Raised in a household short on cash but big on maternal love, Grohl believes he probably had ADHD, such was his restlessness and inability to turn his natural curiosity into good grades.

An irrepressible yang to Cobain’s more anguished yin, he has always chosen life. Grohl himself is, infamously, a Tiggerish character, genial and enthusiastic. Equally, these genres run on bonhomie and positivity, coexisting alongside the nihilism. Rage and disaffection are fundamental to punk, grunge and rock. He is now pals with Paul McCartney, eulogiser to the late Lemmy from Motörhead. It starts as an account of how the young Grohl goes from grinding his jaws rhythmically, to fashioning a drum kit from pillows, to summoning the spirit of the Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham on a rudimentary altar and petitioning him for musical success. Grohl is so rock’n’roll that he falls off a stage and breaks his leg at a Foo Fighters gig in Sweden in 2015, goes to hospital and returns to finish the show This is a compendium of vignettes from a rock’n’roll life lived with brio.

But it sounds like that might be over coffee – Grohl loves coffee, to the point of nearly having a heart attack – with his publisher rather than inside a dust jacket.įor anyone interested in how a hyperactive misfit from suburban Virginia became a third of Nirvana and went on to become a stadium-filling star with his own Foo Fighters, The Storyteller lives up to its billing. “Some day I’ll have to tell you the rest,” he writes in the acknowledgments. He also has three daughters who will in all likelihood read this the book feels like an intentionally PG take on what could be a much rowdier, more hair-raising tale. It seems obvious that Grohl would not want to tear open cauterised wounds. In 2014 Grohl, Novoselic and Love ended years of suits and counter-suits over the rights to Nirvana’s music with a very public show of solidarity. Grohl deals with the addiction factually and sadly, and steers round the latter entirely. Cobain’s death was preceded by disenchantment, heroin addiction and a tempestuous marriage to Courtney Love. There’s relatively little here about all that. Were they so inclined, Nirvana’s surviving members – Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic – could rehash the most painful time of their musical lives in perpetuity, such is the insatiable appetite for Cobain-themed rock’n’roll rubbernecking. The band’s legacy remains overshadowed by the 1994 suicide of singer and guitarist Kurt Cobain. I f you are curious about Dave Grohl, drummer from “tragic grunge poster boys” Nirvana, whose Nevermind album has just turned 30, The Storyteller might not be the memoir for you.

The storyteller dave grohl