The band Dave Grohl and Keanu Reeves both adored: “The best”
What majestical, mythical band brings together the seemingly disparate worlds of Dave Grohl and Keanu Reeves?
Aside from both enjoying reputations as the ‘nicest guys’ of their respective fields, any Reeves fan will tell you how much of a hardcore muso the longtime Hollywood veteran actually is. Grohl’s rock stripes need no explanation, fronting the Foo Fighters monster and Nirvana’s classic drummer thrusting Grohl to the fore of the Gen X alternative world, but Reeves has always orbited music’s fringes both professionally and personally.
It’s probably what makes him play the time-travelling, slacker metalhead Theodore ‘Ted’ Logan so well. His first role to truly break through, 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, saw Reeves perform the closest we’ve ever seen as an alter ego, an embellished, exaggerated version of his real self.
Not content with just spinning records, Reeves picked up the bass for his Dogstar trio for the best part of 30 years, counting Weezer as an early opening act, touring the world and dropping three studio albums, including the latest Somewhere Between the Power Lines and Palm Trees as recently as 2023.
Reeves was quizzed on his favourite bands for a 1996 Entertainment Weekly piece. Adopting a best till last order, Reeves reeled off a string of much-loved groups that had shaped his life and musical identity, “I’d say Fugazi, the Ramones, Exploited, Discharge, early Elvis Costello, The Clash, Violent Femmes, Joy Division, Minor Threat,” before finally landing on, “And Bad Brains. That’s definitely what I cut my teeth on.”
Most in the punk world will reel off largely the same. Bad Brains’ impact on the Washington, DC, hardcore scene, and later New York, was seismic, brewing a blistering turbo attack laced with political seethe and Rastafari spiritualism, including detours into dub reggae amid the burning garage attack.
They didn’t write ‘Banned in DC’ for nothing. Building a fierce reputation for sets so furious that crowds would be sent into a frenzy and venues turned upside down, one such convert among the battered audience counted a young Grohl years before grunge had sparked the Seattle underground’s later Billboard domination.
Living in DC in the early 1980s, Grohl caught the legendary Bad Brains in the zenith of their notoriety. “I was in love with their music – it was so fast, so distorted, so dissonant,” he revealed to Red Bulletin in 2021 with undimmed enthusiasm. “It made me want to drink a hundred beers and break windows. Now, if that’s not a good enough reason why I wish it had been written by me”.
The song referred to was ‘Sailin’ On’, opening their Bad Brains debut or re-recorded for Rock the Light, depending on which album you had, a perfectly volatile capture of their ferocity that spawned just as many punk bands as their elder Ramones statesmen, the band naming themselves after Road to Ruin’s bratty punk skulk.
“Bad Brains were America’s greatest hardcore punk-rock band in the ’80s,” Grohl concluded. “The best live band I’ve ever seen in my life.”
