This Is a Call: The Life and Times of Dave Grohl. Paul Brannigan
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Originally a sprawling live jam, allowing the Texas-born Winter to demonstrate his virtuosity on a variety of instruments on his 1972 album They Only Come Out at Night, ‘Frankenstein’ was a spacey, synthesiser-led, progressive rock instrumental, featuring a spiralling saxophone solo and mid-song drum duel. The following year the track was used as the B-side of the band’s ‘Hangin’ Around’ single, but as disc jockeys nationwide began playing the track in response to listener requests, Winter’s label Epic flipped the seven inch and began plugging ‘Frankenstein’ as the single. In May 1973 the song reached Number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, eventually selling more than one million copies. As track nine on the Block Buster compilation, it would change one little boy’s life forever.
‘To me that was just the best sound I had ever heard in my life,’ Grohl later enthused. ‘To this day [it’s] still one of the most amazing songs you’ve ever heard in your life. Every time I hear “Frankenstein” it reminds me of being that young, just rocking out in my bedroom.’
On the wall of that bedroom, Grohl had tacked a poster of the cockpit of a 747 aeroplane. At the time the young man dreamt of becoming a pilot, of leaving Springfield behind and escaping to new places, experiencing new things. But if his next musical discovery taught him anything, it was that he didn’t actually need to leave his small bedroom in order to escape the realities of day-to-day life.
For American teenagers from Long Island to Long Beach, and all points in between, obsessing over Kiss was a rite of passage. On 31 October 1976 the quartet from New York stomped onto ABC’s The Paul Lynde Halloween Special in Kabuki make-up and stackheels, and proceeded to pout and prance through lip-synched versions of ‘Detroit Rock City’, ‘Beth’ and ‘King of the Night Time World’ for a national TV audience that numbered millions. For a generation of wide-eyed, awestruck young viewers this was their ‘The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show’ moment, only with added flashbombs.
Kiss were four cartoon superheroes – Starchild, The Demon, Space Ace and Catman – both larger and louder than life; figures who breathed fire, spat blood, fired rockets from their guitars and made rock ’n’ roll seem like the most impossibly exciting vocation. A self-confessed ‘show-off’, fond of dressing up in clothes ‘as outlandish and ridiculous as possible’, the seven-year-old Dave Grohl thought they were just about the coolest thing he’d ever seen. Soon enough, Virginia Grohl was pestered into buying Rock and Roll Over (and later Kiss Alive II), but in truth Dave spent more time looking at the album sleeves than actually listening to the vinyl within. The true magic lay elsewhere. Kiss breathed fire! They spat blood! They played guitars that fired rockets! A poster of the band posing atop the Empire State Building soon occupied pride of place on Grohl’s bedroom wall. It was surely no coincidence that his interest in playing guitar started soon afterwards.
‘My mother bought my father a nylon string flamenco-type guitar when I was three or four years old,’ he recalls. ‘He never learned to play so it just sat around the house, and by the time I was nine I’d broken four of the six strings on it. But with the two left I’d learned how to make a chord and learned [Deep Purple standard] “Smoke on the Water” … very Beavis and Butthead. And that was how I started playing guitar.’
While Grohl was getting to grips with his first powerchords, his mother’s new boyfriend, Chip Donaldson, a fellow English teacher and Vietnam War veteran, moved into the family home. Far from resenting this new alpha male presence, Grohl was in awe of the new arrival, and Donaldson’s arrival started the fledgling guitarist’s musical education in earnest.
‘Chip was a fucking brilliant man, who I totally looked up to,’ he told me in 2009. ‘He was a real wild, “outdoors man” guy, who was just as book smart as he was at home in nature: we would go on these crazy nature walks, and he taught me to hunt when I was ten. He moved in with us for a few years and brought his record collection with him. Our living room went from being a conservative suburban Virginia home living room to crates of albums on the walls, and maybe deer antlers, and a gun rack … it basically turned into a hunting lodge, with really good music.
‘I learned a lot from his record collection. It was everything from Jethro Tull to the Grateful Dead to the Rolling Stones to Phoebe Snow to Zeppelin to Jefferson Airplane to Dylan, all late sixties and seventies shit. Lynyrd Skynyrd was another big one. I remember listening to “Freebird” when I was ten years old and thinking, “God, if some day I could just play a solo like that …” and Chip saying, “Well, if you practise, maybe some day …” But I knew with all my heart he was wrong, that even if I practised for years I’d never be able to play that guitar part. And I still can’t play that guitar part!’
Pleased that Dave had a hobby that was keeping him out of trouble, Virginia Grohl paid for guitar lessons for her son, until after a year the student pronounced them ‘boring’, and quit. In place of these lessons, Dave Grohl calmly revealed that he had formed a band.
The HG Hancock Band was a duo, a partnership between Grohl and North Springfield Elementary School classmate, and near neighbour, Larry Hinkle. Grohl viewed the group as nothing less than North Springfield Elementary’s answer to Southern rock heroes Lynyrd Skynyrd. Having discovered that the Jacksonville, Florida band had taken their name in mocking tribute to their former PE teacher Leonard Skinner, he and Hinkle borrowed the name of their own PE teacher Ms Hancock for their new outfit: the HG prefix stood for Hinkle/Grohl.
The pair shared classes together in fifth grade, and were now inseparable, always in and out of one another’s houses, forever hatching schemes and making mischief. Now a self-employed woodworker living in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Hinkle has fond memories of his time as Grohl’s partner-in-crime.
‘Dave was pretty funny, and fun to be around,’ he recalls. ‘We sat close to each other in class, he didn’t live too far away from where I lived, and he was just a good guy to hang out with.
‘We did do some things that weren’t too cool,’ Hinkle admits. ‘I used to spend the night at Dave’s house and we’d sneak out and go to this one road late at night and throw crab apples at cars and try to get them to chase us. That could have got us into a lot of trouble. Another time I remember we were teasing some girl on the school bus and we grabbed her purse and threw it out of the bus window. We forgot all about it until we were called into the principal’s office the next day. We weren’t bad kids, just kinda goofy.
‘But Dave was always really into music. He always had his guitar with him, a beat-up old acoustic with broken strings. Hanging out with him it was hard not to get into music.’
When they weren’t terrorising the local community, Grohl and Hinkle spent their free time listening to local classic rock station DC 101 with classmate Jimmy Swanson, sniggering at ‘shock jock’ Howard Stern’s gleefully puerile banter and playing air guitar to a soundtrack of AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Cheap Trick, Black Sabbath, Ted Nugent, Alice Cooper, Van Halen and, naturally, Lynyrd Skynyrd.
‘Dave played his guitar with the broken strings,’ says Hinkle, ‘and I played drums, which was made up of his mom’s knitting needles and laundry basket and pots and pans. His mom was always very welcoming, always really nice to us. But God only knows what she thought of the noises we were making.’
In truth, Virginia Grohl had long since learned to tune out the noises emanating from her son’s bedroom. Since a cousin had given him a copy of Canadian prog-rockers Rush’s 1976 album 2112, Grohl had been teaching himself how to play drums, using the furniture in his room as a crude approximation of a kit. Now the thump-thwack-thump-thwack coming from her boy’s bedroom was as natural to Virginia Grohl as birdsong, and scarcely more intrusive.
‘I had a chair that was next to my bed, and I would kneel down on the floor and put a pillow between my legs to use as my snare,’ said Grohl, explaining his rudimentary set-up to Modern Drummer magazine in 2004. ‘I would use the chair to my left as the hi-hat and use the bed as toms and cymbals. And I would play to these records until there was condensation dripping from the windows.’
Encouraged by the promise displayed in the first HG Hancock Band rehearsals, Grohl decided it was time to start committing some of his own original material to tape. The HG Hancock Band’s first