Dave Grohl, the frontman who keeps sneaking back behind the drum kit

Photo: Raphael Pour-Hashemi / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 14, 1969 Warren, Ohio, United States
Occupation	Musician, singer-songwriter and drummer
Known for	Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny, Cobain: Montage of Heck, The Muppets
Awards	5 Grammy · 2 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame · MTV Video Music Award

Before the band had played a note in Brisbane this month, Dave Grohl tripped and fell flat on the runway at Suncorp Stadium. He laughed it off and played for the next three hours. The more revealing moment came later. During the band introductions, drummer Ilan Rubin strapped on a guitar, and Grohl walked to the back of the stage, sat down behind the kit and played as if he had never left it.

That stool is where his story started, and it keeps pulling him back. A week earlier he had drummed for Aerosmith at their first concert in three years, at the Hollywood Bowl. A few weeks before that, after joining AC/DC for Highway to Hell in New Jersey, he walked off stage and, by his own account, “broke down in tears, sobbing like a baby.” Nirvana’s drummer has spent three decades as the singer, guitarist and chief songwriter of Foo Fighters, the steadiest stadium rock band America still produces. Yet some of his most telling recent work keeps happening behind the drums, and the public image he built over those decades, the nicest man in rock, has had to absorb a confession of his own.

David Eric Grohl came into the world in Warren, Ohio, on January 14, 1969, and grew up in Springfield, Virginia, raised by his mother, Virginia, a teacher, after his parents divorced when he was seven. He taught himself guitar at 12, and learned drums by playing along to Rush and punk records; he has never read music. A summer with a cousin in Illinois took him, at 13, to his first concert, Naked Raygun at a Chicago club. At 17 he auditioned for the hardcore band Scream, lied about his age, got the job and dropped out of high school.

Four years of touring with Scream ended when the band fell apart mid-tour in 1990. Buzz Osborne of the Melvins, who had brought Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic to one of his shows, handed him their phone numbers. Grohl flew to Seattle, joined Nirvana and within a year was driving Nevermind (1991), the record that pulled the American underground onto mainstream radio. He was also writing songs. A cassette, Pocketwatch, came out in 1992 under the alias Late!, and one of its songs, reworked by Nirvana as Marigold, became the B-side of Heart-Shaped Box.

After Cobain’s death in April 1994, Grohl withdrew for months. In October he booked time at Robert Lang Studios in Seattle and recorded fifteen songs, playing every instrument except a single guitar part by Greg Dulli. Tom Petty offered him the Heartbreakers’ drum seat for good; he said no. The demo became Foo Fighters (1995), and to avoid it being read as a solo record he hired a band: Pat Smear, Nate Mendel and William Goldsmith.

The second album showed what kind of bandleader he would be. Unhappy with the sessions for The Colour and the Shape (1997), Grohl moved the recording to Los Angeles without telling Goldsmith and replayed most of the drums himself. Goldsmith, who said he had been made to do 96 takes of one song, quit. Grohl later conceded that part of him did not know if he was “finished playing the drums yet.” The album gave him Everlong, the song that still closes every Foo Fighters show, and it brought in Taylor Hawkins, the drummer who would be his closest musical partner for a quarter of a century.

Through the following decade Grohl kept making the point on other people’s records. He played drums on Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf (2002), and that November he knocked himself off the top of Billboard’s modern rock chart when Foo Fighters’ All My Life replaced Nirvana’s posthumous You Know You’re Right. Across 18 weeks he held number one for 17, with three different acts. In 2009 he formed Them Crooked Vultures with Josh Homme and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones.

Foo Fighters, meanwhile, became an institution. Wasting Light (2011), recorded on tape in Grohl’s garage, was their first album to top the US chart and won five Grammys; the band’s total stands at 15. He turned director with Sound City (2013), a documentary about the studio where Nevermind was made, and its jam with Paul McCartney, Novoselic and Smear, Cut Me Some Slack, won the Grammy for best rock song. He has entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, with Nirvana in 2014 and with Foo Fighters in 2021, the year he also published his memoir, The Storyteller.

The friendly face is the part of the story that deserves the hardest look. Grohl has long been rock’s designated good guy, the man who handed his own guitar to a ten-year-old fan on stage in Kansas City. The record is less tidy. Bandmates have gone without public explanations, from Goldsmith in 1997 to Josh Freese, who said in May 2025 that he had been fired with little explanation; Mendel would only say the decision was “best for all parties.” In September 2024 Grohl announced that he had fathered a daughter outside his marriage to Jordyn Blum, with whom he has three daughters, and asked his family for forgiveness. Speaking to The Guardian this year, he said he had been through 430 therapy sessions in 70 weeks and had “wound up in a place that I needed to stop and sit with myself and re-evaluate myself.” Critics have a quieter complaint: that the music settled into a dependable stadium formula long ago.

The hardest stretch came in 2022. Hawkins died on March 25 in a hotel room in Bogotá, and Grohl’s mother, Virginia, died the same year. Foo Fighters played two tribute concerts that September, at Wembley and in Los Angeles, then made But Here We Are (2023) with Grohl playing the drums himself, a record dedicated to both. Freese took over on tour; Rubin, formerly the touring drummer for Nine Inch Nails, replaced him in 2025.

Your Favorite Toy, released in April, is the band’s 12th album and the first with Rubin. Grohl and Rubin cut the basic tracks live, without a click track; his daughter Harper sings backing vocals on the title track, which was called For Good until the name collided with Wicked: For Good. Pitchfork called it “the leanest, meanest Foo Fighters album in 30 years.” The A.V. Club found it “far from convincingly inspired.” On the road the verdict has been subtler. In Brisbane only two of its songs made a setlist built on the old hits, and Grohl sold Australia a thirty-year anniversary rather than a new record.

The calendar stays full. Foo Fighters play KROQ’s Almost Acoustic Christmas in Los Angeles on December 12, return to New Zealand and Perth in late January and open a South American run in Montevideo on February 23. Meanwhile The Best Summer, Tamra Davis’s documentary about the 1995 Summersault tour, has put the early Foo Fighters back on screen: the band Grohl started as a way out of the drummer’s seat. Three decades later, he keeps finding reasons to sit back down in it.

Selected Discography

The Hanukkah Sessions 2020 (2021)
The Hanukkah Sessions 2021 (2021)
The Hanukkah Sessions 2022 (2023)

Tags: singers, rock, Foo Fighters, Dave Grohl, Nevermind, Nirvana, Your Favorite Toy

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