This Is a Call: The Life and Times of Dave Grohl. Paul Brannigan
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first Mission Impossible demo neatly captured the quartet’s combustible energy. It provides a snapshot of a band in transition, mixing up vestigial Freak Baby tracks and goofy cover versions (most notably a take on Lalo Scifirin’s theme for the Mission Impossible TV series, with which the band opened every gig) with more nuanced shards of hardcore rage. Across twenty tracks the shifts in tone occasionally grate – the decision to include a screeching romp through a BandAids advertising jingle alongside a thoughtful, articulate song such as ‘Neglect’, in which Page delivers a spoken-word lyric juxtaposing the privileged consumer lifestyles of the suburbs with the poverty and pain he encountered on visits to inner-city DC, rather betrays the quartet’s youthful over-exuberance – but at their best Mission Impossible were a genuinely thrilling prospect.
Among the more light-hearted selections on the tape, two tracks stand out: ‘Butch Thrasher’ is Grohl’s mocking paean to the macho knuckledraggers who considered punk rock moshpits their private battlefields, while ‘Chud’, inspired by the kitschy 1984 horror movie C.H.U.D., sees Page screaming ‘Chaotic Hardcore Underage Delinquents! Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers!’ while trying to keep a straight face. Of the more sober tracks, ‘Different’ deals with the hassles devotees of punk rock faced from parents and peers unsympathetic to the lifestyle, while ‘Life Already Drawn’ echoes the sentiments Ian MacKaye expressed in the song ‘Minor Threat’ with Page screaming ‘Slow down!’ at teen peers who seemed in an unseemly haste to join the adult rat-race.
Two Dave Grohl-penned originals also warrant mention: ‘New Ideas’ stands as the fastest song in MI’s repertoire, packing whammy bar divebombs, squealing harmonics, two verses, three choruses and a jittery, atonal Bryant Mason solo into just 74 seconds. Elsewhere ‘To Err Is Human’ was arguably the demo’s most sophisticated track, its driving rhythms and sudden dynamic shifts in tempo and key bearing the influence of Grohl’s favourite new band, SST’s Hüsker Dü, the brilliant Minneapolis trio whose stunning 1984 double album Zen Arcade had rendered hardcore’s perceived boundaries obsolete, and drawn favourable comparisons to The Clash’s London Calling album in mainstream music publications. ‘To Err …’ was significant not only for highlighting the increased maturity of Grohl’s songwriting, but also for flagging up to his new friends issues in his personal life, specifically in regard to his relationship with his father.
Over the years Dave Grohl has stubbornly resisted journalists’ attempts to play amateur psychologist over the impact his parents’ divorce had upon his life. It would make for a convenient narrative if his drive, energy, work ethic and subsequent success could be linked back to a teenage desire, conscious or subconscious, to scream ‘Look at me now!’ at the man who walked out on his family; if his entire artistic raison d’être could be traced back to the rejection, resentment, anger and pain he felt as the child of a broken home. But time and again Grohl has rejected this analysis. ‘There was some Nirvana book that glorified my parents’ divorce as if it were my inspiration to play music,’ he protested in 2005. ‘Completely untrue. The fucking Beatles were the inspiration for me to play music.’
Nevertheless, Dave had James Grohl in mind when in spring 1985 he scribbled the lyrics to ‘To Err Is Human’ in his notebook: ‘To err is human,’ he wrote, ‘so what the fuck are you? Working so hard to make me perfect too …’
At the time, Grohl’s visits to see his estranged father in Ohio were regularly punctuated by finger-pointing lectures, explosive arguments and sullen, protracted silences. As a speechwriter for the Republican Party, James Grohl was a master of the dark art of transforming trenchant opinions on morality, ethics and law and order into screeds of fiery rhetoric, and he was never shy of sharing his views with his teenage son, regardless of whether Dave wanted to hear them or not: ‘Imagine the lectures I’d get if I fucked up,’ Grohl commented in 2002. ‘I’d get the State of the Union address!’
With his grounding in classical music, James had firm views too on the self-discipline required of performing musicians – ‘He thought that unless you practised for six hours a day you couldn’t call yourself a musician,’ his son once noted – and Dave’s basement thrashings didn’t exactly match up to his lofty ideals. Even after Nirvana’s Nevermind album became a worldwide phenomenon, Dave Grohl was still mindful of his father’s occasionally dismissive attitude to his career. ‘Dave and I were at his house one night,’ his friend Jenny Toomey told me during the research for this book, ‘and I remember him talking about his father being critical of him for not being a “real” musician and I thought that was really sad,’ so one can only imagine the snarky, offhand comments that would have been directed towards him during his formative years in the DC punk underground.
During these difficult times music provided Dave with both a pressure valve and an escape hatch. His spirits were buoyed as Mission Impossible’s demo quickly built up a word-of-mouth buzz on the tape-trading underground, attracting plaudits both nationally and overseas. The band were name checked by maximumrocknroll editor Tim Yohannon in a review of Metrozine’s DC area cassette compilation Can It Be? (which featured MI’s ‘New Ideas’), and secured their first international release around the same time when French punk rock label 77KK included ‘Life Already Drawn’ alongside tracks by D.O.A., California’s Youth Brigade, Red Tide and the best up-and-coming French punk acts on their début release, a compilation album also titled 77KK.
In April 1985 Mission Impossible returned to Laundry Room Studios to cut a second demo. The quartet were now writing collaboratively, pushing one another to create more complex, challenging material, and a new-found self-assurance shone through in each of the six new tracks demoed with Barrett Jones. Hardcore’s ‘loud fast rules!’ ethic still provided a foundation for the new material, but MI had learnt that silence and space could be harnessed to accentuate volume and weight as readily as thrashing powerchords. Chris Page was growing in confidence as a lyric-writer too, and the conviction with which he delivered each word rendered his tales of teenage travails wholly believable.
Of the songs on this second demo ‘I Can Only Try’ is a classic slice of teen angst (‘I can’t promise perfection, I can only try’), ‘Into Your Shell’ is a rallying call for noisy self-expression (‘If you’re really upset and you don’t know what to do, then shout it out or talk it out, don’t crawl into your shell’) while ‘Paradoxic Sense’, ‘Wonderful World’ and ‘Helpless’ tackle issues of growing up without giving in. The demo’s final track, ‘Now I’m Alone’, finds the singer picking over his father’s decision to leave the family home – ‘You could say that disappointment with fathers was a minor theme with MI,’ Page now wryly reflects – and celebrating the freedoms that came with his immersion in the DC punk community.
Delivering fully on the promise of their first demo, the tape showcases a committed, articulate, progressive young band gearing up for adult life with defiant self-belief: ‘Now I’m off to face a new horizon,’ Chris Page sings, ‘but I don’t think I’ll be alone.’ These words would carry an added emotional resonance in the months ahead.
In spring 1985 unmarked envelopes were pushed through the letter-boxes of a number of homes in Washington DC and suburban Virginia. Each envelope contained a photocopied leaflet, styled to resemble a kidnap ransom note, bearing messages such as ‘Wake up! This is … REVOLUTION SUMMER!’ and ‘Be on your toes. This is … REVOLUTION SUMMER’. Recipients of the letters were initially bemused, then intrigued, curious not only to discover the identity of the anonymous letter-writer and the meaning of the note, but also as to who else might have received one. A common thread quickly emerged: everyone sent a ‘Revolution Summer’ missive had been active on the DC hardcore scene at the beginning of the decade.
The letters were traced back to the office of the Neighbourhood Planning Council, a small administrative body set up by the DC Mayor’s office to host community meetings and schedule an annual free summer concert series in nearby Fort Reno Park. Located next to Woodrow Wilson High School, the office had become a de facto drop-in centre for local punks to hang out and drink sodas. While they were there they had access to Xerox machines in order to run off flyers, posters and fanzines. It subsequently emerged that the letters had been sent out by Dischord staffer Amy Pickering as a playful way to get old friends talking together once again.