Dave's Bio
In a sense, Grohl had been preparing himself for the front of the stage for much of his life. Born January 14, 1969, in northern Virginia, he started fooling around on guitar by age ten, and joined a neighborhood cover band at twelve. The next summer, he visited his cousin in Evanston, Illinois, and his life was forever changed. Cousin Tracey was a full-on punk rocker, and she not only took young Dave to his first rock concert (Naked Raygun at the Cubby Bear), more importantly, she presented him with a firsthand sense of what being a punk was all about. Over the next few years, Grohl played in several different bands. In the first, the fledgling punk outfit Freak Baby, he made his initial foray into a real recording studio, working with Barrett Jones, who has recorded every Grohl project since. In the next, hard-core punkers Mission Impossible, he made the switch from guitar to drums. With Dain Bramage — which blended rock, art punk, and hardcore — he was able to record his first album before his seventeenth birthday. The following year, Grohl hooked up with Scream, the legendary D.C. punk band whose records had provided practice fodder for him several years earlier. Although leery of joining the band full-time, he ultimately made the jump, and he was soon touring the U.S. and Europe. The steady gig as a hired player afforded Grohl the freedom to put his creativity to work on his own songs. With Barrett Jones' help, he experimented in the studio whenever he could, recording full backing tracks (guitar, bass, and drums) for his compositions. One song from this era, "Marigold," would later become a Nirvana B-side. In 1990, Scream started to disintegrate. Fortuitously, Buzz Osborne, of early grunge vets the Melvins, told Grohl that his friends' band, Nirvana, was looking for a permanent drummer. Osborne knew Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic from their shared hometown of Aberdeen, Washington, and they had told him of their appreciation for Grohl's playing with Scream. The Virginia native took a chance and flew to Seattle. Soon after, Nirvana went into the studio and recorded Nevermind, and the rest is history. During the next few years, whenever he had time away from Nirvana's busy schedule, Grohl worked with Jones on songs at the latter's Virginia studio, including some material that would appear on the Foo Fighters' first album. The rest of the record was finished in Seattle after Cobain's death, but that catastrophic event left Grohl questioning his desire to continue playing music at all. He was finally spurred to move on by a letter from 7-Year Bitch, another Seattle band who had lost a member. According to Grohl, "that fucking letter saved my life." The full Foo Fighters lineup completed work on a second album, The Colour and the Shape, which was released in 1997.