Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl discussed his most embarrassing moment ever during a recent audiobook recording session with his mother Virginia. Alternative Nation transcribed the audio clip from EW.
“Oh my god, this is the most embarrassing thing ever. It was my mother’s birthday, we went down to One Step Down, which was this jazz club outside of Georgetown in Washington DC. Every Sunday they had the jazz workshop with a house band of Lawrence Wheatley, Lenny Robinson, they were heavy old school jazz dudes in Washington DC.”
“It probably held 50 people. It was tiny, so it was an afternoon thing on Sunday. What they would do is the house band would play a set, and then their second set they would invite other musicians to come up and play. So if you were a local musician, you would sign your name on the paper, give your name and instrument you play, and they would call you up, and you could jam with this band. They were the heavy cats, this was not some high school gig, it was the real deal.
So we go for my mother’s birthday, I think it was just you and I, at this point I had discovered punk rock. I had stupid hair, and ripped up jeans, and a dumb t-shirt, the whole deal. I did not look like I should be in a jazz club. We sit down at our table and ordered crab dip, or whatever the heck we always got. My mother said, ‘You know what I want for my birthday? I want you to go up and play drums with the band.’ I think at this point I had been playing drums on pillows for like a year. I was like, ‘Oh no no no no no.’ Because the jazz musicians, jazz drummers are like magicians, it’s like a whole other level. I’m like, ‘Oh Mom, I can’t. I don’t know how to.’ She’s like, ‘Please, it’s my birthday.’ So I walk up to the pad of paper and wrote my name down: David Grohl, drums. I slinked back to the table, and thought, ‘No no no, please don’t call me.’
At one point Lawrence Wheatley says, ‘Alright, next up we’ve got Mr. Dave Grohl on the drums.’ I stand up, and the whole band looks at me like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ So I just walked up, we had been to the club for years, we’d seen the band, they had probably seen us walking out of there 100 times. I just went [and played a very simple beat] for about 3 minutes. They’re like, ‘Okay, let’s hear it for Dave.’ But that was huge for me, because not only was it your birthday, but I had just jumped in the icy lake of live performance with the heaviest of all jazz bands, and realized that I sucked, and I need to get it together.”
