Dave Grohl’s ‘The Storyteller’ Chronicles Stardom
Grohl reflected on his life and music career by zooming in and telling smaller stories.
March 12, 2023
Dave Grohl is a legendary musician. Anyone with halfway decent taste in music will know the names of some of the bands he’s been in, Foo Fighters and Nirvana, and some might even know Scream, a local suburban teenage punk band. Being a music enthusiast myself, I decided to read Grohl’s autobiography, The Storyteller, and I instantly fell in love with the book and his story.
The Storyteller is different from any other autobiography I’ve read; rather than using the book to settle scores or reopen old wounds, Grohl spends his time telling smaller stories, like a series of vignettes inside a larger book. He tells stories about how his life changed when he had children, his dinners with Paul McCartney and AC/DC, playing a show through a broken leg in Sweden, and a raging coffee addiction.
Through a series of different stories about Grohl’s past bands and the process of forming Foo Fighters, The Storyteller serves as a sort of description of how Grohl ‘made it’ into the musical world.
One of my favorite stories is about Grohl’s teenage years, which were spent grinding the drumbeat to various different rock songs on his teeth (where he introduced a very concerned dentist to the story), experiencing his ‘punk rock baptism’ at a Naked Raygun concert, and his infatuation with Scream.
After years of dreaming about being called up on stage to fill in for legendary Scream drummer Kent Stax, Grohl called the lead singer’s girlfriend and asked for an audition after Stax left the band – and it went well. But by the time he’d been asked to join the band full time, Grohl was at a crossroads. Joining Scream would mean leaving school and quitting his high school band, Drain Bramage. So he declined.
It was when he started discussing how he instantly regretted not joining Scream when attending one of their concerts that I realized why I loved the book so much — it spoke to anyone who thought of music as more than just sound, giving proof to the impact of live music.
