For These Stars, Mom's the Word

"I tried to instill in him what works for me," she said. "First thing, be spiritual. Have the Lord in your life to guide you; good morals and values are the basis for everything. Without them, I don't know how you can have a happy and successful life."

The recipe book might not be widely known, but every once in a while someone who has one asks Thomas for an autograph.

"Are you sure?" she recalls asking in reply, surprised that a player's mother could be considered a celebrity, too.

Passing on the Love of Music

On a sunny afternoon in the Springfield home where she raised her musician son, Virginia Grohl recalls the day when the Foo Fighters frontman stopped a show in England to call her onstage. The weather was soggy, and she was wearing clunky rain boots.

Watching from the wings, she maneuvered toward him, so stunned she hardly recalls what was said.

But David Grohl's words were published on a music news Web site. "When I say I owe it all to somebody, it has got to be this woman," David Grohl told the crowd. And it was not the first time he had gone public with his affection. "She's the most incredible woman in the world," he told a biographer.

Hearing this, Virginia Grohl offers that she and her son have been close since he was a boy playing soccer in the fields of North Springfield Elementary School, tearing up the back yard with his go-kart, slamming hockey pucks at the Fairfax Ice Arena, latching onto his guitar.

For most of his childhood, she said, she worked as a high school English teacher and raised him and his older sister, Lisa, in a tiny "box of a house" with one bathroom. The close quarters and being "kind of poor" brought them all together, she said. Virginia Grohl and their father had divorced.

She said that David was involved in bands by junior high and that she could appreciate it, having always loved music. As a teenager, she had been part of a girl trio -- "sort of like the McGuire Sisters" -- but "it never occurred to us to continue with it," she said.

Her son seized the chance.

Most surprising to other people, she said, was that she let him drop out of Annandale High School at 17 to tour in Europe with the Washington band Scream.

She recalled: "I said, 'Hallelujah. Go.' Because, of all the things he's done brilliantly in his life, school was never one of them." He would learn more on tour in Europe, she decided, "than he's going to get making excuses for why he didn't read Chapter 7."

Thus started David Grohl's forward trajectory. He played drums for Scream, then in 1990 moved on to Nirvana, the Seattle grunge band led by Kurt Cobain that became an international sensation.

Grohl formed the Foo Fighters in 1995, not long after Cobain committed suicide and Nirvana fell apart. In the past decade or so, the Foo Fighters have released a half-dozen albums and won several Grammys.

Virginia Grohl enjoys the music so much she shuns earplugs at concerts, regardless of her proximity to the amplifiers. "They change the sound," she said.

"You know, people sometimes look at me like, 'You're 70 and you like his music?' And I do," she said.

While in Los Angeles, Grohl stays about 15 minutes from her son and five blocks from her daughter, an accomplished cook and visual artist. She says: "I am really lucky. People say, 'I want your life,' and I don't blame them. I love it."

She travels often to her son's concerts, especially when they are in places of interest: Australia, Ireland, England, Japan, France and Canada.

When the cameras flash near her son, however, she often heads the other way.

"Part of it was that it just didn't seem very rock-and-roll to have your mom around backstage," she said.

"I thought, 'Oh God, if this gets out that his mother comes to his shows. Because I haven't met too many mothers who are backstage or on tour," she said. "Really, it's pretty rare."

Since the birth of her granddaughter two years ago, her sense of parenthood has expanded, she said, reaching across to the next generation.

"I'm proud of so many things about him, only a few of which are music-related," she said. "Now what I thrill to is the kind of father he is. It's just the most amazing thing. And his wife, too. . . . We all start with nothing, with no book or advice, just fear. . . . And they have just done it so well."