Throughout his career in some of the biggest bands in Rock, you’d think Dave Grohl would have a story or two to share. Thankfully, he’s got a whole memoir lined up for you.
Grohl joined Audacy’s Nicole Alvarez for an Audacy Check In as the two had an in-depth conversation on his newly released New York Times bestselling memoir The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music.
Being a New York Times bestselling author is something Grohl never imagined happening when he began this process. “I’m blown away because I’ve been doing the music thing for so long that I know how that game works, you know,” he said. “With Foo Fighters, we go play shows, we make records, we put songs on the radio, I understand it. With the book world, no clue.”
“For the bestseller thing, I always imagined that was for Bob Woodward and Michael Crichton,” he added. “People that wrote these incredible books. So I was really surprised, and of course honored, that it was on that list. It’s still a trip, it’s funny.”
The gift of writing runs in the Grohl family as his mom was a teacher in creative writing and his dad was a speech writer. “In our family, not only the written word, but the spoken word is taken seriously,” he said. This included his mom giving articulation drills at the dinner table where she assigned a topic that you had to speak about for three minutes without breaking your speech.
Those exercises not only helped hone his skills as a storyteller, but it provided a great opportunity to boast to his mother once his book was released. “Being able to write a book, and then to get that first copy and drop it in her lap, that felt great,” he said.
Writing a book wasn’t always on the horizon for Grohl, but the COVID-19 pandemic helped kickstart things. The whole process began with his Instagram page (@davestruestories) that he started during quarantine. “I’m such a spaz, there’s no way I can have nothing to do,” he exclaimed. “I thought this would be some sort of creative outlet and fun for someone to read in an otherwise really dreary time. The pandemic just hit and everyone was in their houses all alone.”
As Grohl began compiling these stories for his Instagram account, he realized he had enough material to put a book together. “I made a list of 30 or 40 stories for that Instagram thing and then I just sent it to the editor. I’m like, ‘you pick me what you want me to write.’”
Grohl’s editor would then give him assignments to expand on specific stories he sent over. “When you’re writing a story, the composition and arrangement is very much like a song,” he said. “There’s an intro, there’s a hook, there’s a verse, there’s a chorus, there’s a bridge, and then there’s a big finish. As you’re doing story-by-story, it’s like you’re writing a bunch of songs until you get into the studio to make them into the album.”
From here, Grohl said there’s a lot of similarity when it comes to sequencing the book as there is sequencing an album. “It’s very much exactly the same,” Grohl added.
Grohl admitted he hasn’t really read a ton of Rock biographies in his life. Part of this is because he’s not really interested in the more technical aspects of these stories, like what microphone was used. Instead, he wants to understand the why of these processes, which helped him while he was writing. He knows that people may want to hear the informational side of things, but he was more interested in “painting an emotional picture of that stuff.”
“The challenge was deciding what to write and what not to write,” he says. “There’s so much! I was like 300 pages in and I hadn’t even mentioned the Foo Fighters yet. I was like, ‘Oh My God!’ I've been in this band for 26 years, if I don’t write about it my guys are going to kill me.”
His gift of storytelling made the process difficult just because there’s so much he could write about. “The way I look at it,” he says, “every day is a story in itself. I could write 365 of these things a year.”
“I remember when they announced that I was writing a book. My editor, she was like ‘it’s on presale!’ And I’m like, ‘really, where?’ And she goes, ‘Amazon or something!’ So I click on it and it shows the cover, it’s got the dimensions of the book. Then it said 384 pages and I wasn’t even halfway done yet!”
As much as this was a personal project for Grohl, he did rely a lot on fans to help him through this. “I would find these crazy websites that basically detail every single day of Nirvana’s life for those three years. And I would rely on that for any sort of chronological reference.”
“For the most part,” he adds, “when it comes to recalling any of these memories, they really are triggered by music.”
Towards the end of their conversation, Grohl spoke on how he found inspiration while writing the book. Part of it was listening to the music of the era he was writing about. “I would listen to the music that was in those chapters. If I was writing about Scream, I would listen to those old Scream records or listen to the music I was listening to at the time. If I was writing about Led Zeppelin, I would go back to those records. I kind of had my own playlist as I was writing,” he said.
“Really, those songs and that sound would trigger a deeper memory where I could write in detail, like more focused detail, if I hear those songs playing while I’m writing.”
Now that his memoir has been released, Alvarez asked Grohl if he felt like this was the book he wanted to write. “Absolutely,” Dave said resoundingly. “I didn’t feel like I had enough pages. When I hit send on the last story, I thought, ‘I’m really glad I did that and I can’t wait to do it again.’”
You can watch the full conversation with Dave Grohl above.
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