time the Sex Pistols finally hit America’s West Coast in January 1978, however, they were a very different band. Vicious was by now a full-blown heroin addict, Rotten was at loggerheads with McClaren over his manipulative managerial style and Jones and Cook were tiring of the self-destructive circus that had long since enveloped their band. With perverse, puckish logic, McClaren had shied away from booking the Pistols into America’s most Anglophile, punk-cognisant cities – New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Detroit – opting instead to schedule dates in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Memphis, San Antonio, Baton Rouge, Dallas, Tulsa and San Francisco, gambling that America’s media would lap up the opportunity to see how the more conservative Bible Belt states would react to these delinquent scumbags pitching up in their towns. Hysterical television reports sensationalising the violence at the band’s English gigs duly followed: Atlanta’s Channel 2 news team upped the ante by claiming that the band routinely vomited and committed ‘sex acts’ upon one another as part of their stage show.

Those hoping to witness Caligulan frenzy on the Pistols’ début US tour would have been horribly disappointed: the shows were remarkable only for the sense of anti-climax which accompanied them. The biggest problem the Pistols faced lay in the yawning chasm between their terrifying reputation and the rather more prosaic reality: audiences expecting to see the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were confronted instead with little more than a workmanlike rock ’n’ roll band.

By the time the Pistols pitched up at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom on 14 January it was all over bar the shouting. The Winterland show saw the quartet play to a crowd of over 5,000 people – more than they’d drawn in the previous six shows combined – but by now Rotten was sick to his cavities of the whole sorry pantomime. At the end of a perfunctory set the band returned for one encore, a ramshackle, seemingly interminable trawl through The Stooges’ ‘No Fun’. As the song limped to its climax, Rotten knelt at the lip of the stage, his arms folded across his chest, fixing his audience with a sullen glare.