Dave Grohl on the Song That Saved His Life
The Foo Fighters frontman and former Nirvana drummer on grief, gratitude, and why he still plays every show like it might be the last.
You've played thousands of shows. How do you keep treating each one like it matters?
Because for somebody in the crowd, it's their first show, or their last show, or the show they saved up for all year. I owe them the version of us that gives a damn. The day I walk on stage and phone it in is the day I should stop. I've been in the audience for phoned-in shows — it's heartbreaking. You remember it forever, and not in a good way. So I'd rather leave it all on the stage and wake up wrecked than save anything in the tank.
You've been open about how music carried you through grief. Can a song actually do that?
A song doesn't fix anything — let's be honest about that. But it gives you somewhere to put the thing that's too big to carry. When I lost people, I couldn't talk about it, but I could play about it, and the playing was the talking. The song becomes a container for something you can't hold in your hands. And then you play it for a room full of people who've lost somebody too, and suddenly you're not carrying it alone. That's the whole magic of rock, right there.
From drums to guitar to frontman — what did switching instruments teach you?
It taught me humility. I was a good drummer, and then I picked up a guitar and I was terrible, and I had to be okay with being terrible for a long time before I was anything else. That's the part people skip. They see the frontman and assume it was always natural. It wasn't. I was bad, and I stayed bad, and I played through bad until one day I was less bad. Every musician I respect has that same story of being willing to suck in private until they didn't.
What do you want on your tombstone, musically?
'He showed up.' That's it. Showed up, played hard, meant it, did it again tomorrow. I don't need to be remembered as the best anything. I just want people to say the guy was there, every night, and he gave it everything he had. That's enough for a rock and roll life.