Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl has shared a snippet from his upcoming book, The Storyteller, detailing his life-changing journey into the punk scene…
Ahead of the release of his new book The Storyteller in October, Dave Grohl has shared a huuuuuge excerpt detailing his journey into punk, and how he discovered the recipe to make it in rock'n'roll himself.
Entitled 'Tracey is a punk rocker', the Foo Fighters frontman recalls in an almost 3,000-word segment of the book how his "ultra-cool cousin Tracey" (who isn't actually related to Dave) had transformed into a "postapocalyptic superhero" between their usual summer meetings back in the day, with her "shiny Doc Marten boots, black bondage pants, an Anti-Pasti T-shirt, and a shaved head" inspiring something he'd never felt before when he was just 13 years old.
Tracey then took Dave to his first-ever gig at Chicago's Cubby Bear to see Naked Raygun, the experience blowing his mind having only previously spent his childhood "watching MTV and staring at the KISS and Led Zeppelin posters on my bedroom walls".
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"I foolishly thought that bands only performed on giant stages with smoke machines and massive displays of lasers and pyrotechnics," Dave writes. "To me, that was rock'n'roll. Little did I know that all you needed was four walls and a song."
Following the show, he explains how he was "forever changed, and now understood that I didn’t need the pyrotechnics, lasers, or impossible proficiency of a virtuoso instrumentalist to become a musician. The most important element of rock'n'roll had been revealed to me in Naked Raygun’s performance: the raw and imperfect sound of human beings purging their innermost voice for all to hear. This was now available to me, and I couldn’t wait to return home to Virginia and spread the gospel to all of my friends, hoping that they would see the light, too."
