the legend of Dave Grohl, soccer mom
gentle as fuck
The parents volunteering as soccer coaches take on the full Mount Olympus of Types. The angry the serious the ecstatic the proclamatory the late dragging a ball. One of the coaches on the field next to us this fall season was a dad from our school with long brown hair, skinny jeans and a grungy sweater. I heard him once telling his team that he didn't know the score and that "all that matters is having a rad time out there and trying hard." Better, though, was the harmonica. Every time he wanted to call the kids in for a huddle, instead of blowing a whistle he played an ascending arpeggio on his harmonica. Halfway through an interminable game in the rain which had "no score" but saw our team get railed 6-3, I heard it waft up from somewhere behind me: ₗₐ-la-la-ˡᵃᵃᵃᵃ.
Once I knew him, I started noticing him doing dropoff at our school in of his SUV, fixing his girls’ hair before kissing them goodbye, his long hair still crisp from a morning shower: a perfect incarnation of minivan-era Dave Grohl.
Grohl has long been a proud Honda Odyssey owner, a true soccer mom. The vibes are good:
Who among us doesn’t love Dave Grohl, who once fell off the stage and broke his leg but continued the show from a chair, figuring the hospital could wait, and whose mum accompanies him on the road and drinks with other musos. (There’s a whole social media genre of Dave Grohl fan service out there: here he is with his mum discussing a very poor report card from his youth, and here talking about bringing his mum on the road. Here’s the vid of him bringing a 10-year-old on stage who then rips out a Metallica cover.)
Why do we love him so much though? The origin story I thought I knew was just that he was famous from Nirvana and went on to make some amazing dad rock. But from reading his memoir (more just a series of stories in no particular order), it’s not quite like that. His dad was a bit of a bummer, exit stage left, and his mum worked three jobs to support her kids growing up in the suburbs of D.C.
Grohl tries to teach himself drums using cushions and eventually gets his dream gig as the drummer of Scream, a punk band that is the center of the universe to Grohl and something I have never heard of, remaining at the roadshow, $5-per-diem, living-on-the-floor-of-a-mud-wrestler’s-L.A.-house level. Huge portions of the book are devoted to this band—much more so than to Nirvana—because Grohl is so stoked to be part of it. He’s still young when he joins Nirvana, shoots straight up in the air on unmanageable fame, and loses Kurt Cobain.
Grohl is gutted. He travels to Ireland and out to the Ring of Kerry, the windswept edge of the world where he sees a hitchhiker on the side of the road in a Kurt Cobain t-shirt, and hits the accelerator to get away from it. But he realized that, “even in the most remote place I can find, I can’t outrun this thing.” So he comes back and he has to rebuild. Here’s how he describes his process of making music again, giving us an incidental metaphor of self:
My method was simple: record a guitar part on one cassette, eject that tape and put it in cassette player number two, hit Play, record myself playing “drums” along with the guitar part on another cassette, and so on, and so on.
He founds the Foo Fighters and he is ridiculously grateful for every little piece of good luck that comes to him including, later, kids.
Back to his crappy-ass dad, Grohl writes after having his own kids of thinking back to his own childhood: “How could he not want to spend every waking minute bouncing me on his lap, pushing me on the swing, or reading me stories every night before bed?” That’s how he treats parenthood himself. Grohl is offered a chance to jam with John Fogerty and tells him he has another appointment he can’t miss: breastfeeding class. So John Fogerty comes along. That’s his approach to parenthood as a musician: he tries to do it all.
At one point he realizes the daddy-daughter dance at the kids’ school is in the middle of his Australian tour, so he moves a date, flies on a tight string of private jets and international flights to get back, take the kids to the dance—he remembers the butter noodles, pinning tiny corsages to their dresses—and then zooms back to Perth (puking the whole way thanks to food poisoning). “I was cured by life,” he writes of his family, and then gives some fairly stock standard pop psych, only in all-caps, as is his wont:
I LOVE MY CHILDREN AS I WAS LOVED AS A CHILD, AND I PRAY THAT THEY WILL DO THE SAME WHEN THEIR TIME COMES. SOME CYCLES ARE MEANT TO BE BROKEN. SOME ARE MEANT TO BE REINFORCED.
He’s no Adrienne Rich, but “with each child born, I was born again, and with each step that they took, I retraced my own.” YES, DAVE. (toots Odyssey horn)
Also relatable: the time he is invited to play at the White House and says yes, because LIKE YOU he is trying to do it all, so he folds it into his five-pots-of-coffee daily routine but worries he might be having a heart attack through the whole thing (he goes to the hospital afterward and is told it’s the coffee).
I will leave you with this video of Grohl playing with his eldest daughter Violet, which should be enough to get him onto Mt. Olympus, I reckon.
Took the kids into NYC for the day this week and they were more entranced by the ~quotidian~ than the big tree at Rockefeller
Japhy, excited, in the subway: Is this where the rat got his pizza?
Me: Kind of, yeah
*a short while later*
Scout: is this where the dreidel was?
Me: just about!
Goodies
Catherine Lacey has a little project going called
with flash narratives of 144 words. Here’s Dave answers one crazy question.Popped into the resuscitated Jezebel and found this lovely little story by Kady Ruth Ashcroft about visiting a ham bar (the one that used to be on my block in Brooklyn, if I know my ham bars)
Very good: Isabelle Hummad’s lecture
Also, an old interview I did with Hala Alyan about how she constructed the Palestine of her novel Salt Houses, and how she views diaspora and homesickness as both a writer and psychologist.
Read: Day by Michael Cunningham, which is a “pandemic” novel but also, to me, manages to show how the people around you feed into your relationships—as in, they’re not a strict 1:1 formula. It’s just nicely interconnected and I’m of course always here for a novel that spends chunks of time talking about the color and scent of alpine grass and moss.
I popped back into McSweeney’s with “Only one person is allowed to gentle-parent my kid, and that’s Keanu Reeves.” I stand by it.
Finally for now
To the friends still with us, and those that are also still with us
Really good writing - think I have read four of your pieces and I have really liked reading them
I'm going to start saying gentle af. The bit about the harmonica coach was very novelesque.