Dave Grohl often posts longer texts in his Instagram format “Dave’s True Stories”. One of them was about his late father, James Harper Grohl, and was also published in The Atlantic magazine.
The essay addresses a memory from 1985 in which Grohl is a rebellious teenager constantly at odds with his distinguished, conservative father.
“Born in 1938 to a working-class Ohio family, my father was a complicated, multifaceted man, sometimes contradictory,” wrote the Foo Fighters frontman.
“Actor, writer, award-winning journalist, lover of art and good food, and a wild, classically trained musician. A true Renaissance man, yet so conservative that the public sometimes mistakes him for legendary political commentator George Will. All of this and more poured into a crisp, clean seersucker suit.”
“Never do that again, David”
Grohl talks about his father’s “paradoxical traits”: “At night you could find him with a glass of Johnnie Walker Red, baton in hand, reclining in his Eames chair, listening to jazz records and the smoke of his sweet pipe wafting through his apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, was blowing.”
He remembers performing with his former band Mission Impossible in 1985, and how his father taught him a lesson afterwards. He would have known that he “was by no means on the fast track to becoming a professional musician”. Grohl wrote a letter telling about the performance as proof of his ability. “Don’t ever do that again, David,” his father would have told him in response to the letter.
“I was his conservatory’s garage band,” Grohl sums up, “the screeching feedback to his perfect tone, the Dead Kennedys to his Leonard Bernstein.”