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Résumé
Résumé
So, I've written a book.
Having entertained the idea for years, and even offered a few questionable opportunities ("It's a piece of cake! Just do 4 hours of interviews, find someone else to write it, put your face on the cover, and voila!") I have decided to tell these stories just as I have always done, in my own voice. The joy that I have felt from chronicling these tales is not unlike listening back to a song that I've recorded and can't wait to share with the world, or reading a primitive journal entry from a stained notebook, or even hearing my voice bounce between the Kiss posters on my wall as a child.
This certainly doesn't mean that I'm quitting my day job, but it does give me a place to shed a little light on what it's like to be a kid from Springfield, Virginia, walking through life while living out the crazy dreams I had as young musician. From hitting the road with Scream at 18 years old, to my time in Nirvana and the Foo Fighters, jamming with Iggy Pop or playing at the Academy Awards or dancing with AC/DC and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, drumming for Tom Petty or meeting Sir Paul McCartney at Royal Albert Hall, bedtime stories with Joan Jett or a chance meeting with Little Richard, to flying halfway around the world for one epic night with my daughters...the list goes on. I look forward to focusing the lens through which I see these memories a little sharper for you with much excitement.
Critiques (5)
Critique du Publishers Weekly
Sixteen-time Grammy-winner Grohl cranks the story of his life to full volume in this exciting debut chronicling his rock 'n' roll career. Growing up in the 1970s in the suburbs of Springfield, Va.--a "Wonder Bread existence"--Grohl followed the sound of drumming all the way to the stage, from jamming with friends in high school to playing in the D.C. hardcore punk band Scream, joining Kurt Cobain's Nirvana in 1990, and eventually fronting his band, the Foo Fighters. Grohl's uninterested in regaling readers with tales of backstage debauchery; instead, he candidly shares his reverence for the enduring power of music. As a teenager, he writes, it became his religion, "the rock stars my saints, and their songs my hymns." By the time he turned 22, he was traveling the world with Nirvana. After the shock of Cobain's 1994 suicide subsided, Grohl focused on the Foo Fighters and began touring internationally again, while raising three girls with his wife ("music and family intertwined"). Reflecting on his fame, Grohl writes, "I have never taken a single moment of it for granted." Paired with his sparkling wit, this humility is what makes Grohl's soulful story a cut above typical rock memoirs. There isn't a dull moment here. Agent: Eve Atterman, WME. (Oct.)
Critique du Guardian
If you are curious about Dave Grohl, drummer from "tragic grunge poster boys" Nirvana, whose Nevermind album has just turned 30, The Storyteller might not be the memoir for you. The band's legacy remains overshadowed by the 1994 suicide of singer and guitarist Kurt Cobain. Were they so inclined, Nirvana's surviving members - Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic - could rehash the most painful time of their musical lives in perpetuity, such is the insatiable appetite for Cobain-themed rock'n'roll rubbernecking. There's relatively little here about all that. Cobain's death was preceded by disenchantment, heroin addiction and a tempestuous marriage to Courtney Love. Grohl deals with the addiction factually and sadly, and steers round the latter entirely. In 2014 Grohl, Novoselic and Love ended years of suits and counter-suits over the rights to Nirvana's music with a very public show of solidarity. It seems obvious that Grohl would not want to tear open cauterised wounds. He also has three daughters who will in all likelihood read this; the book feels like an intentionally PG take on what could be a much rowdier, more hair-raising tale. "Some day I'll have to tell you the rest," he writes in the acknowledgments. But it sounds like that might be over coffee - Grohl loves coffee, to the point of nearly having a heart attack - with his publisher rather than inside a dust jacket. For anyone interested in how a hyperactive misfit from suburban Virginia became a third of Nirvana and went on to become a stadium-filling star with his own Foo Fighters, The Storyteller lives up to its billing. This is a compendium of vignettes from a rock'n'roll life lived with brio. It starts as an account of how the young Grohl goes from grinding his jaws rhythmically, to fashioning a drum kit from pillows, to summoning the spirit of the Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham on a rudimentary altar and petitioning him for musical success. The seance worked a treat. He is now pals with Paul McCartney, eulogiser to the late Lemmy from Motörhead. Rage and disaffection are fundamental to punk, grunge and rock. Equally, these genres run on bonhomie and positivity, coexisting alongside the nihilism. Grohl himself is, infamously, a Tiggerish character, genial and enthusiastic. An irrepressible yang to Cobain's more anguished yin, he has always chosen life. Raised in a household short on cash but big on maternal love, Grohl believes he probably had ADHD, such was his restlessness and inability to turn his natural curiosity into good grades. While his mother, whom he adores, encouraged him to seize the day, Grohl's divorced father disowned him when he dropped out of school to join punk band Scream, playing venues Grohl wasn't legally allowed to enter because of his age (he had lied to get the gig). As with many memoirs, artists' origin stories can resonate far more sonorously than their victory laps; so it is with Grohl's. Those years spent crammed into vans, living off fumes and the kindness of female mud wrestlers are some of the most vivid here. The camaraderie and sudden violence of the international punk ecosystem is beautifully evoked as he lurches from high jinks with Italian tattooists to Dutch squat riots. With Scream suddenly defunct, Grohl hears on the grapevine that Nirvana - then merely well-regarded - were interested in him. His second secondment finds him (not) sleeping on Cobain's couch, kept awake by the butting of a desperate terrarium tortoise. Until he gets his first pay cheque, an emaciated Grohl eats nothing but cheap corndogs from a petrol station. The band's ascent is exciting and bewildering - until it isn't. When Nirvana ends, he turns down a cushy number playing drums for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers to record Foo Fighters' terrific debut album in a makeshift home studio, playing every instrument himself. The "fame" half of the book doesn't dip exactly - Grohl is so rock'n'roll that he falls off a stage and breaks his leg at a Foo Fighters festival gig in Sweden in 2015, goes to hospital and returns to finish the show. But somehow, the A-list fun is less exhilarating than the time a very pre-fame Grohl is roped in to play drums for Iggy Pop. He is constantly grateful for his good fortune, meeting his idols and not being disappointed, delirious at playing in a supergroup, Them Crooked Vultures, with Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. And while Grohl is a lively and thoughtful writer, deeper than his great bloke reputation, what rankles are the weird editorial decisions: the repetitions, and the changes to a weird font when he wants to emphasise a point. That hand-holding jars with the image of a bespectacled rock elder statesman on the cover, gazing maturely backwards.
Critique de Kirkus
The Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters frontman shares anecdotes from his (mostly) charmed life in rock 'n' roll. Grohl's memoir is thick with name-drops, but not for the sake of gossip or even revelatory detail. (Fans likely won't learn anything about Kurt Cobain they didn't already know, except perhaps his choice for cheap sustenance in the band's pre-fame days, a canned-tuna-on-toast concoction dubbed "shit on a shingle.") Rather, Grohl's name-drops are of the "can you believe I get to do this for a living" variety: backing Tom Petty and Iggy Pop, meeting musical heroes from Little Richard to Joan Jett, singing "Blackbird" at the Oscars, performing at the White House, and filling arenas all over the world. As the book's entertaining early pages reveal, Grohl was an unlikely candidate for global stardom. An accident-prone kid and unschooled drummer raised in a middle-class suburb of Washington, D.C., he caught the punk bug at a Naked Raygun show in Chicago, later dropping out of high school to join Scream. Though Scream was only moderately popular, Grohl thought he'd reached the mountaintop, so Nirvana's massive fame, followed by Cobain's suicide, was seriously disorienting. Still, the author is upbeat even when talking about lean or tense moments, like when his body finally pushed back against his five-pot-a-day coffee habit. Grohl is good company, but the gee-whiz tone as well as the clichés (hanging out with the members of metal band Pantera is "not for the faint of heart") make the book feel like a missed opportunity. Grohl survived a massive band's collapse and leads another hugely successful act in a genre that's no longer dominant. Rather than exploring that, he's largely content to celebrate his good fortune. Perhaps when he finally hangs it up, he will dig more deeply into his unique career. A high-spirited yet surface-level glimpse into the life of one of the planet's last rock stars. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Critique de Booklist
Grohl describes seeing the video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on MTV in 1991 as "an event that changed not only my life, but the world of music at that time." No words could be more understated. Grohl's career in music, put to paper in this kinetic autobiography, has also been life-changing on the same two scales. From his grubby, mischievous, injury-laden upbringing in Washington, D.C.'s Virginia suburbs to playing drums and touring with punk band Scream at age 18, Grohl breathed, slept, and consumed rock music even when the meager rewards were not enough to get the tour van to the next city. Nirvana's catapulted fame just urged him on as he encountered the thrills and drawbacks of too much of a good thing. The sudden loss of his friend Kurt Cobain and the loss of a lifelong best friend years later are emotionally and beautifully rendered. Grohl also writes with equal fervor about his path from "that guy from Nirvana" to the leader of the uber-famous Foo Fighters and his parenting experiences. An exciting read for fans and a remarkable perspective on the last 30 years of rock music. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Musician, songwriter, and documentary filmmaker Grohl's first book will have enormous draw for for punk rock and rock fans.
Critique du Library Journal
Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters frontman Grohl joyfully recounts his life in this memoir. Growing up in Virginia, Grohl taught himself to play drums by ear. He left school to tour with the group Scream, then joined Nirvana and struggled with its monumental success. The lifelong nonconformist found himself adored by Nirvana's mainstream audiences while dealing the band's "awkward dysfunction." After Nirvana's breakup, Grohl started the Foo Fighters, then formed the supergroup Them Crooked Vultures, with Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme and Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones. In nostalgic, often humorous anecdotes, he recalls meeting the musicians who inspired him: jamming with Iggy Pop, drumming for Tom Petty on Saturday Night Live, sharing bedtime story duties with Joan Jett. Grohl seems most proud of his role as father, and his loving stories of parenthood are sprinkled throughout the book. VERDICT Grohl bares his soul and shares his passion in this must-read memoir, which will resonate with music lovers and his fans.--Lisa Henry, Kirkwood P.L., MO
