“I was suspicious of it”: The band Dave Grohl was too cynical to like
It’s hard to picture Dave Grohl with anything but a big smile on his face at every opportunity. He clearly knows that he is comfortable with winning the musical lottery in many respects and can spend the rest of his life doing what he loves without worrying about paying the bills for the rest of his life. For Grohl to succeed in an industry that’s designed for failure is no small feat, but he admitted that there were some musical bridges that he didn’t think he should ever have to cross during his lifetime.
Because as much as rock and roll can be fun, it can also take a lot out of you if you’re not in it for the right reasons. The main reason why anyone should write a song is because they have something to express, and if that involved droning on for five minutes or writing a dopey pop song, that was normally enough as long as it was heartfelt.
That’s why Grohl catered to punk rock so much when he first started learning his craft. He had spent a long time playing along to music on his pillows when listening to his favourite Beatles records, but listening back to the first bands that he joined, it was about harnessing that raw energy and giving 110% whenever someone counted off a tune. This was what music was all about, and it’s also what made prog-rock so pretentious for many punks.
Then again, Grohl still had a certain affinity for punk. He knew that he would never reach the level of Neil Peart behind the drumkit, but he also wasn’t afraid to throw in one of his drum licks if it served the song. Prog was alright in his book, but when he saw a band like Kiss making their music nothing more than a commodity, that was usually the moment where he drew a line in the sand.
Although Grohl was more than happy to jam along to music like Kiss, Gene Simmons’ behaviour has shattered the illusion for far too many people at this point. It’s fun looking at them at these larger-than-life caricatures of what rock and roll is supposed to be, but Simmons explaining how important the merchandise is for Kiss is like the musical equivalent of telling a kid that one of their favourite mythical creatures isn’t real.
That’s not to say that approach doesn’t work, but it also was one that Grohl wanted no part of, saying, “The thing I didn’t like about a lot of rock music was the superhuman pretension – at an early age I was suspicious of it, cynical. I had a Kiss poster, but I didn’t like their music, I liked them as comic book characters. But I also had an AC/DC poster, Malcolm Young wearing jeans and a T-shirt, hasn’t taken a shower all week, drunk and just fuckin’ playing music for the sake of playing music. I thought, ‘I wanna be that guy.’”
And why wouldn’t he cater to this kind of music? As opposed to Kiss’s merchandise machine, AC/DC was the kind of band that lived and breathed every single note they played, whether that was Angus Young strutting around the stage or Brian Johnson singing his guts out. They aren’t looking to cash the big checks, and the reason why everyone believes in that kind of rock is because they believe it.
So, really, Grohl’s entire approach to rock was about proving everyone wrong when it came to the artificial side of the genre. There may be some fine artists who are in the business to grab a quick paycheck, but the real musical superheroes are the ones who keep their nose to the grindstone and make something because they genuinely want to make the world a better place.
