“He could write one hell of a Republican speech but he and I did not have a decent relationship when I was young. “My father wasn’t the greatest communicator,” he says today. Two years ago, he wrote an affectionate eulogy in The Atlantic about the late James Harper Grohl, a buttoned-down political reporter/consultant who took a dim view of his son’s middling school reports and punk-rock aspirations.ĭave Grohl was both inspired and intimidated by his father James Harper Grohl “One of the reasons why he just sort of slips in and out of the book is because he just kind of slipped in and out of my life,” Grohl explains. It only makes Dad’s fleeting profile in The Storyteller more conspicuous. Virginia Hanlon Grohl’s heart-warming relationship with her son has been on the record since her 2017 book, From Cradle To Stage: Stories from the Mothers Who Rocked and Raised Rock Stars (now a Paramount+ TV series). I f-ng hated school, but I loved doing that.”ĭave Grohl with his hugely influential mum, Virginia Hanlon Grohl. I mean, we would have articulation drills at the dinner table, where my mother would give us a subject and we’d have to talk about it for three minutes without breaking speech. “Not only the written word, but the spoken word was taken seriously. “Both of my parents were brilliant writers,” Grohl says.

I was so terrified that I wouldn’t be accepted by my old friends that I’d be seen as some kind of sell-out.”īefitting his all-American sweet guy image, it’s the author’s mother who beats all contenders to emerge as the hands-down hero of his life story, rooted in the Happy Days-cum- Brady Bunch suburbia of North Springfield, Virginia. “I was nervous because I was actually in town to play the f-ing White House. “I heard that my heroes were all going to be there,” Grohl says, namechecking righteous dudes from Scream, Black Flag, Husker Du, Fugazi and Minor Threat. The Foo Fighters, from left, Chris Shiflett, Nate Mendel, Dave Grohl, and Pat Smear perform at the MTV Video Music Awards on September 12. On the same trip to Washington, his multimillion-album-selling rock band Foo Fighters was booked at the 9:30 Club, an underground hangout he’d played with his first teen punk band in the ’80s. This time he was scared, though, because a reckoning loomed.

Or it might have been the time Barack Obama’s people asked him to sing at a similar ceremony for Sir Paul McCartney. Bush gave the former hellraisers a medal. Maybe the time he was invited to say a few words about The Who when George W. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text sizeĭave Grohl can’t immediately recall which visit to the White House it was.

Scared of love songs