Dave Grohl reveals his thoughts on UFOs and aliens
Read More
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Dave Grohl remembers his first heartbreak
Dave Grohl is lauded in such God-like terms that he is best regarded as the last genuine rockstar. The Foo Fighters frontman is coveted in a way that is akin to the legends of old such as Paul McCartney and Jimi Hendrix, and his many feats are likely to be spoken about for years to come, with his place in the great pantheon of rock a more than deserved one.
From his role in Nirvana to masterminding Foo Fighters and even playing drums for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Grohl has done it all, and it is certain that the young music lover deep within him pinches himself every day when looking back at all he has achieved.
He first broke through as a teenage drumming prodigy that fibbed about his age to audition for local D.C. hardcore legends, Scream. Hired in an instant, Grohl then toured the world, cutting his teeth and developing quickly. The waves he made in the band would lead to the chance meeting he had with Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic of Nirvana, who were brought to one of their shows by Melvins frontman Buzz Osbourne.
Before too long, Scream would be over, and soon Grohl would find himself the new drummer of Nirvana. He proved to be what school friends Cobain and Novoselic had long been looking for, and over the next couple of years they would rise from being local legends in the burgeoning grunge scene to the biggest band on the planet, and the de facto champions of Generation X, giving a voice to the jaded, the misunderstood and the angry.
The story of Nirvana is a well-known one, and after Kurt Cobain’s tragic suicide in 1994, Grohl took some time away from music and began to focus on other projects. He then set his mind to returning from the shock of Cobain’s death and wrote and recorded the first Foo Fighters album.
It would be a success, and by the end of the decade, off the back of titles such as 1997’s The Colour and the Shape, Foo Fighters established themselves as one of the biggest acts on the planet, with Grohl rising as a musician all of his own makings.
Ostensibly, Grohl is one of the most honest men in rock, and as well as dazzling fans with his musical aptitude over the years, he’s also had us captivated by the truthfulness and skill with which he tells stories. From discussing being trapped in elevators to the death of Cobain, there’s a reason his memoir is called The Storyteller, as aside from music, he was born to regale fans with stories.
One of his best tales is one that he’s told a handful of times across his career; the one that sees his goofy 7th-grade self get dumped by a popular girl called Sandy, who he’d been going out with for only a week. He regards this moment as a significant turning point in his life, as afterwards, because of the extent of the heartbreak, he turned to the guitar on a deeper level, connecting his heart and music forevermore.
Discussing the heartbreak, he expressed on a chat show in the 2000s: “Then after seven days she said, ‘You know, I’m new here and I just don’t wanna get, like, tied down’… We were eleven years old! She says, ‘I don’t wanna get tied into a relationship’. It absolutely broke my heart, I was heartbroken.”
Grohl would have the last laugh, though, both in the real world and in dreamland. He concluded: “That night I had a dream that I was in an arena full of people, and I was playing guitar. It was just like this packed arena, and they’re all going ‘Yeah!’, and I’m playing, and I look down and she’s staring at me, and she’s crying.”
