Sprawling on the fringes of the city

Dave Grohl's The Storyteller

“Why would you want to be a writer if you can’t even tell a story?”

It was the beginning of my second year of graduate school in Flagstaff, Arizona, and I was hanging out at a bar with a colleague.¹ We’d just spent the evening with some of the new writers who were starting their first year in the writing program and my friend was not impressed.

At first I thought he was being harsh. Meeting new people can be stressful. Some writers are writers because they’re antisocial.

But this wasn’t the vaunted Iowa Writers’ Workshop. This was a middle-of-the-road writing program at a middle-of-the-road university, which is being generous. There were no scholarships to compete for. No jockeying for favor from famous writers because there weren’t any. The stakes were extremely low.

We were all meeting each other for the first time, introducing ourselves, talking about our stories, our travels, the events that led us to this place on the map where few, if any, of us thought we’d ever end up.

But at the risk of sounding overly paternal, you only get one shot at making a first impression.

The storytellers all had something to say and in the telling revealed things about themselves. Our passion for writing. Our wariness of academia. Our nerves about teaching for the first time. Our willingness to relocate hundreds and thousands of miles away for a shot at a dream.

I may have been a middle class kid from Virginia who barely graduated from high school, but I’d been all over the world thanks to the US Navy and I’d just spent a year in LA soaking up the culture, going to shows, performing spoken word, and reading everything I could get my hands on.

In other words, I didn’t know how to write anything longer than a couple pages, but I had stories.

This is exactly the charm of Dave Grohl’s The Storyteller, which Grohl narrates and I listened to while driving around San Diego the last few weeks. Grohl isn’t a memoirist. This isn’t a literary project. He’s not writing a history of the bands he’s been in—even the ones he started. He’s not trying to set the record straight about anything. He’s simply telling some stories about his life in rock and roll.

Grohl, who grew up in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Springfield, Virginia, is an engaging and enthusiastic storyteller, but I didn’t expect his stories to be so relatable. I’m not a musician. I was never a member of the biggest rock band in the world. I didn’t help change the history of rock and roll. (Not yet anyway.)

I was, however, a weird kid from Northern Virginia who struggled to fit in and Grohl’s description of the suffocating conformity of that particular time and place made me break out in a sweat. He absolutely nailed it. A four-minute version of the NoVa strain of compulsive conformity is captured in No Trend’s post-punk, anti-hardcore masterpiece “Reality Breakdown.”

Thanks to Grohl’s records, his guitar, and a shit-ton of weed, he made it through high school, but he got in a lot of trouble along the way, which he is strangely coy about. Apparently, he went to three different high schools, including Bishop Ireton, which he doesn’t name. I went to Bishop O’Connell—the only other Catholic high school for boys in Northern Virginia.

What was that like? There was a kid who came to our school after he got kicked out of Ireton for fighting. I was sitting by myself at a table in the school cafeteria and watched him go through the lunch line. When he turned around and faced the packed cafeteria it was like a scene out of an after-school-special: he stood there frozen for what must have felt like hours. 

I waved him over and when he sat down, he was visibly relieved. We introduced ourselves and he stopped short.

“What did you say your name was again?”

I told him. He dug a folded-up sheet of paper from his pocket and showed it to me.

“They gave me this list of people to avoid,” he explained.

I looked at the list. My name was on it. It was a short list. Some of the other people on the list were people I considered friends.

“Ain’t that a bitch?” he said. “The only motherfucker who gives me the time of day in this fucking place is on the list of people I’m not supposed to hang out with!”

Naturally, we became friends.

As for the list, it was created by the school vice principal who had the title “Disciplinarian.” He was an ex-Marine with a crew cut named Colonel Gutter. His son was the quarterback on the varsity football team.

It sounds like I’m making this up but that’s the kind of shit me and Dave Grohl had to deal with in Northern-fucking-Virginia.

I’m not a huge Foo Fighters fan. I don’t think I could name more than a handful of songs, but I am fan of Pat Smear (Germs), Nate Mendel (Diddly Squat, Christ on a Crutch) and, of course, Grohl’s former bands.

I knew Grohl wasn’t an original member of DC hardcore legends Scream, and I always wanted to know how he came to join the band. Grohl doesn’t disappoint and goes into a lot of detail about both the beginning of his time in the band and the end, which is kind of his m.o. A good storyteller knows when to skip over the boring middle parts and get to the drama.

For instance, I didn’t know that at the end of its run, Scream got stuck in LA and the band members crashed at Franz and Pete Stahl’s sister’s apartment while figuring out what to do. When Grohl called Nirvana to audition, he was borderline desperate.

A lot of people write about the Pacific Northwest like it’s a foreign country, but it resonated for Grohl in much the same way that it resonates for me because it reminded him of Virginia—but with more rain and more heroin.

There’s some really interesting stuff about the writing of Nevermind when Grohl and Cobain shared an apartment in Olympia and they drove to their rehearsal space in Tacoma every day. One never gets the sense that Grohl is altering his storytelling approach for Cobain’s fans. He hones in on the details of his own experience and it makes for some of the most evocative passages in the book.

After the success of Nevermind and all the touring was done, Grohl went back to LA to hang out with his old bandmates, Pete and Franz Stahl, who had formed a new band called Wool. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was around the time that I met Pete Stahl when he wandered into Eagles Coffee Pub in North Hollywood, where I worked for a year before going off to grad school in Arizona. I somehow recognized him and we chatted for a few minutes before it was time to make a cappuccino or toast a bagel for the next customer.

What makes Grohl’s storytelling so compelling is his earnestness. You’re with him every second of every story. He doesn’t get lost in the weeds because there are no weeds to get lost in. If given a choice between a novel phrase or a cliched expression, Grohl chooses the familiar wording every time. He’s not reinventing the wheel here.

As a musician who has graduated from dingy clubs to sold-out arenas, he is always playing for the people in the last row. That was also his style as a drummer. His approach was to keep it simple and play with great gusto so that everyone could feel every beat.

The last third of The Storyteller is largely a compilation of encounters with famous people, including multiple presidents and multiple Beatles. Grohl has performed at the White House more than any other musician. That’s because 1) he’s a nice guy and 2) he did something I don’t think I could ever do: he moved back to Virginia.

It gets a little saccharine in places and I couldn’t help but wonder if his willingness to play all these one-off gigs at award shows and the White House can be traced back to being the weird kid who didn’t fit in. Maybe deep down he craved acceptance. Maybe he never got over the sting of rejection. Maybe punk rock didn’t beat that instinct out of him after all. Maybe I’m not talking about Dave Growl here, but about myself.

What do we learn about Grohl from his stories? He loves his mother very much. He’s a name-dropper, but a gracious one. After all these years, he still can’t believe his life has turned out the way it has, that he gets to do all the amazing things he does.

As a kid from the suburbs of Northern Virginia, I feel weirdly fraternal about Dave Grohl. If I ever have the chance to talk to him, I’m not going to ask him about Scream, or Nirvana, or even how he met Nate Mendel, but what he did to warrant being sent to Bishop Ireton and what happened to him there.

That’s a story I want to hear.

1. The bar was called Cattle Barons but we called it Cattle Prod or just The Prod. It was our inside joke. I used both the setting and the joke in Make It Stop. It’s not there anymore. I think it’s a tiki bar now.