The shock rock band Dave Grohl was almost convinced to join: “A big pain in the ass”
Throughout his illustrious career, Dave Grohl has been in a grand total of seven bands, proving himself to be a true team player.
Things kicked off with a small band called Scream in 1986, before he joined grunge band Nirvana in 1990, just before their breakout album, Nevermind, after which he founded Foo Fighters, while also lending some skills to Queens of the Stone Age, Monod Generator, and Sound City Players, and let’s not forget Them Crooked Vultures, a supergroup formed in 2009 alongside Josh Homme and John Paul Jones.
This is enough to fill three or four lifetimes’ worth of musical achievement, but Grohl’s unique multi-instrumental ability left him encumbered with an itch that has never felt adequately scratched. This urge is no more pressing than in your teenage years, when there is nothing to be afraid of, and everything is possible.
Growing up as a drum prodigy in the suburbs of Washington DC, Grohl had set his sights on joining the band GWAR to thrash out behind the drum kit. He informally registered interest with their guitar player, Dewey, who gave him a piece of homework before he could truly audition for the honour: a bespoke costume, something that didn’t cover his face and allowed both of his arms their full range of movement.
The young hopeful set to work brainstorming on a mind-blowing costume that’d ensure he got the job. Known for grotesque and macabre costumes, the band’s ideation revolved around science fiction mythology and biblical interpolations, imbued with sardonic, scatological humour. At any age, it’s hard to strike a balance between salacious and suitable, let alone as a teenage boy.
Soon thereafter, joining GWAR didn’t seem to be such a good idea: “The more I thought about it,” Grohl wrote in his memoir, The Storyteller, “‘Am I really gonna invite my uncle to see me play when there’s like fake blood and cum shooting all over the place?’.” The audiences of around 700 people were hugely enticing at that stage in his career, but the humiliation of the licentious event was too much for the budding star.
We’ve all been there, almost encouraged to take a job that sounded awful, or accepting free work because it might eventually bring you closer to the thing you really want to do, but Grohl had the maturity to realise that he was better than dressing up in a robot costume and blasting four-four beats into anonymity.
Michael Bishop, or his onstage alter-ego Blöthar, thinks that this excuse was a load of baloney. Instead of his woes about family embarrassment, Bishop mused that the timid Grohl “had enough sense to see that GWAR was a big pain in the ass, a hard band to be in. Why would you want to put these outfits on when you could just walk onstage in your normal clothes? Even back then, being in GWAR was hardly an appealing proposition for a musician.”
His interest in this kind of shock rock that GWAR championed would later manifest in the raucous, thunderous rock music he made as the Foo Fighters entered the scene with a bang and, much to GWAR’s dismay, never looked back.
