Niceberg

The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music, Dave Grohl (Simon & Schuster 2021)

Dave Grohl is a multi-talented musician who seems to be living three or four lives at once. He’s enthusiastic and knowledgable about all forms of loud, fast guitar-based music and seems to be one of the nicest people in showbiz.

Unfortunately, being talented, enthusiastic and knowledgable isn’t the same thing as being creative. Grohl played every instrument on the first Foo Fighters album, but that didn’t make the music good. Okay, Foo Fighters are much better then the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but then who isn’t? I find Grohl’s music bland and although I enjoyed this book at first, I was skipping before the end. Okay, if he wrote it all himself, he has another impressive talent – literary talent, because The Storyteller is well-written and evocative, despite the clichés. But I suspect he didn’t write it all himself. Here’s the book describing the gig that changed Grohl’s life. He was thirteen and visiting his punk cousin Tracey in Chicago when he got the chance to see a live band for the first time:

Like a bomb ready to explode, the room was ripe with anxious tension as Naked Raygun prepared to take the stage. As the house-lights went out, I was immediately struck by the intimacy of the gig. Unlike what I saw on those posters [of Led Zeppelin and KISS] on my bedroom wall, I was shoulder to shoulder with everyone else, standing only feet from the small stage as the singer gripped the microphone, ready to count into the first number. And when he did, the small room ignited like a powder keg in a frenzy of limbs and deafening volume. People on top of people. Slam dancing, stage diving, the crowd chanting the words to each song like an army of loyal sonic soldiers. I was stepped on. I was shoved and punched. I was thrown about like a rag-doll in the melee of the crowd, and I fucking loved it. The music and violent dancing released an energy that had been pent up in me for years, like an exorcism of all my childhood traumas. – “Tracey is a punk rocker”, pg. 57

If that’s all Grohl’s own work, yes, he’s a good writer. But I’m inclined to think he had help, maybe a lot of help. Whether he did or not, the power of the writing began to wear off, the clichés became more obtrusive, and I got bored. It would have been more interesting if he’d dished the dirt on Courtney Love in the section about his time in Nirvana, for example, but he’s too nice a guy to do that. He doesn’t even mention the harpy from Hole. So you could say that the book hits a niceberg and sinks in a sea of blandness, because Grohl is too enthusiastic about too many people, bands and genres.

But not the most interesting ones. He says in the credits at the end that, “If it weren’t for my sister’s record collection (Neil Young, Bowie, Tears for Fears, Squeeze, etc), I may have followed a life of only death metal and corpse paint.” But he doesn’t write about death metal or black metal, two interesting and intense genres. And he doesn’t write much about heavy metal in general. For example, it would have been good to hear more about Probot, the band and album he put together with big metal names like Lemmy and obscure metal names like Wino.

It would have been better than listening to the Probot album, in fact. Because it’s not a very good album. It’s bland. And so was this book in the end. I hope Grohl does a follow-up and concentrates on extreme metal, rather than mainstream rock.