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Thursday
March 28th, 2024

the storyteller spotlight pageELLY GRIMM • Leader & Times

 

Dave Grohl has been rocking out and entertaining fans for many years, and with several groups, most notably Nirvana and the Foo Fighters. With entertainment venues canceling shows due to lockdowns throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Grohl had quite a bit of time to tell his story and how he came to this point of his life. 

And Grohl certainly delivers with his memoir, “The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music,” which was released in October 2021. I picked the book up at the library rather recently, and I went into it mostly blind since I’d had mostly only a passing experience with his music. Ultimately, I ended up being glad I picked up the book. 

The first thing I noticed is how Grohl is actually an extremely good storyteller throughout and knows exactly what he wants to say and how he wants to say it. Grohl’s overall tone of the book is very straightforward and he’s not afraid to throw in some depreciating humor and the occasional curse word. My favorite stories come from the parts where he describes growing up and the famous (or infamous) hijinks he got into as a child, especially the various injuries he suffered due to those hijinks. After my initial thought of “How could one boy be THAT injury-prone?!” there were a few parts that reminded me of some of the foolish things I did when I was young, making for some good laughs. 

Grohl also does a great job at painting a picture for readers when describing his childhood home and different performance venues, among many other places. He has a great gift for description and I could almost see in my mind’s eye exactly what he was describing, from the number of people in the crowds at the performance venues to the old and decrepit van used to transport him and his band when he was starting out as a musician. There are also several photos sprinkled throughout the book to help fill in some of those details, and it was a wonderful blast into the past. It also goes to show how even some of the biggest rock stars in the world have rather humble beginnings and aren’t necessarily born with a guitar or a set of drumsticks in their hands. 

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And it’s not just the description of physical places and things Grohl has a gift for describing throughout the book. Like many others, Grohl has experienced his own losses throughout his life, and he does a wonderful job tapping into those feelings and sharing what was going through his mind at those moments. One of those moments that particularly struck me is when he talks about the morning he found about the unexpected death of his Nirvana bandmate Kurt Cobain, who he’d grown to be good friends with. Grohl talks about being overwhelmed with sadness (yet somehow also unable to fully express that sadness), and he also recounts what happened when the band met a short time after Cobain’s death to decide what to do. Something else I found rather cool was when Grohl described still having moments of emotional whiplash even to this day, including one time when he encountered a boy wearing a Nirvana t-shirt while driving through town a few years after Cobain died. I could feel that vulnerability coming off the pages and I have to admit, I shed a few tears. He also describes having those same feelings after the death of another good childhood friend shortly after Cobain’s death, and he paints another rather vivid picture of how he felt after that happened.

Along those lines, I also enjoyed reading Grohl’s recollections of meeting some of his own rock heroes, because it proves how even super-famous people can still get starstruck. My favorite stories are from when he met Tom Petty and his bandmates and later, Sir Paul McCartney. There are other such stories he recounts throughout the book, and they’re all entertaining to read, particularly since there’s some of Grohl’s depreciating humor sprinkled throughout. 

Something else I noticed about the book was how the book is anything but a boring biography, and I loved how Grohl goes back and forth with the different stages in his life, ending each chapter with a life lesson not just for himself, but also for the readers. Some of those lessons are pretty commonsense, and some others were deeper and made me think “WHOA” to an extent. One of those lessons was basically how people should follow their dreams, which is what he did in high school when he decided to drop out and pursue music as a career. With that, Grohl also does a great job describing how much of a pull music had on him and how strong the feeling was of his pursuit of what would ultimately be his career. 

Overall, I very much enjoyed reading Dave Grohl’s memoir “The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music,” and I would give it a solid “A.” Grohl has some amazing storytelling chops and he does a wonderful job of recounting his life not just in the physical sense but also how he felt about the losses he encountered at certain points of his life. The book is also a pretty easy read and the overall writing style is straightforward and completely unpretentious. If you’re a fan of Grohl and his music, or if you’re interested in modern music history, “The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music” is one to pick up.