Jason Kirk recently tweeted, “Do you think you could defeat in physical combat the most famous person who shares your first name, and who is that person.”
Emmy winner David Helman responded, “Dave Grohl, David Beckham and Dave Chappelle would all whoop my ass.”
We know that Good Guy Dave would only do it if David wanted him to! Grohl recently discussed his life and career at Pollstar Live, via Variety.
On first meeting the guys in Nirvana: Grohl spoke of his early impressions of Krist Novoselic, who he described as, “like six-foot-eight” and Kurt Cobain. “I saw them at a show and I thought, ‘That’s Nirvana. Oh my god.’ It was like ‘Children of the Corn.’ … With Scream, we never had anything successful. Nirvana had great songs. ‘About A Girl’ was like a Beatles song. It was clear that dude [Cobain] could write songs.”
On Nirvana’s first meeting with record executive Donnie Ienner: “Don said, ‘What do you want?’ Kurt said, ‘We want to be the biggest band in the world.’ I thought he was joking. He was serious.”
On Nirvana’s early days: “We practiced every day in this barn thing in Tacoma. We wrote a lot. There was major label interest and I just wanted to not sell equipment for food. We wanted to be Sonic Youth — play to 500 people a night.”
On life after Kurt: “After he died I didn’t want to play music again. The whole world turned upside down for me. It was bad.”
On Foo Fighters’ longevity: “The first 20 years of our band, I thought, ‘Let’s make another record and call it a day. Get one more in there.’ Now we can’t break up. Imagine grandparents getting a divorce. I’m sure it happens, but you’d be like, ‘Why?’”
On his first show: “At 13, I saw a punk band at Cubby Bear across from Wrigley Field in Chicago. There was spitting, blood, broken bottles. It was disgusting and I was like, ‘I want to do this for the rest of my life.”
On dropping out of school: “I dropped out of the high school my mom was a teacher at to play music. I never ever for one second imagined this would happen. Had this not happened I would honestly be doing this anyway, because the love of live music started [for me] when I was six or seven.”
On technology: “A lot of the changes in music I don’t understand. I don’t know the difference between Pandora and Spotify. I don’t get it. I don’t have the app. Sorry.”
On rock music as day-job: “It’s only work if you don’t want to do it. I never say, ‘I don’t want to go onstage and drink whiskey and have 30,000 people sing my songs.’ It’s pretty cool.”
