Before we get into the bleach and potatoes, I wanted to announce a new premium perk: voiceovers!
From time to time, I will be recording audio to go along with the posts I’ve made meaning you can listen as you read or take my writing on the go as a podcast. This will be a perk for paid subscribers at this time. Here’s a little sneak peek:
Now…to the Grohl of it all.
I truly debated if this was worthy of conversation, but the longer I sat knowing Dave Grohl’s daughter had to deactivate her Instagram because fuckers couldn’t leave an 18-year-old girl alone for the sins of her father, well. I have something to say.
Let me be clear and say that the title of this post was almost, “A Love Letter to the Way I Won a Back Alley Fight Against Dave Grohl”.
Dave Grohl remains one of the most visible members of the rock music scene. Sure, he’s a talented musician steeped in the lore that comes with being part of THE band of the 90s, but he’s also got a larger than life personality that transcends music and has extended into the zeitgeist of those who have never heard more than “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or “Everlong”.
See how I didn’t choose “My Hero”? Very cutesy, very demure, very mindful. Very overdone at this point, the lyric “There goes my hero” being shared ad infinitum over the news that Dave Grohl, self-proclaimed, outward family man, has revealed he was unfaithful to his wife and fathered a child with another woman.
I shouldn’t be so surprised. I shouldn’t be so sensitive to it. Not because of any sort of psychoanalyzing I’ve done of David Grohl but because as a lover of rock music, this is a story as old as time. A story I know all too well. And yet every time, every fucking time I learn another godforsaken fact about what one of my — not heroes, muses — one of my muses has done to a woman in his time, I have to mourn.
If you would have met me before 2020, you would have met someone with a passing enjoyment of rock music. Classic rock, to be specific.
And then we were thrown into quarantine and one thing led to another and I fell into the deep, beautiful abyss of Led Zeppelin.
What does Led Zeppelin have to do with Dave Grohl? Well, everything, but I’ll get there, I promise.
See, I have a tendency to hyperfixate. When I like something enough to teeter into love, I not only love it, I need to consume everything there is to consume. I need every piece, every crumb, every atom.
Led Zeppelin was that thing for me. They’re a subject for a series of love letters in and of themselves. For me, I couldn’t just have the sound, I needed to know everything about the sound, about the men who created the sound, the time in which the sound was created, I needed it all.
And what was at first surface level, the Wikipedia of it all, grew deeper and deeper with each Google search.
I tried to look away because the pain of seeing the truth is egregious. That these stupid, stupid boys that had claimed me in one of the hardest times of not just my life but of many of our lives, weren’t just sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll but alleged whipped cream affairs and roadwives and the infamous, infamous Mud Shark Incident.
As immortalized in the Zappa song.
Again. Alleged. I can’t claim to know. Surely many of the stories are larger than life, but these four men were larger than life. There is no denying that.
So perhaps nothing can truly be claimed as fact. But I do believe women when they tell their stories. And how do I reconcile the two things? The love of men who have done bad things and the love for my fellow woman?
Herein lies the dangers of parasocial relationships. Or the danger of separating the art from the artist. Or just the danger of loving anything.
To love anything means to risk breaking your own goddamn heart.
I promised Zeppelin would relate back to Dave Grohl. Not just because Dave Grohl has John Bonham’s symbol tattooed or because the Foo Fighters played with Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones at Wembley in 2007.
My true introduction to Dave Grohl was through Them Crooked Vultures, the supergroup he formed with John Paul Jones and Josh Homme in 2009. John Paul Jones is responsible for my true musical education, but that’s in fact another story for another time. What’s important to know is I follow his projects through time to learn and devour and listen.
Them Crooked Vultures was the next logical step for me and my Zeppelin addled brain. And through following JPJ, I found myself following the same path of hyperfixation to Josh Homme and Queens of the Stone Age. And eventually, of course, Dave Motherfuckin’ Grohl.
Hell, I love that trio so much I went to the Taylor Hawkins Tribute Concert in LA to see them play three songs, the first time they’d played together since 2010.
I work through my music slow. I take my time. I listen until I think I’ve heard everything there is to hear and then listen again and find something new. So after working my way through Zeppelin and QOTSA, it was finally time.
This year was supposed to be the beginning of my Grohlification. Yes, I’m deeply sorry for making that a word, it’s unsettling to say the least.
At the beginning of the year I listened to his audiobook, The Storyteller. I started letting Foo Fighters sneak into my daily repertoire. I watched his Sound City documentary and fell further for the persona. The charming, dadly, warm-hearted musical behemoth.
And now here we are.
No one is perfect. Especially not rock musicians despite the way us fans idolize them to the point of sin.
Dave Grohl is just a man. Just a man with ample privilege and I suppose opportunity to feel untouchable. But just…a man. Not a hero, not a god.
A man. With a wife and three, now four daughters, but three daughters who have to pick up the pieces of a man they thought they knew.
When I learn something new about a musician I love, something unsavory, it always hurts. My mouth gets hot, my cheeks get red, and my heart shoves itself up against my ribs and threatens never to be the same again. It’s something like grief. Takes a long time to move through. And all the while I wonder how can I grieve a person I do not know? Is it fair to grieve a man I do not know?
Is it fair to grieve the human embodiment of Animal the Muppet when I only know him through his art? And do we know anyone through their art ever?
I always come to the same conclusion…more pertinent now than it’s ever been.
I’m not grieving him. I’m grieving for them. For any woman who trusted. For any woman who has to suffer the sins of her husband or any daughter who has to suffer the sins of her father. For any woman who ever has to question the time that has passed and the love she thought she had in the way she thought she had it.
I’ve never been cheated on. But I know this feeling. The smack upside the head when you realize someone was telling falsehoods and that gaps in the timeline start to make sense. That the lies you told yourself as comforts and had started to believe really were lies.
I’ve been there. Not just with rock music. That’s a story for another time. I’m not ready to tell it.
To love rock music as a woman is a constant reconciliation of the world around you. To love the thing you fear. To desire the thing you abhor. To wonder if you are doomed to perpetuate the cycle that our mothers and our mothers’ mothers and all the mothers before them have been trying to deconstruct since the second man said, “I have the power to make them question their entire reality.”
I grieve for all the times women thought they knew themselves only for the rug to be pulled out from under them by a man whose selfishness forced them to question the reality they’ve been living in.
(And yes, let’s be nuanced. I’m saying women though any person of any gender identity can be betrayed…stay with me).
Why is this a love letter, you may ask, when I’m being critical of a stranger’s personal life and speculating on minutiae I could never possibly know?
I guess the love letter really goes out to everyone who has had to reinvent themselves because the life they thought they knew was upended by someone who did not stop to think their lies would ever have consequences beyond the ones they themselves could suffer.
I celebrate and love those of us who have had to realize when we were made someone else entirely in an instant. Were forced to mourn the person we were until one day we understood it was not only time to recover.
It was time to reinvent.
And that is why it is a love letter.
The ending to this story is unsatisfying.
I suppose, sadly, I will reconcile. For the music. I’ve reconciled before.