The other driving force, Grohl says, was the music itself: “From an early age, I realized that that was my lifeline, or that was my best friend, and I would do anything to keep it.” He was so driven to play that he wasn’t even dissuaded by the fact that he couldn’t initially afford to buy a drum set.

Or my mother would say, ‘Guess what’s for dinner? Scrambled egg sandwiches!’ And were like, ‘Yay!’ not realizing there was only six pieces of bread and four eggs in the fridge.” Dave Grohl with mom (Photo Courtesy Andreas Neumann)

There were times when the electricity got shut off, or the heat or the phone. “Growing up in Springfield, Virginia in a little house, with my mother working three jobs trying to make a public school teacher salary work as a single mother raising two children, we never had much,” he says, “but we were always happy. Grohl credits his mother with instilling this grit and work ethic in him. Even as he tells harrowing stories from his half-starved early days, when he could barely scrape up enough cash to live on convenience store corndogs, he makes it clear that his passion for music has never wavered. In The Storyteller, Grohl describes how he worked his way up from being a music-obsessed high school dropout playing in punk bands to becoming one of the most celebrated and influential artists of the past thirty years. It’s the same feeling as completing a song.” “When I hit ‘send’ on the last story, I got really emotional because I didn’t want it to end. “It was really fulfilling-I really got into it,” he says. “I made a list of thirty or forty stories, and it ranged from everything from blowing up my neighborhood with fireworks to meeting Little Richard to parenthood.” That list also included lots of stories about Foo Fighters, as well as Grohl’s days as the drummer for the seminal grunge band Nirvana.Īs Grohl began writing, it quickly became clear that this should be more than just a series of social media posts, so he ended up turning it into a book, The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music, which was published on October 5 (via Dey Street Books). “When the world shut down, I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ll start an Instagram page where I write these outrageously cool experiences that I’ve had-this will give me something to do because I can’t just make lasagna every night for my kids,’” he says.

While Grohl is relieved that things are getting back on track, it’s not like he’s been idle during the past year and a half.

The storyteller grohl