“Embellished crap”: The band Dave Grohl thought looked like assholes
Being a rock and roll star doesn’t lend itself to having the smallest ego. Despite some artists still acting like the same person that they were when they started, it’s easy for anyone to feel like musical royalty when they have millions of people screaming the words to their songs or being able to bulldoze past any line in a restaurant. Although Dave Grohl could justifiably play the rock god card if he wanted to, he never wanted to act like some 1980s rock stars did back in the day.
Because looking back on his rise, Grohl never took a second of his time for granted. Before he had even picked up a drumstick, he grew up as a stoner in Washington, DC, where his mother worked as a teacher, so he knew the importance of working to get whatever he wanted, no matter what job he found himself in.
Even when he was in Scream, his day-to-day life of surviving off of gas station chilli dogs and narrowly making any money by the end of the night suited him fine until he joined Nirvana. While Kurt Cobain probably had no idea what the group were in for when Nevermind dropped, Grohl was always thinking practically, even joking that he would spend his first paycheck on getting a bigger grill rather than a mountain of cocaine.
Then again, a rock star’s priorities were very different a few years before Nirvana arrived. This was the era when rock stars were almost expected to be as loud and as crude as possible, and when it came to unadulterated sleaze, no one seemed to take those lessons to heart harder than Mötley Crüe.
While they might not have been the greatest 1980s metal band, The Crüe encapsulated everything about the decade in one band. It was loud, it was aggressive, but it was also downright misogynistic at times and seemed a little too pleased with being bad boys. I mean, Vince Neil ended up accidentally killing one of his friends in a drunk driving incident and managed to get a slap on the wrist and go right back to drinking, so it’s not like we were dealing with upstanding citizens here.
Despite them chronicling all of their nefarious behaviour in the book The Dirt, Grohl said he had no desire to even come close to what they did, saying, “I read Mötley Crüe’s [book] – it’s hilarious, but all embellished crap. It makes them seem like complete assholes: ‘We raped chicks and did heroin.’ I don’t want people to know that.”
Even though Grohl did end up writing his own autobiography, he always seemed more concerned with celebrating parts of his life that wouldn’t make someone want to wash their hands after reading about it. No part of Foo Fighters’ journey to the top has been easy, but hearing Grohl open up feels much closer to someone talking over drinks rather than sharing the biggest smut they can think of.
But then again, that’s always been a part of what Mötley Crüe stood for. They made their living off of being one of the absolute worst examples of what a moral person should be, and yet their fans flocked to it because they thought it was cool. But if that kind of logic is still able to work today, maybe there are a few more sad people out there listening than most of us realise.
