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

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.

‘Ah-ha-ha,’ he laughed joylessly. ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Good night.’ His microphone clunked to the floor, and the Pistols’ great rock ’n’ roll swindle was over.

Among the audience at Winterland that night were 19-year-old Eric Boucher, a freshman at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and two friends from Hermosa Beach, California, 22-year-old Keith Morris and 23-year-old Greg Ginn, who played together in a Stooges/MC5-influenced garage rock band called Panic. Far from feeling cheated, and unaware that the Pistols had just played their last show – Johnny Rotten would announce his exit from the group just four days later – all three young men walked out of Winterland feeling elated, energised and inspired by what they had seen. Six months later Boucher formed his own punk band, Dead Kennedys, and adopted the stage name Jello Biafra. Six months after that, Ginn and Morris changed the name of their band to the more militant, threatening-sounding Black Flag.

It would be a gross over-simplification to suggest that the American hardcore movement was born, like a phoenix from the ashes, out of the death of the Sex Pistols’ punk rock dream. By the summer of 1977, while the Pistols were finishing up the recording of their début album Never Mind the Bollocks at Wessex Sound Studios in London, there was already a fertile, diverse punk rock scene in Los Angeles, centred around the Masque, a dingy basement club just off Hollywood Boulevard. Here bands such as the Weirdos, The Zeros, X, The Bags and The Germs – the latter fronted by charismatic, nihilistic Iggy/Bowie acolyte Darby Crash and his guitar-playing best friend Pat Smear – played short, riotous sets for messed-up Hollywood club kids.

Keith Morris and Greg Ginn were occasional visitors to the Masque but found themselves out of step with the self-absorbed, narcissistic, peacocking club regulars, who took one withering look at the suburban beach kids with their long hair, faded jeans and T-shirts, and slammed doors in their faces.

‘We weren’t in it for the fashion,’ Morris told Black Flag biographer Stevie Chick, ‘we were in it for the music, its intensity, and the volume.’ The cliquish snobbery they encountered in Hollywood only enhanced the alienation felt by Morris and his friends, and strengthened their desire to create a new noise, without waiting for anyone’s permission or acceptance.

Black Flag’s début EP then was a startling declaration of independence, in both content and form. Released on guitarist Greg Ginn’s own newly created SST label in January 1979, the Nervous Breakdown EP featured four taut, wired tales of caucasian psychosis, delivered at breakneck speed, with extreme aggression. From Keith Morris’s agitated delivery of Ginn’s tension-filled lyrics – ‘I’m about to have a nervous breakdown / My head really hurts / If I don’t find a way outta here / I’m gonna go berserk …’ – through to the pen-drawn cover art (contributed by Ginn’s brother Raymond Pettibon) which depicted a terrified-looking man holding up a chair to fend off another visibly distressed, aggravated individual with clenched fists raised, it was a record every bit as viciously confrontational as The Stooges’ 1969 début.

By the time filmmaker Penelope Spheeris began documenting the LA punk scene for her 1981 movie The Decline of Western Civilization, Morris and Ginn were no longer playing together (the singer having bailed out to form his own band, the more frantic but less threatening Circle Jerks) but the Nervous Breakdown EP had become one of the cornerstones of a new punk rock community.

Born in South Bay towns such as Hermosa Beach, San Pedro, Santa Ana and Huntingdon Beach, American hardcore was, in its earliest incarnation, the sound of California screaming. Growing from childhood to adolescence while former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan reigned as Governor of California, teenagers in these towns were raised to believe that theirs was the golden generation, that they were the heirs apparent to the fabled American Dream: for many, such promises were a joke without a punchline. Living in the suburbs, and still dependent on their parents, these kids felt like flies caught in a jam-jar jail: they understood that a bigger world lay somewhere out there, but they themselves stood trapped in their everyday world, frustrated and constrained by the invisible walls they believed surrounded them.

To those with such a mindset, punk rock offered both succour and a sense of escape. It did not matter that by 1979 the mainstream was already pronouncing punk ‘dead’ – indeed this was the year that trailblazing fanzine PUNK ceased publication – it didn’t matter that the Sex Pistols were defunct and that The Clash had broken their chains with the expansive London Calling: for the kids who had just discovered the genre, this was a new form of music from which they weren’t about to walk away. Instead they stripped away the elements they didn’t like – the posturing, the obsession with fashion, the elitism – and rebooted the genre, amplifying its volume, simplifying its structure, accelerating the velocity, ratcheting up the aggression. What emerged was hardcore: music made by, made for and made about America’s angry, alienated youth, a true riot of their own.

In the 2006 documentary American Hardcore, based upon writer Steve Blush’s 2001 book of the same name, Keith Morris gave an eloquent summation of hardcore’s appeal for suburban teens.

‘I’m working Monday through Friday, here comes Friday night and I’m just gonna go off,’ said Morris. ‘I hate my boss, I hate the people that I work with, I hate my parents, I hate all these authoritative figures, I hate politicians, I hate people in government, I hate the police: everybody is kinda pointing the finger at me, everybody is picking at me, everybody is poking at me and now I have a chance to be with a bunch of my own type of people, and I have a chance to go off. And that’s basically what it was … BOOM!’

Dave Grohl’s first punk rock epiphany came not in one of the community centres, church halls or housing co-op basements that provided the setting for the incubation of Washington DC’s nationally regarded hardcore scene, but in Evanston, Illinois, a prosperous suburb of Chicago. Located on the shores of Lake Michigan, Evanston was largely populated by wealthy old money families, aspirational middle-class professionals and a transient student population taking classes at the nearby Northwestern University. It was also home to Virginia Grohl’s best friend, her former Boardman High School classmate and Three Belles bandmate Sherry Pelz, by then the married Sherry Bradford, and her teenage daughter Tracey, a sassy, feisty punk rock girl who within the space of ten days in the summer of 1982 turned Dave Grohl’s world upside down.

Tracey Bradford became a punk after seeing Dead Kennedys and Chicago’s own Naked Raygun and Articles of Faith destroy her hometown’s Club COD one ‘fun, crazy’ night in September 1981. An instant convert to the cause, within weeks she had shorn her long brown hair and swapped pretty, preppy dresses for bondage pants and ripped T-shirts. None of this, however, had been relayed to Dave Grohl before he knocked on the Bradfords’ front door that summer.

‘So we showed up that year,’ he recalls, ‘and Tracey came down to the door in engineer boots, bondage pants and an Anti-Pasti T-shirt, with a crew cut and a fucking motorcycle chain around her neck and spikes. And I was like, “You are my hero!”

‘We ran up the stairs of their mansion to her bedroom and she had, honestly, a collection of punk rock singles that would be worth like $100,000 today, singles that are considered impossible to find, like first-pressing Dischord singles, legendary shit you just don’t see. And I went through every single one of those records. And that definitely set my life in the direction it’s been in for thirty fucking years.’

Now a care home nurse living in Florida, Tracey Bradford has fond memories of her ‘cousin’ Dave’s visit.

‘It’s funny, I don’t ever remember thinking, “Wow, Dave thinks I’m cool!”,’ she laughs. ‘I don’t really recall him being really impressed. I just remember that Dave was always a really nice guy. He was pretty young the first time he came to visit – I remember him visiting with his little Winnie the Pooh bear – and he was a good kid, always super, super nice.’

As Grohl rifled through her record collection, Bradford dropped another bombshell: she wasn’t just a punk rock fan, she was also the singer in her own punk rock band, Verboten.

‘Verboten were a pretty cool little band,’ remembers Steve Albini, now frontman of noise rock provocateurs Shellac and a world-renowned recording engineer, then a journalism and fine art student at Northwestern University, taking his first faltering steps towards punk rock godhead with his misanthropic dorm room solo project Big Black. ‘Chicago had such a small punk rock scene and everybody knew everybody. That was a really inspirational period: it seemed like everything was permissible, like all the misfits and losers and people who couldn’t function in regular society could get along quite comfortably with each other and that sort of created a punk rock scene. There was nothing fashionable or chic about it like it was in Los Angeles or New York where you’d have hip socialites dropping in on the punk scene, or where wealthy patrons took bands under their wings. That didn’t happen in Chicago, it was very much a street-level scene and by the mid-eighties it had extended to misfits of all ages. The kids in Verboten would probably have been the youngest kids involved.’

Verboten, in which 14-year-old Bradford was joined by 10-year-old guitarist Jason Narducy, 12-year-old bassist Chris Kean and 11-year-old drummer Zack Kantor, played their first show at Chicago’s Cubby Bear, a dank, dark rock club opposite Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs baseball team, in January 1982, opening up for Naked Raygun and Rights of the Accused. Video footage of the gig shows Verboten to be a tight little unit, with their young guitarist emerging as the star of the show, ripping out a blistering Angus Young-style solo during a chaotic cover of ‘Louie Louie’ as stage invaders swamp his singer and front row punks take the piss with good-humoured ‘We’re not worthy!’ bows.

‘It was all a big laugh,’ remembers Bradford, ‘all about having a good time.’

As Naked Raygun and Rights of the Accused were back at the Cubby Bear while the Grohls were staying in Evanston, Bradford asked Grohl and Hinkle if they would be interested in coming along to see a punk rock show with her.

‘I had to sit them down and give them the Punk Rock 101 speech before we left,’ laughs Bradford. ‘And they had to look the part so we wouldn’t stand out. I’d dated the drummer of Rights of the Accused and then the guitarist, they were both boys that I knew, so it was important that I wasn’t bringing two little geeks to the show.’

Yet to release a single, in 1982 Naked Raygun were still one of the Chicago punk scene’s best-kept secrets. Influenced by second-wave British punk acts Wire, Gang of Four and Stiff Little Fingers, the band dealt in abrasive, scratchy, teeth-on-edge post-punk, with Santiago Durango’s metallic, drilling guitar lines tempered by vocalist Jeff Pezzati’s keen melodic instincts: the notoriously hard-to-please Steve Albini considered them the finest band in his adopted hometown.

Grohl was also blown away by the band, but more than that, he loved the tumultuous atmosphere in the Cubby Bear and the sense of community within its walls. Tracey Bradford introduced him to Pezzati and her friends in Rights of the Accused, and the Chicago punks adopted him for the evening, filling his head with stories of legendary gigs and must-have records, and scooping him off the venue’s sticky floor when the propulsive ebb and flow of the pit threatened to pull him under. It was an eye-opening, life-changing night for the youngsters from Virginia: ‘When we walked out I remember Dave saying, “That was fucking crazy!”’ says Bradford.

‘I stood there and thought, “I could do this, I can play drums, and you don’t even have to sing – you can just scream your balls off,”’ Grohl recalled two decades later. ‘I talked to the singer and I jumped on someone’s head and I felt completely at ease with the band and the audience. It was just a bunch of people having a good time.

‘Most people who were kids back then, when they talk about their first concert it’s like, “Yeah, I saw Dio opening for Ozzy,” or “I saw Fastway opening for Van Halen,” but mine was Rights of the Accused opening for Naked Raygun. That was my point of reference, and still to this day it remains some sort of reference as to how music should be experienced live.’

Before he left Evanston, Grohl had one more revelatory experience, one which would shape the rest of his adolescence, and provide a moral framework that continues to inform his life. It came with the discovery that, back on the East Coast, one of punk rock’s most vibrant, vital communities was virtually on his doorstep.

‘I remember looking at Tracey’s singles,’ he told me in 2009, ‘and picking up an S.O.A. single or a Minor Threat single – a Dischord single anyway – and looking at the address and going, “Woah, this one is from Washington DC!” And then Tracey said, “Dude, listen to this!” and she played me a Bad Brains record. And it was like, “Holy shit! They’re from DC too?” And then we listened to Faith and Void and all the real cool shit from Dischord’s early days. And a lot of these bands were still going at that time, so now I had a mission for when I got back home, to check out that scene. It took me about a year before I finally found it. And then I couldn’t get out of it.’

If liberal, leafy Evanston, Illinois was an unlikely breeding ground for punk rock revolution, the same could be said of Washington DC’s affluent, elegant Georgetown district, home to politicians, foreign diplomats and some of the city’s most influential, wealthy and well-connected families. Before he was elected as the 35th President of the United States in 1961, Senator John F. Kennedy owned a house in the district; former US President Bill Clinton also lived in the area while studying at Georgetown University, America’s oldest and most prestigious Catholic university. The hub of Washington’s glamorous social scene, Georgetown is best known for its refined architecture, upscale boutiques and high-end restaurants, but it was in this genteel, gentrified district that the punk rock scene which changed Dave Grohl’s life was spawned.

Ian MacKaye is the godfather of that community. A most reluctant punk rock icon, MacKaye’s name has nonetheless become a by-word for uncompromised integrity, independent thought and unyielding, principled self-determination. The Clash’s Joe Strummer once commented: ‘Ian’s the only one who ever did the punk thing right from Day One and followed through on it all the way.’ Dischord, the record label MacKaye co-founded in 1980 to document his hometown’s nascent scene, stands as an inspirational example of the potential of the punk rock underground. Preferring handshake deals over legal contracts, selling its releases at affordable prices and splitting all profits evenly between artists and the label, Dischord is a collective that values community above commerce, and offers an alternative, ethical framework to standard record industry practices. The trailblazing bands Ian MacKaye fronted – among them Minor Threat, Embrace and Fugazi – operated defiantly out of step with the music business; his current group The Evens continue happily to do so.

Like Dave Grohl, MacKaye is the son of a journalist father and a schoolteacher mother: unlike Grohl, one can easily imagine him excelling in either profession. Often portrayed as an austere, intimidating character, in person MacKaye is thoughtful, eloquent and disarmingly direct, blessed with a dry wit and an encyclopaedic knowledge of, and boundless enthusiasm for, music.