“A new era”: The band Dave Grohl says invented hardcore punk
Many musicians at the ‘top’ of the industry can lose sight of where they come from after years of being celebrated like a god, being rich beyond their wildest dreams, and having doors opened to them that only a select few do. It’s a credit to Dave Grohl, the ostensible nicest man in rock, that despite his many incredible feats, he’s always been the most approachable A-list rocker.
Regardless of the fact Foo Fighters are one of the most popular bands on the planet, and that he was in one of the most significant outfits of all time, Nirvana, Grohl is famed for his humble, everyman nature. While this manifests in various ways, it’s clearly perceived in his championing of up-and-coming acts, which Wet Leg recently experienced, and how he has never shied away from discussing and celebrating the genre which made him: punk.
It is also his inextricable link to punk which has fed into his everyman nature. It’s not just punk either, but specifically, hardcore. This 1980s answer to the wrongs of the first wave, which happened to be incubated in DC, a city close to where he grew up in Virginia, not only provided the young Grohl with a form of expression to rid himself of his teenage angst and other feelings such as the complexities of his parent’s divorce, but also a clear set of morals, and an ethos with which to live.
Subscribing to the hardcore way meant that while he openly drinks alcohol, unlike practically every other A-list musician, Grohl has never used cocaine, heroin or speed, and stopped smoking weed and tripping on LSD when he was 20. He’s been known to appear in anti-drug campaigns, and is a self-professed coffee lover, who drank so much one day, that, in 2009, he was admitted to the hospital due to chest pains caused by a caffeine overdose. It presents a starkly different image from that of Kurt Cobain, the late Nirvana frontman and voice of a generation, who succumbed to a lethal mixture of heroin addiction and debilitating mental health problems.
It all speaks to Grohl cutting his teeth in the DC hardcore scene. He’s so tied to the era that when he was 17, he lied about his age to audition as the drummer for genre pioneers, Scream, a position he was subsequently hired for. He promptly ditched school and embarked upon a globe-trotting journey of musical and personal discovery, wherein he committed himself to the hardcore ethos, albeit not a straight-edge one, and many of his characteristics were formed thanks to the influence of older acolytes.
Despite being in two world-famous bands since those green days, Grohl has clearly always tried to keep the hardcore flame alive with his various exploits, whether it be secret gigs, putting his friends on at the band’s historic Hyde Park show, or helping new artists. He might be clearly flawed, but he’s done more with his position than many of his peers have.
You can attribute this to the impact of the hardcore pioneers who led the charge in the 1980s. While Bad Brains are a band he credits with changing his life, when Grohl spoke to Melody Maker in 1997, he credited Ian MacKaye’s Minor Threat – the band who undeniably invented straight-edge – as also the inventors of hardcore, saying they established a new era for punk, ethically and musically. He’s spot on.
He said: “They sort of made hardcore what it is, with Ian’s vocals and the whole straight-edge ‘no drink-no drugs’ thing. They started a new era. Although they were kind of minimalist about it, they were really talented musicians and they rocked.”
While MacKaye would move on to Embrace after Minor Threat, and then Fugazi, he has always continued to be the flagbearer of hardcore, from the music to the ethics. It’s not just Dave Grohl he made a mark on either; everyone from Refused to John Frusciante cites him as a key influence. Even the late Clash leader Joe Strummer said his work embodied the spirit of punk.
