This Is a Call: The Life and Times of Dave Grohl. Paul Brannigan
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referencing his band’s past while keeping both eyes firmly fixed on the future: ‘We’re from the basement / We’re from underground / We want to break all barriers with our sound / We’re sick and tired of fucking rejection / But we’re not down ’cause we got a direction.’ It’s a ferocious statement of intent.
Given the mix of apathy and outright hostility they faced at their earliest DC shows, it was unsurprising that Scream began booking shows nationally even before the release of Still Screaming. In Putting DC on the Map (a booklet included with the 20 Years of Dischord box set) Ian MacKaye notes that Scream were the first act on his label to be paid ‘royalties’, when Dischord stepped in to help them pay for a van repair and a tour-related phone bill: this little detail speaks to the band’s proud reputation as inveterate road dogs. No DC band was more committed to taking their music to the people.
‘We didn’t really have time to think about whether anybody accepted us or not,’ says Franz Stahl, ‘we wanted to play the world and we couldn’t believe that there was this network that was already out there. DC wasn’t that big and you could only play the 9:30 Club so many times. We got out of there pretty quickly.’
The responsibility for booking Scream shows fell to Pete Stahl. He remembers his band’s earliest national tours coming together on a somewhat ad hoc basis – ‘You’d phone someone who was a friend of a friend in another town and they’d say, “Okay, this guy is going to be at this record store between twelve and two and he’ll help you put on a show”’ – but over time he built up ‘The Book’, a comprehensive database of phone numbers and addresses for record stores, promoters, venues, fanzine writers, DJs, record labels and bands in every state. For all Stahl’s meticulous planning, however, touring the nation was rarely predictable: on the road a certain ‘Wild West’ mentality prevailed. On more than one occasion the band found themselves literally staring down the barrel of a gun.
‘We had a couple of shows where we had guns pulled on us,’ recalls Franz Stahl. ‘Once in Pennsylvania we didn’t get paid and the guy pulled a gun because basically Skeeter was trying to kill him. Another time we played in New Orleans and this crazed redneck came storming into the club with a shotgun, saying, “Any y’all feel like being punk rock here?” This huge biker named Ace just stuck his hand out, whipped the shotgun out of the guy’s hand and said, “We’re not having any of that here.” That could have ended badly.’
‘You’d play a lot of crazy shows in those days,’ agrees Pete Stahl. ‘You’d have cops trying to shut down shows, there’d be tensions with skinheads – we had a black guy in the band, remember – and fights were pretty common. But we always got by.’
‘Most of the confrontations we had were with drunks, people who just happened to come to the club for a drink and got stuck with us,’ says Franz. ‘But Skeeter was a big, cut dude and my brother was afraid of no one, so they’d shut down situations pretty quick. Pete was never scared to jump in the middle of potential fights. People would just back away saying, “These motherfuckers are crazy.”’
Following the example set by Minor Threat and Faith, in spring 1983 Scream decided to flesh out their sound with the addition of a second guitar player. Their new recruit could hardly have been more at odds with the DC punk aesthetic. Robert Lee Davidson – better known by his nickname ‘Harley’ – played in a Judas Priest-influenced metal band called Tyrant, and first met the Stahl brothers while dating their sister Sabrina. Every bit as stubbornly independent as his new bandmates, the candy-floss-haired, studs-and-leather-wearing metal-head made absolutely no attempt to tone down his look to assimilate into the DC scene, horrifying elitist punk purists. This secretly gave Pete and Franz Stahl no small amount of pleasure.
Whatever his perceived sartorial shortcomings, Davidson was an undeniably gifted guitarist, and his fluid, technical hard-rock style helped Scream tap deeper into primal rock ’n’ roll sources on their superb second album, 1985’s This Side Up. The new guitarist’s metallic influences are most evident on ‘Iron Curtain’, a not-entirely-convincing Aerosmith-meets-Judas Priest headbanger replete with squealing guitar leads, but elsewhere This Side Up swaggers and slams with a confidence and agility of which Bad Brains themselves would have been proud.
The rollicking ‘Bet You Never Thought’ could have fitted seamlessly onto The Clash’s London Calling; the title track is an exhilarating tangle of Buzzcocks guitar and air-punching PMA (‘Yesterday it rained so hard I thought the roof was gonna give / But now today’s so bright, just wanna let it all in’) while the soulful ‘Still Screaming’ matches shimmering minor key reggae with skronking jazz saxophone. Elsewhere, ‘I Look When You Walk’ has a sexy garage rock groove, and album-closer ‘Walking Song Dub’ mixes arty, experimental found-sound collages with booming dub basslines, cut-and-paste vocal loops and a whistled melody line. Within a scene hovering dangerously close to self-parody in the mid-eighties, This Side Up was a genuine revelation. In 1997 Dave Grohl nominated it as one of the most significant albums of his adolescence.
‘This is the album where Scream went from being a hardcore band into being a rock band,’ he told England’s now defunct Melody Maker magazine. ‘They sounded like Aerosmith and I loved that. I liked the fact that they had long hair, that they weren’t straight edge and that they played this kinda hard-rock/hardcore thing. It made me realise there was a place for me making music.’
With a superb new album to draw upon, and with their sound bolstered by Davidson’s muscular fretwork, Scream quickly acquired a reputation as one of the punk scene’s unmissable live draws. When the quintet came through Boston in April 1985, Suburban Voice editor Al Quint declared their set at the Paradise ‘the best set of the year, so far’.
‘The perfect combination of speed, power and melody,’ Quint wrote. ‘The new songs combine those attributes and more. Pete Stahl has charismatic stage presence, able to draw people together, while the band’s versatile, uptempo sound, spearheaded by a two-guitar blitz, keeps on coming. The band’s newer material has been lumped into the metal classification, but it’s coming more from a late sixties hard-rock style – bands like Ten Years After, Steppenwolf (especially their 10-minute jam of “Magic Carpet Ride”) or Blue Cheer have influenced their newer material. Scream are definitely in the top echelon of American bands.’
In autumn 1986 Kent Stax reluctantly came to the conclusion that he would have to leave Scream. Having recently become a father for the first time, the drummer felt that he could no longer commit to the band’s arduous, loss-making touring schedule. He promised, however, to stick around until the band found a suitable replacement. To this day Dave Grohl maintains that he never imagined that this opportunity would fall to him. When he first made contact with Franz Stahl Grohl’s ambitions were modest: he simply hoped to score a jam session with his favourite local band so he could brag about it to his friends. In conversation with Stahl, he mentioned his stints in Freak Baby, Mission Impossible and Dain Bramage and explained that he was a huge Scream fan. When Stahl asked Grohl his age, the 17-year-old drummer claimed to be 20, making the assumption that a nationally touring rock band wouldn’t be interested in auditioning a rookie teenager. Stahl promised to be in touch.
As an emerging talent on the DC scene, Grohl wasn’t a complete unknown to the members of Scream. Franz Stahl had seen Mission Impossible play at Lake Braddock, while both Stahl brothers and Skeeter Thompson had witnessed an early Dain Bramage show at dc space. Pete Stahl’s memory of that particular night tallies with Reuben Radding’s account of playing with Grohl: ‘All I remember is everybody staring at Dave and not really watching the band,’ Stahl says. ‘Everyone was like, “Wow, this kid is really good.”’
Given the instant impression that the young drummer had made that night, Franz Stahl’s decision not to schedule an immediate audition for Grohl was mystifying, though the guitarist now admits that he has scant memory of the pair’s first phone conversation. In fact, Grohl only secured an audition for Scream after calling Stahl a second time. The delay proved to be to Grohl’s advantage, however. In the interim period he obtained Scream’s demo recordings for what would become the Banging the Drum album and he had taught himself the drum parts to every song. When the drummer arrived for his audition at Scream’s rehearsal space,