The band that taught Dave Grohl how to play drums
In his book The Storyteller, Dave Grohl described the one and only time he took a drum lesson as a kid. It was with a jazz drummer who played around the Washington D.C. area, close enough for a teenaged Grohl to get him to come to his mother’s house in Northern Virginia. After a brief battle with how he gripped the sticks, Grohl realised that he was never going be able to stand taking lessons.
Instead, Grohl went straight to his record collection in order to learn everything that he needed to know. When Grohl sat down with Sam Jones for his online series Off Camera, he shared which band was the initial guide that helped Grohl understand how to play the drums.
“I never took lessons to play the drums. I learned how to do it on my bed, listening to fucking Rush record,” Grohl explained. “Punk rock. I took one drum lesson. He’s like, ‘How do you hold your sticks? Yeah, you know that’s not how you’re supposed to hold them.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, I don’t have $30 an hour to sit there and re-learn everything that I’ve learned.”
“The same with guitar: I took a couple of guitar lessons and then I wound up playing, and I play guitar the way I do it. I don’t know what any of the chords really are. I know the basic chords,” Grohl claimed. “But the way I look at a guitar is like a drum set. I look at the lower strings like they’re kicks and snares and I look at these [high strings] like they’re cymbals.”
Grohl demonstrates his rhythmic approach to guitar by breaking down the main chord pattern behind Foo Fighters’ ‘Skin and Bones’ and busting out the riff to ‘Everlong’. He also related his approach to learning things to how he puts together furniture.
“You know, if I go to IKEA and buy a shitty fucking chair that I need to put together, I don’t really want to read the instruction,” Grohl said. “I kind of just want to figure it out. Because at the end of the day, when I’m sitting there in my shitty IKEA chair, I feel proud that IKEA didn’t tell me how to put it together.” It might be the only time Rush and IKEA have been used to explain music with equal amounts of influence.
Watch Grohl talk about learning music down below.
