This Is a Call: The Life and Times of Dave Grohl

Virginia Jean Hanlon met James Harper Grohl while working in community theatre in Trumbull County. She was a striking, smart and sassy trainee teacher, he a quick-witted, charming and confident young journalist. Grohl was a classically trained flautist – nothing less than a ‘child prodigy’, according to his son – and a keen jazz buff; Hanlon sang with high school friends in an a cappella vocal group named the Three Belles. The pair also shared a love of poetry and literature, particularly the provocative counter-culture writings of Beat Generation authors Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. In later years, in the company of his son’s more artistic, liberal-minded friends, James Grohl was fond of wheeling out an anecdote about Ginsberg (unsuccessfully) hitting on him when the pair moved in the same bohemian circles, a pointed reminder to his son that he wasn’t always such a strait-laced square.

At the time of his son’s birth, James Grohl was a journalist for the Scripps Howard news agency, a division of the multi-platform communications empire built up by the tough-talking Illinois-born media mogul Edward Willis Scripps. With a culture encouraging independent thinking, instincts for social reform and a healthy disrespect for authority, it was a fecund environment for any ambitious young journalist. For James Grohl, this avowed policy of fearless, scrupulous news-gathering was never more important than when he was called upon to cover the student protests at Kent State University in nearby Kent, Ohio in May 1970.

Founded in 1910 as a teacher training college, Kent State was officially accorded university status in 1935; then, as now, the college prided itself upon a commitment to ‘excellence in action’. By 1970 the student body, which included future Pretenders singer Chrissie Hynde, then an eighteen-year-old art student, numbered 21,000 across all programmes. That student body had become enraged when US President Richard Nixon, a man elected two years earlier on a pledge to end the war in Vietnam, announced on 30 April 1970 that US combat forces had invaded neighbouring Cambodia, an act widely interpreted as an escalation of the conflict.

When sporadic rioting broke out in the city in the wake of an anti-war demonstration on the university campus on 1 May, Mayor Leroy Satrom declared a state of emergency, and Ohio Governor James Allen Rhodes sent the National Guard to Kent to quell the disturbances and restore order.

On 4 May, when 2,000 protestors gathered on the university commons for another scheduled protest, they were ordered to disperse. When it became clear that the protestors were not prepared to comply with this injunction, the Guardsmen fired first tear gas, then live ammunition, into their midst. Four students were killed, and nine more injured.

Dubbed ‘the Kent State Massacre’ by the media, the killings galvanised the American anti-war movement. In the wake of the shootings, angry demonstrations were held on college campuses nationwide, and on 9 May an estimated 100,000 people converged upon Washington DC to protest against the Vietnam War and the horrifying events in Ohio. In response, the Nixon administration called upon the military to defend government offices, as the President was secreted from the District of Columbia to Camp David in Maryland for his own safety. White House staffers viewed the tense stand-off with mounting panic: upon seeing armed soldiers in the basement of the executive offices, one Nixon aide later commented, ‘You’re thinking “This can’t be the United States of America. This is not the greatest free democracy in the world. This is a nation at war with itself.”’

James Grohl’s dispatches from Ohio marked him out as a rising star within the Scripps Howard news service. In 1972, while working in Columbus, Ohio, he was asked to consider a move to Washington DC, the nation’s capital and political nerve centre, to develop his career further. For Grohl, the timing was perfect. This was the age of the crusading journalist, with Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward being hailed as American heroes for their incisive and explosive investigations into a seemingly trivial burglary at the Watergate Hotel on 17 June 1972, which exposed a botched attempt to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee offices and uncovered a paper trail all the way to the White House, leading to the resignation of ‘Tricky Dickie’ Nixon on 8 August 1974. What upwardly mobile young reporter wouldn’t wish to join the pair on the frontline in their tenacious pursuit of the truth? It was an opportunity Grohl accepted without reservation.

Like so many other transplants to the DC metropolitan area, he chose to relocate his family not in the District of Columbia itself, but in the outlying suburbs. Springfield, Virginia lay six miles down the I-95, just inside the Capital Beltway, and like the neighbouring towns of Arlington, Annandale and Alexandria it was a popular destination for commuters working in the city or at the nearby Pentagon offices. As with other Northern Virginian towns, it had a transient population, with the shifting dynamics of working on Capitol Hill leading many families to relocate after four or five years in the area. Despite this, residents worked hard to foster and maintain a strong community spirit.

At the dawn of the 1970s the Grohls’ new hometown was a location suited to the patronising sobriquet ‘white-bread’. But, befitting a town ‘15 minutes from chicken farmers, and 15 minutes from the White House’, as Dave Grohl would later describe it, Springfield, VA also had a more schizophrenic character. Here, urbane, moneyed politicos – those ‘fortunate sons’ eviscerated in song by Creedence Clearwater Revival – shared street space with blue-collar Southerners with gun racks on their pickup trucks and Skynyrd and Zeppelin blasting from their Camaros and Ford Mustangs.

The family lived on Kathleen Place, a quiet cul-de-sac, in a house Dave Grohl remembers as ‘a tiny shoebox’. The children settled quickly into their new home. Lisa Grohl enrolled at North Springfield Elementary School, while Dave, fondly remembered by his mother as ‘a pretty rambunctious kid’ with a taste for mischief that cherubic looks and a beatific smile couldn’t always mask, was left to explore his new surroundings on his go-kart, with his faithful companion, a somewhat bedraggled Winnie the Pooh bear, glued to his side.

‘Springfield was a great neighbourhood to grow up in,’ recalls Nick Christy, the frontman of Grohl’s first real band Nameless, whose own family moved to Springfield from Massachusetts in the early 1970s. ‘A kid could have a lot of fun there. The houses weren’t fancy or spectacular, but it was a nice friendly neighbourhood. It was all middle-income white families, and people looked out for one another. I only later found out that all my friends’ parents were in the FBI or CIA or were senators from Washington.’

Seduced by the electric, politically charged atmosphere of his new environs, James Grohl switched careers soon after settling in Springfield, quitting journalism to take up a new position as a speech writer/campaign manager for Robert Taft Jr, the Republican Senator for Ohio and grandson of former US President William Howard Taft. His wife also secured new employment, teaching English and drama at Thomas Jefferson High School in nearby Alexandria, where she was a popular addition to the staff.

‘Virginia Grohl was a great teacher,’ recalls Chet Lott, a student at Thomas Jefferson High from 1981 to 1984. ‘She was the type of teacher that took an interest in you personally, and got to know everyone, and she was definitely one of the stand-out teachers in my whole schooling. She was very cool, a very nice lady.’

In private, though, things were not going quite so well for the Grohls. Behind closed doors, and out of earshot of their children, James and Virginia Grohl’s marriage was slowly falling apart. In 1975 James Grohl walked out on his wife and young family. Virginia Grohl faced what would have undoubtedly been a difficult, stress-filled time with dignity and admirable stoicism, shielding her two children from both the harsh realities of separation and her own fears and concerns for the future.

‘Of course it caused a lot of pain and it caused a lot of struggle, but I don’t think I really understood what was going on,’ Dave would later recall. ‘By the time I got a hold of the situation, it was too late for me to have a freak-out. It just seemed abnormal for all my friends to have a father. I thought growing up with my mother and sister was just the way it was supposed to be.’

On a practical level, Virginia Grohl quickly realised that her $18,000 salary as a high school teacher in the Fairfax County public school system was never going to cover the cost of raising two children single-handedly. To supplement her income she took on part-time work: week-day evenings were spent working in a department store, while weekends were occupied by administration duties for a local carpet cleaning company.

In order to keep her children occupied and entertained while she was working weekends, Virginia Grohl would allow Lisa and Dave to listen to her record collection on a stereo borrowed from Thomas Jefferson High School. One day while the family were out shopping in a local drugstore Dave nagged his mother into buying him an album of his own, a K-Tel compilation which had been heavily advertised on television. Released in 1976, Block Buster promised ‘20 original hits by original stars’, and featured some of the biggest anthems of the era, from KC and The Sunshine Band’s ‘That’s the Way (I Like It)’ to Alice Cooper’s ‘Only Women Bleed’. Back home at Kathleen Place, Dave commandeered the stereo for the next few weekends, bugging the shit out of his big sister by lifting the stylus every three and a half minutes to play one particular track over and over and over again.

The Edgar Winter Group’s ‘Frankenstein’ was one of the 1970s’ more unlikely Number 1 singles. Originally a sprawling live jam, allowing the Texas-born Winter to demonstrate his virtuosity on a variety of instruments on his 1972 album They Only Come Out at Night, ‘Frankenstein’ was a spacey, synthesiser-led, progressive rock instrumental, featuring a spiralling saxophone solo and mid-song drum duel. The following year the track was used as the B-side of the band’s ‘Hangin’ Around’ single, but as disc jockeys nationwide began playing the track in response to listener requests, Winter’s label Epic flipped the seven inch and began plugging ‘Frankenstein’ as the single. In May 1973 the song reached Number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, eventually selling more than one million copies. As track nine on the Block Buster compilation, it would change one little boy’s life forever.

‘To me that was just the best sound I had ever heard in my life,’ Grohl later enthused. ‘To this day [it’s] still one of the most amazing songs you’ve ever heard in your life. Every time I hear “Frankenstein” it reminds me of being that young, just rocking out in my bedroom.’

On the wall of that bedroom, Grohl had tacked a poster of the cockpit of a 747 aeroplane. At the time the young man dreamt of becoming a pilot, of leaving Springfield behind and escaping to new places, experiencing new things. But if his next musical discovery taught him anything, it was that he didn’t actually need to leave his small bedroom in order to escape the realities of day-to-day life.

For American teenagers from Long Island to Long Beach, and all points in between, obsessing over Kiss was a rite of passage. On 31 October 1976 the quartet from New York stomped onto ABC’s The Paul Lynde Halloween Special in Kabuki make-up and stackheels, and proceeded to pout and prance through lip-synched versions of ‘Detroit Rock City’, ‘Beth’ and ‘King of the Night Time World’ for a national TV audience that numbered millions. For a generation of wide-eyed, awestruck young viewers this was their ‘The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show’ moment, only with added flashbombs.

Kiss were four cartoon superheroes – Starchild, The Demon, Space Ace and Catman – both larger and louder than life; figures who breathed fire, spat blood, fired rockets from their guitars and made rock ’n’ roll seem like the most impossibly exciting vocation. A self-confessed ‘show-off’, fond of dressing up in clothes ‘as outlandish and ridiculous as possible’, the seven-year-old Dave Grohl thought they were just about the coolest thing he’d ever seen. Soon enough, Virginia Grohl was pestered into buying Rock and Roll Over (and later Kiss Alive II), but in truth Dave spent more time looking at the album sleeves than actually listening to the vinyl within. The true magic lay elsewhere. Kiss breathed fire! They spat blood! They played guitars that fired rockets! A poster of the band posing atop the Empire State Building soon occupied pride of place on Grohl’s bedroom wall. It was surely no coincidence that his interest in playing guitar started soon afterwards.

‘My mother bought my father a nylon string flamenco-type guitar when I was three or four years old,’ he recalls. ‘He never learned to play so it just sat around the house, and by the time I was nine I’d broken four of the six strings on it. But with the two left I’d learned how to make a chord and learned [Deep Purple standard] “Smoke on the Water” … very Beavis and Butthead. And that was how I started playing guitar.’

While Grohl was getting to grips with his first powerchords, his mother’s new boyfriend, Chip Donaldson, a fellow English teacher and Vietnam War veteran, moved into the family home. Far from resenting this new alpha male presence, Grohl was in awe of the new arrival, and Donaldson’s arrival started the fledgling guitarist’s musical education in earnest.

‘Chip was a fucking brilliant man, who I totally looked up to,’ he told me in 2009. ‘He was a real wild, “outdoors man” guy, who was just as book smart as he was at home in nature: we would go on these crazy nature walks, and he taught me to hunt when I was ten. He moved in with us for a few years and brought his record collection with him. Our living room went from being a conservative suburban Virginia home living room to crates of albums on the walls, and maybe deer antlers, and a gun rack … it basically turned into a hunting lodge, with really good music.

‘I learned a lot from his record collection. It was everything from Jethro Tull to the Grateful Dead to the Rolling Stones to Phoebe Snow to Zeppelin to Jefferson Airplane to Dylan, all late sixties and seventies shit. Lynyrd Skynyrd was another big one. I remember listening to “Freebird” when I was ten years old and thinking, “God, if some day I could just play a solo like that …” and Chip saying, “Well, if you practise, maybe some day …” But I knew with all my heart he was wrong, that even if I practised for years I’d never be able to play that guitar part. And I still can’t play that guitar part!’

Pleased that Dave had a hobby that was keeping him out of trouble, Virginia Grohl paid for guitar lessons for her son, until after a year the student pronounced them ‘boring’, and quit. In place of these lessons, Dave Grohl calmly revealed that he had formed a band.

The HG Hancock Band was a duo, a partnership between Grohl and North Springfield Elementary School classmate, and near neighbour, Larry Hinkle. Grohl viewed the group as nothing less than North Springfield Elementary’s answer to Southern rock heroes Lynyrd Skynyrd. Having discovered that the Jacksonville, Florida band had taken their name in mocking tribute to their former PE teacher Leonard Skinner, he and Hinkle borrowed the name of their own PE teacher Ms Hancock for their new outfit: the HG prefix stood for Hinkle/Grohl.

The pair shared classes together in fifth grade, and were now inseparable, always in and out of one another’s houses, forever hatching schemes and making mischief. Now a self-employed woodworker living in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Hinkle has fond memories of his time as Grohl’s partner-in-crime.

‘Dave was pretty funny, and fun to be around,’ he recalls. ‘We sat close to each other in class, he didn’t live too far away from where I lived, and he was just a good guy to hang out with.

‘We did do some things that weren’t too cool,’ Hinkle admits. ‘I used to spend the night at Dave’s house and we’d sneak out and go to this one road late at night and throw crab apples at cars and try to get them to chase us. That could have got us into a lot of trouble. Another time I remember we were teasing some girl on the school bus and we grabbed her purse and threw it out of the bus window. We forgot all about it until we were called into the principal’s office the next day. We weren’t bad kids, just kinda goofy.

‘But Dave was always really into music. He always had his guitar with him, a beat-up old acoustic with broken strings. Hanging out with him it was hard not to get into music.’

When they weren’t terrorising the local community, Grohl and Hinkle spent their free time listening to local classic rock station DC 101 with classmate Jimmy Swanson, sniggering at ‘shock jock’ Howard Stern’s gleefully puerile banter and playing air guitar to a soundtrack of AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Cheap Trick, Black Sabbath, Ted Nugent, Alice Cooper, Van Halen and, naturally, Lynyrd Skynyrd.

‘Dave played his guitar with the broken strings,’ says Hinkle, ‘and I played drums, which was made up of his mom’s knitting needles and laundry basket and pots and pans. His mom was always very welcoming, always really nice to us. But God only knows what she thought of the noises we were making.’

In truth, Virginia Grohl had long since learned to tune out the noises emanating from her son’s bedroom. Since a cousin had given him a copy of Canadian prog-rockers Rush’s 1976 album 2112, Grohl had been teaching himself how to play drums, using the furniture in his room as a crude approximation of a kit. Now the thump-thwack-thump-thwack coming from her boy’s bedroom was as natural to Virginia Grohl as birdsong, and scarcely more intrusive.

‘I had a chair that was next to my bed, and I would kneel down on the floor and put a pillow between my legs to use as my snare,’ said Grohl, explaining his rudimentary set-up to Modern Drummer magazine in 2004. ‘I would use the chair to my left as the hi-hat and use the bed as toms and cymbals. And I would play to these records until there was condensation dripping from the windows.’

Encouraged by the promise displayed in the first HG Hancock Band rehearsals, Grohl decided it was time to start committing some of his own original material to tape. The HG Hancock Band’s first song, ‘Bitch’, was a tribute to the Grohl family dog BeeGee. The second song presented to Hinkle by his musical partner was titled ‘Three Steps’.

‘In class this one day he gave me a piece of paper and said, “Here’s this new song I’ve wrote, let’s do it!”’ Hinkle recalls. ‘He played it for me and I said, “Wow, this is great!” And then later that afternoon he was feeling kinda weird about it and he admitted that he didn’t write the song, that it was a Lynyrd Skynyrd song, “Gimme Three Steps”. We wondered if we could get into trouble for playing it. We were kinda nervous for the rest of the day.’

‘I certainly didn’t consider myself a songwriter, they were just little experiments, little challenges,’ says Grohl of his earliest, non-plagiarised songs. ‘I honestly wasn’t aiming for anything. But I figured out for myself that I could record multitrack at home with two cassette players. I could hit Record on one cassette player, play the guitar, stop, rewind, take that cassette and put it into the other cassette player, hit Play, get another cassette to record on in the first one and sing over the top. And then you have a two-track recording. I would listen back to it and I didn’t necessarily like the sound of my voice but the reward was simple: proof that I could.’

In 2009, as part of the liner notes to Foo Fighters’ Greatest Hits album, Grohl laid out this primitive recording process in marginally more detail in a four-step mini essay entitled ‘How to Multitrack at Home’. The final step read simply ‘Start band’.

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.