The best band Dave Grohl has ever seen live: “It made me want to drink a hundred beers and break windows”
The best band that most people will ever see is a group that blew their mind as a teenager in a sweaty box of a venue that cost less than $20 to attend.
These entry-level shows capture your imagination in a way that can’t be replicated when you’re older and wiser with hundreds of concerts under your belt. It could be a $200 ticket to see Foo Fighters in a stadium, and still not come close to giving you that feeling of empowerment that came from seeing The Cribs at Hull University in 2012.
Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl knows what it’s like to have a riotous gig make your life technicolour. Upon moving to Washington DC in his early teens, Grohl suddenly had access to a whole roster of bands and shows, which directly led to him waving bye to his education to become a touring musician at 16.
Before having a scene on his doorstep to immerse himself in, live music was a facet of his imagination. While Grohl had already started to play the guitar, which he learned thanks to a songbook of material by The Beatles, bands such as the Fab Four felt distant.
That relationship all changed thanks to the emergence of punk, providing concerts easily accessible in a live environment, and Grohl loved nobody more than Bad Brains, who embodied the spirit of the DC scene. The hardcore icons operated by their own rulebook and consistently blew Grohl’s mind whenever he was fortunate enough to be in their vicinity. They might not have been Led Zeppelin or The Beatles in worldwide stature, but they were precisely of the same importance to Grohl.
During an interview with Red Bulletin in 2021, Grohl opened up about his love of the punk pioneers and went as far as naming their track ‘Sailin’ On’ as one song he wishes he wrote. He elaborated on his selection: “Bad Brains were America’s greatest hardcore punk-rock band in the ’80s. They were from Washington, DC, and were the best live band I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“I was in love with their music – it was so fast, so distorted, so dissonant,” he added. “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”.
If it wasn’t abundantly clear already, Grohl is no fairweather Bad Brains fan, either. His favourite album in their canon is a bootleg, which expresses his credentials and further highlights how much of a stranglehold they had on him as a teenager, seeking out anything and everything related to them.
“I was living in DC in the early ’80s and got into the hardcore scene, but nobody else blew me away as much as Bad Brains,” he told NME. “I have never ever, ever, ever, ever seen a band do anything even close to what Bad Brains used to do live.”
Unsurprisingly, Grohl also confirmed Bad Brains were one of the key reasons he chose to chase a career as a musician, revealing, “They made me absolutely determined to become a musician; they basically changed my life and changed the lives of everyone who saw them.”
Bad Brains remain more than a band to Grohl, but the benchmark when it comes to live acts and the group that made him dare to dream that this would be his life.
It’s 40-plus years since they catapulted into his life, and now, whenever he hears their music, Grohl suddenly finds himself 15 again, with a burning desire to step on a stage himself. Their influence didn’t just shape his music taste, but his entire existence.
