![]() ![]() When I came back, the class gave me a roar.” I said to the class: ‘I’ve been teaching for 30 years and had all kinds of successes, but I’ve never had a roar.’ Then one day I was called out of the room. ![]() “When I was teaching,” she has recounted, “I had a senior class and had just come back from time on the road with Nirvana. They changed the course of popular music … my son had become a rock star!” She embraced it – it’s perhaps telling that she was a former singer born late enough to know rock’n’roll in her youth – and went to many of the band’s shows. Only a few years later he was one of three members of Nirvana, who, in Virginia’s words, “became the biggest sensation in music in decades. Not many people make it in the music business.’ But I didn’t.” And Dave went to Europe with Scream. “I could have said, ‘Just go to school, get your education, have something to fall back on. But she wasn’t an ordinary mum she had helped out with his previous bands and taken him to jazz clubs. And then there were the “Mohawks! Tattoos! Shredded jeans with more holes than fabric … not exactly wholesome”. It didn’t help that she had no idea what 17-year-old Dave’s new band was singing about, “because they were just screaming their heads off” – she was “pretty sure they wouldn’t replace the Beatles”. ![]() This was a step-up, and it triggered what his mother calls “the Conversation”, the rite-of-passage when education is abandoned. Then Dave, a ferocious drummer, was asked by the punk band Scream to join them on a tour of Europe. (Improbably, they played an old people’s home, and sang Time Is On Your Side.) He was also smoking a lot of weed: he was, he has said, so stoned at school that “I didn’t know what I was studying”. ![]() The high-school band he was playing in had the awful name of Dain Bramage. By this time, he was learning to play drums in his bedroom, using a chair as the high-hat, and a pillow on the floor as the snare and was easily picking up songs on his guitar. In his early teens, she tells me, Dave’s life was “all failure, and doom and gloom – not going to school, and then getting detention because he didn’t go … it was just deadly”. Running through her book is the suggestion that schools don’t cater well for energetic, creative but non-academic kids. Less happy was Dave’s experience of school, which hit his mum especially hard, as she was a teacher. Dave has reminisced about “Mom making cinnamon toast and sticking shirts in the dryer to warm them up because it was cold outside”. He did some devilish things, but I never thought of him as bad.” She divorced Dave’s father in the mid-70s, and was a happy single parent (“some of us are very good at it”), although their house near Washington DC was small and the kids argued continually. When I talk to Virginia at her home in Los Angeles – where she lives near Dave and Lisa – she remembers her son as a boy “so outgoing and talkative I honestly remember as a child going down an escalator and he’s talking to the people coming up … He was always really fun to be around. Without realising it … I was harmonising! My heart lit up … Hell, this was the chicken AND the egg!” My mother started singing Mick’s lower line as I sang Carly’s high lead vocal. Then “as Mick Jagger’s unmistakable voice joined the chorus,” Dave writes in the book, “our voices split into harmony for the first time. Dave, then aged six, his sister Lisa and Virginia would always sing in the car his mum was belting it out “above the booming roar of the open windows”. He was in the back of his mother’s Ford Maverick on a hot summer day in 1975 when Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain came on the radio. In the book that has emerged from those conversations, From Cradle to Stage, Dave Grohl – or David, as his mum steadfastly calls him – recalls a moment when music took over his life. ![]()
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