The first time Dave Grohl met Iggy Pop
Before he became one of the most famous musicians in the world, Dave Grohl was just another high school dropout making the bare minimum of money playing in a punk rock band. A teenaged Grohl achieved his dream of playing with his favourite band, Washington D.C. hardcore punk gods Scream, and was officially on the road, ready for whatever might come.
As he describes in his memoir The Storyteller, that mostly meant basement shows, dirty clubs, and sleeping in the van that they drove in from gig to gig. It wasn’t a glamorous life, but it was what Grohl was meant to do. It even came with some perks, including an impromptu night as Iggy Pop’s drummer.
In the pages of The Storyteller, Grohl relates how a gig in Toronto eventually turned into the opportunity to play with the legendary Stooges frontman for one night. “They’re putting up all these posters, which I thought was peculiar, so I asked someone at the club, ‘What’s up with the Iggy Pop posters?’” Grohl said. “And they said, ‘Well, he’s actually doing a record release party here before your show.’ So we were like, ‘Yes! We get to see Iggy Pop in the flesh before our show! We’re gonna see Iggy in a small club!’ And they said, ‘Actually it’s record company only.’”
Grohl and the rest of Scream had to kill time in their van behind the venue. Pop pulled up in a limousine and went inside the venue, giving the band members their first real brush with someone famous. That would have been enough, but not long after, the band got a knock on their van door asking for a drummer.
“He said, ‘Do you wanna play drums with Iggy Pop?’ Iggy Pop had shown up to this record release party with no band – just a Marshall stack and a guitar,” Grohl recalls. “So I walked in and there he was. And he said,’ Hi, my name is Jim.’ And I said, ‘Hi, I’m Dave.’ He said, ‘Do you know my music?’ And I said, ‘Yeah I do.’ And we started to play ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ and ‘1969’. And then he starts showing me these new songs.”
Grohl managed to convince pop to let Scream bassist Skeeter Thompson join in on the fun. “I had finally “made it”, even if only for one night, and it was just like I’d always dreamed it would be. Too good to be true,” Grohl writes in The Storyteller. “So, without the least bit of disappointment, I appreciated it for the beautiful experience that it was. It was practically delusional to expect I would ever be in the right place at the right time again. What were the odds?”
