Thoughts on The Storyteller by Dave Grohl

So much of growing up is about reconciling conflicting truths: intentions can be kind yet dishonest, actions understandable yet inexcusable, and people good yet capable of shitty things. Adult life is, more than anything else, an unending education in moral ambiguity.

Dave Grohl has been a personal hero of mine for most of my life - not for his music and accolades, but for the incandescent enthusiasm that has produced them. At the time of its release, I had sampled enough of his memoir, The Storyteller, to know that it was dripping with the same contagious positivity I had come to admire about him. And so, after having it on my to-read queue for a while, I finally gave myself over to David Eric Grohl’s version of David Eric Grohl.

The book that split into two

For about two-thirds of the journey, I bathed in the if-joie-de-vivre-were-a-person of it all. Chuckling along at the genuinely funny and well-crafted accounts of his experiences through the three main phases of his career - young punk rocker, drummer of the once-biggest band in the world, and frontman of yet another rock ‘n’ roll behemoth. Narrating all of it with the wide-eyed wonder of a fanboy reliving his musical adventures, Grohl presents himself as a man with infinite capacity for gratitude, and almost none for turning down an adventure. And I was here for it.

Then, things changed.

During a conversation with a friend about the book, I learned about the controversy surrounding Grohl’s infidelity - a news cycle that I had seemingly spent vacationing under the world’s largest rock. A few quick searches later, my unblemished image of “the nicest guy in rock” had been irrevocably dented. Rock ‘n’ roll Santa was not real.

Not usually one for moral absolutism, my desire to make it through the book remained undeterred. But something had quietly shifted under the surface. When I picked the book back up, the jokes were still funny, the stories were just as absorbing, but I was no longer the same reader. And that, it turns out, makes all the difference. The book was now a different book, not because Grohl had changed a word of it, but because I now knew something about which words he had chosen not to write.

The conspicuous silence

For a memoir so warm and wholesome, the view of Grohl’s personal relationships - romantic, marital, parental (at least beyond the surface) - is noticeably sparse. The only exception being his relationship with his mother, rendered with genuine depth and tenderness in the initial chapters, and reappearing briefly, yet consistently, across the rest of the book. As significant as Cobain was to Grohl, there’s something odd about the fact that we learn more about Grohl’s four-year friendship with him than his relationship with Jordyn Blum, his wife of two decades. Indeed, the central romance of Grohl’s life is quite evidently his music, and nearly everything you come to know about him is by virtue of its adjacency to his musical career.

This could of course be a thematic choice for the book. All memoirs are ultimately curated confessions meant to construct the persona that the author wants you to meet. But knowing what I now knew, I was left to wonder how much of the exclusions were self-protective, and how much of the inclusions were perhaps diversionary.

I’ve lived long enough to have performed my fair share of intellectual gymnastics to separate the art from the artist - taking great care to make the gap plausible enough for me to cling on to that original experience of the art before it got contaminated with uncomfortable truths about the artist (Why, Morrissey, why?!). But this time, the dilemma felt a lot more immediate given that my experience of the art (the book) was unfolding in real time as I was processing the disappointing knowledge of the artist’s failings.

The experience forced me to confront something I had always suspected but never quite admitted to myself - that knowledge of the artist has the potential to fundamentally alter the experience of their art (a position philosophers call Aesthetic Interpretationism). It almost made the question of whether we should separate the art from the artist secondary to whether we even can.

He’s the one
Who likes all our pretty songs
And he likes to sing along
And he likes to shoot his gun
But he knows not what it means

In Bloom, Nirvana

The ironic idolatry

In stark contrast to my “interpretationist” experience of reading the later chapters was Grohl’s unbridled hero-worship, as he spends much of the book fanboying over his musical idols. Despite having the privilege of becoming friends with a lot of them, his accounts of his many gigs, parties, and chance encounters with them are always from the perspective of a fan, first and foremost. It reads like enjoyable, wish-fulfilment pulp to a music nerd like me. Only it’s real. And sincere.

He loves his heroes with uncomplicated abandon, despite some of them (Page, Bowie, Little Richard, etc.) having their own chequered histories. He seems to genuinely believe in the separability of art and artist when it comes to them, and more remarkably, he seems to just feel it rather than have to reason it out (a philosophical stance known as Aesthetic Autonomism). Towards the end of the book, I even caught myself feeling a bit jealous of him. Not just for the blessed, fairy-tale life he has led, but also because his appreciation for art (specifically, music) is so pure, that it stays untainted by any complicated context outside of it - a disposition I found increasingly difficult to adopt towards the book itself.

The ordinary hero

Perhaps the first mistake was mine. In an era starved of unimpeachable heroes, I was only too eager to take Dave Grohl for one. The goofy, everyman drummer with an insatiable lust for life. The nicest guy in rock. Epithets that he never asked for, but were conferred upon him nevertheless.

The Storyteller, at least partly, might be Grohl’s attempt to honour that projection. He leans into a lot of the stuff that he knows he’s loved for. And the remarkable thing is that it doesn’t feel dishonest. The enthusiasm, the child-like wonder, the gratitude - it’s all real. It’s just not the complete picture of him as a man. That picture was bound to be more complicated than what I had naively believed. Naive because multi-millionaire rockstars who’ve spent decades in the reality-distorting fields of wealth & celebrity, are seldom just Average Joes. The ordinariness Grohl’s fans wished to see in him was more a reflection of our desire for our hero to be an incorruptible one.

And yet. There is another way to read the word ‘ordinary’ - not as average, but as human. Fallible. Imperfect in the ways that all people tend to be imperfect. In that sense, perhaps Grohl is ordinary after all. Capable of the same failures that characterise the rest of us too.

My untarnished image of Dave Grohl didn’t survive my reading of The Storyteller. But Grohl never created that image; he just failed to live up to one I built myself. What did survive, however, was my image of him as a man of immense love - for life, for people, for music. That image remains unsullied, despite the inconvenient truth I now know about him. I came away from the book with a more complicated relationship with its author than I had going in. But I came away from it a fan, nonetheless.

There goes my hero
Watch him as he goes
There goes my hero
He’s ordinary

My Hero, Foo Fighters