It was Grohl’s drumming that made Nirvana truly volcanic — those brute force thunderclaps rivaled John Bonham’s finest pummeling. And when it helped launch the band to unimaginable levels of fame, Grohl would often retreat to his mom’s house in Springfield. “If I ever felt like I was getting lost in the hurricane that was storming around Nirvana, I’d just go back to Virginia,” he says of his childhood home.
It was there that he learned of Cobain’s March 1994 drug overdose in Italy the same way we all did: watching MTV News. A month later, Cobain’s suicide in Seattle brought Nirvana to a devastating halt, and the best rock drummer alive didn’t want to play his drums anymore. Flooded by offers to join various bands, he batted them away. “It didn’t even register,” Grohl said in an interview last month at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Tex. “I just wanted to disappear for a while.”
So he booked a flight to Ireland and went road-tripping around the Ring of Kerry, searching for solitude in rolling emerald pastures. “It’s one of the most beautiful places on Earth,” Grohl says. “There’s nothing for miles.”
One afternoon, he was driving down a dirt road. He hadn’t seen a soul for hours. Suddenly, a hitchhiker appeared on the roadside. Grohl slowed down. Squinted. The hitchhiker was wearing a Kurt Cobain T-shirt.
Grohl kept on driving.
Fleeing the past
Now 42, Grohl is a hairier, beardier, tattooier version of the scrawny kid abusing his drum kit on MTV 20 years ago. (Twenty
years ago!) He has a new documentary, “Foo Fighters: Back and Forth,” and the band’s seventh album, “Wasting Light,” comes out Tuesday.
And although Grohl is willing to revisit the past, he doesn’t want to spend a lot of time there.
“I remember reading an interview with [Washington punk legend] Ian MacKaye, where he was talking about nostalgia and how unproductive it can be,” Grohl says. “When there’s so much left to do, why spend your time focusing on things you’ve already done, counting trophies or telling stories about the good old days? And that really affected me, because he’s right. It’s the reason we started Foo Fighters. . . . We started it to [expletive] get away from the past. After Nirvana ended, it was the one thing healing us from the heartbreak of losing a friend and a band.”
In that sense, Foo Fighters are a therapy session that has lasted seven albums and counting. “I cannot forgive you, yet,” Grohl seethes on a new song called “I Should Have Known.” Is it about Cobain? Grohl says no. But it features a guest performance from Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic and was produced by Butch Vig. The three hadn’t been in the same room since the recording sessions for Nirvana’s 1991 breakthrough “Nevermind.”
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