This is a Call (10 page)

‘A lot of people don’t realise the importance of that band, but for us they were the most important band in the world,’ he remembers. ‘They really changed a lot in DC. They played every show like it was their last night on earth. They didn’t last long, but then for bands in Washington DC a career in music was never the intention. The motivation was “Let’s get together and fucking blow this place up, until we can’t blow it up any more.” Once the inspiration or electricity felt like it was fading, or once a band started to feel like a responsibility, they’d just break up. It was all about that moment. But those moments were so special to us.’

July 1985 also saw the return to the stage of DC hardcore’s spiritual leader. Ian MacKaye’s new band Embrace may not have been as musically adventurous as Rites of Spring, but they were a powerful, emotive unit in their own right. As with his previous band Minor Threat, Embrace asked a lot of questions, but this time MacKaye’s rage was for the most part directed inwards, as he dissected his own foibles and flaws in unflinching, forensic detail. In part, this soul-searching was sparked by MacKaye’s admiration for DC’s younger punk set. When he looked at bands such as Mission Impossible and their peers Kid$ for Ca$h and Lünchmeat, MacKaye saw a new breed of idealistic, gung-ho teen punks operating in blissful, stubborn denial of hardcore’s demise, a poignant echo of his own reaction to premature reports of the death of punk rock: it made him wonder at what point he stopped believing. ‘Those kids were super enthusiastic and it reminded us of our younger selves,’ he recalls. ‘It was inspiring to see high school kids playing again.’

‘The American hardcore movement may have been all over by 1984, but none of us wanted to believe it,’ admits Lünchmeat vocalist Bobby Sullivan. ‘It was hard for us to measure up to what had already happened, but we were all fans of Minor Threat and Bad Brains and we wanted to carry on the tradition, in the right way.’

Dave Grohl and Bobby Sullivan were regular visitors to Dischord House in the summer of ’85. Ian MacKaye had known Sullivan for years, as he was the younger brother of his former Slinkees bandmate Mark Sullivan, and he remembers Grohl as a nice kid to have around, always positive, friendly and full of enthusiasm. He first saw the pair’s bands play together at a tiny community centre in Burke, Virginia that July. For all the positive energy surrounding Revolution Summer, a number of prominent venues, including the 9:30 Club and Grohl’s beloved Wilson Center, had that summer stopped booking hardcore bills due to the attendant violence and vandalism. Lake Braddock Community Center in the new-build community of Burke had emerged as a new venue after Kid$ for Ca$h guitarist Sohrab Habibion persuaded his mother to sign up as a sponsor to allow him to use the hall for all-ages shows. In keeping with the inclusive vibe of these gigs, the new venue lacked even a stage, the division between the audience and performers having been distilled down to nothing more prohibitive than a line of duct tape marked on the ground. Mission Impossible and Lünchmeat shared this ‘stage’ for the first time on 25 July 1985; Ian MacKaye was in the audience to see them.

‘Everyone said, “You gotta see this drummer, this kid, he’s 16, he’s been playing for two months and he’s out of control,”’ MacKaye recalls. ‘And then I saw them, and Dave was just
maniacal
. He didn’t have all the chops down, but he was dialling it in from the gods, his drumming was so out of control, and he wanted to play so hard and so fast, it was kinda phenomenal. Everybody was like, “Woah, that guy is incredible!”’

‘One night Ian came up and told me that he thought I played just like [D.O.A./Black Flag/Circle Jerks drummer] Chuck Biscuits,’ recalls Grohl. ‘To me that was like saying, “You are just like Keith Moon,” because Chuck Biscuits was a
huge
inspiration to me. So from then I became that kid in town who played like that, I had this reputation as being this super-fast, fucking out-of-control hardcore drummer.’

‘Honestly, from the moment you saw Dave play, you were just in shock, because he seemed superhuman,’ laughs Sohrab Habibion, now playing guitar in the excellent Sub Pop post-hardcore band Obits. ‘I liked Mission Impossible, Chris was a really cool singer and they had great songs, but you’d see them play and there’d be this
monster
on the drums. Dave sat in with my band Kid$ for Ca$h for a couple of shows and it was hilarious, because the whole band was instantly transformed to a higher calibre. We played one show out at Lake Braddock with 7 Seconds and they were all just staring at him, like, “Who is this guy?”’

‘People definitely talked about him,’ agrees Kevin Fox Haley, a Woodrow Wilson High School student at the time. ‘Everyone would say, “You gotta see this kid on drums, he’s
insane.
” To me it seemed like it stemmed from hyperactivity, because he was kinda a spazz, and I don’t mean that in a bad way, but he was so goofy and full of energy. I’m from Washington DC and I’m sorry to say that myself, and some people from Dischord, were pretty snobby about looking down on the kids from the suburbs, so maybe at the time I was still stuck in that snobbiness where I was like, “Yeah, he’s good, but he’s from
out there
…” But he definitely stood out.’

For all the momentum and buzz accumulated by Mission Impossible, their days were numbered. As with so many DC bands before them, the lure of higher education was to prove irresistible. Around the time the quartet recorded their second demo tape Chris Page had been accepted to study at Williams College in Massachusetts, while Bryant Mason had been offered a place at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, meaning the break-up of the band was inevitable. Mission Impossible played its final show at Fort Reno park on 24 August alongside local art-punks Age of Consent, preceded by one last emotional show with Lünchmeat at Lake Braddock, at which the two bands decided to cement their friendship by releasing a posthumous split single. A co-release between Dischord and Sammich, a label set up by Ian MacKaye’s younger sister Amanda and her Wilson High School friends Kevin Fox Haley and Eli Janney, the EP featured three tracks taken from Mission Impossible’s April ’85 demo – ‘Helpless’, ‘IntoYour Shell’ and ‘Now I’m Alone’ – alongside three Lünchmeat originals – ‘Looking Around’, ‘No Need’ and ‘Under the Glare’. As the summer drew to a close, both bands and the Sammich kids commandeered the Neighbourhood Planning Council office to cut out, fold, paste and hand-decorate sleeves for the EP. For Grohl and his friends it was a bittersweet experience. Everyone involved in the project understood that both Mission Impossible and Lünchmeat had more to offer, but the young musicians remained positive and optimistic to the end, writing slogans such as ‘Revolution Summer is for always!’ on every sleeve. As a final gesture towards the community which had nurtured, supported and empowered them both as individuals and as bands, they decided to title the EP
Thanks
.

‘The Do-It-Yourself element made everything more special,’ Grohl recalled in 2007. ‘When your band put the money together to go into a studio, record some songs, take the tape, send it to the plant, get a test pressing, print the labels and stuff the sleeves yourselves, the final product in your hand is just amazing. Because you know you built that shit from scratch from the ground up.’

The sun had set on Revolution Summer long before the
Thanks
EP received its first review. Writing in the March 1986 issue of
maximumrocknroll
, reviewer Martin Sprouse commented, ‘Both outfits create and exhibit three high energy melodic thrashers backed by interesting lyrics. Neither outfit falls into the DC stereotype of musical direction but really do break the ice for a lot of the underground bands from that area. Worth looking into.’ By then of course both bands were already defunct.

When all 500 copies of the
Thanks
EP sold out, it was re-pressed and re-released under the rather more punk rock title
Getting Shit for Growing Up Different
. The new title was all too apt for Dave Grohl. His relationship with his own father James hit its lowest point around the same time, when Virginia Grohl informed her ex-husband that she had found a bong belonging to their son under the driver’s seat of her Ford Fiesta prior to a morning school run. Grohl and Jimmy Swanson had discovered marijuana around the same time they fell in love with punk rock and thrash metal: they embraced the herb with equal vigour. Unbeknown to his father, by 1985 Dave was also partial to huffing lighter fluid and necking hallucinogenic drugs. During one memorable Christmas party at Kathleen Place he was tripping on mushrooms to such an obvious degree that one of Virginia Grohl’s friends steered him away from the other revellers and politely enquired if he was doing cocaine. But pot remained his drug of choice: ‘I was smoking all day long,’ he admitted in 1996. ‘I was such a burn-out. My best friend was the bong. Me and Jimmy were bonded in pot; bonded by herb.

‘The first time I took acid was in Ocean City, Maryland in 1985,’ he recalls. ‘I was forced to take it. All of my other friends had taken it. They were like, “Come on! Take it! Take it!” I said, “I don’t want to take it,” and they said, “If you don’t take it we’re just going to put it in your drink,” so I said, “Okay, I’d rather know I’ve taken it.” I liked it so much I took another about six hours in …

‘When we were teenagers, me and Jimmy were outcasts,’ he laughs. ‘We weren’t jocks, we weren’t nerds, we had created our own little world: we were all about mischief and just being petty criminals. I’m sure most people thought that we were freaks, or just uncool: we were incredibly weird and geeky but we never gave a fuck. Being “cool” in suburban Virginia was like how big of a bong hit you could take. It didn’t matter what haircut you had, or what car you had, or what pants you had on, if you could burn a whole bowl in one bong hit, you were fucking cool.’

When James Grohl looked at his son in 1985, though, he did not see Virginia’s coolest teenager. Instead he saw a smart kid whose future seemed literally to be going up in smoke. He was concerned that Dave’s teenage rebellion was rooted in deeper psychiatric problems, perhaps linked to the break-up of the family unit a decade earlier, but two sessions with a guidance counsellor failed to divine any underlying issues. In a last resort attempt to impose some much-needed discipline on the boy, it was decided that Dave should transfer from Thomas Jefferson High to Alexandria’s Bishop Ireton High School, a Catholic private school, run by priests from the Religious Congregation of the Oblates of St Francis de Sales and nuns from the Sisters of the Holy Cross, known for its strict disciplinary regime. This was not a decision likely to build any bridges between father and son.

‘I’d never cracked a Bible in my life and all of a sudden I’ve started studying the Old Testament,’ Dave complained in 2007. ‘It’s like, “Dude, all I did was take acid and spray-paint shit! Why am I here?”’

Bishop Ireton’s ecclesiastical stormtroopers faced a losing battle in trying to convert the school’s newest recruit to the gospel of Christ: by late 1985 Dave Grohl was already in thrall to new gods – British rock legends Led Zeppelin. Dave first heard hard rock’s most powerful band when ‘Stairway to Heaven’ poured out of his mother’s AM radio when he was six or seven years old – ‘Growing up in the seventies,’ Steve Albini once told me, ‘Led Zeppelin were
everywhere
, so saying you were a fan of Zeppelin was like saying you were a fan of air’ – but it wasn’t until the mid-eighties that the band’s majestic
Sturm und Drang
became an obsession for him. Every weekend Grohl and Jimmy Swanson would call around to Barrett Jones’s house in Arlington armed with a bag of weed. Together with Jones and his roommate, Age of Consent bassist Reuben Radding, the pair would get high while listening to Zeppelin’s fifth album
Houses of the Holy
on Jones’s new CD player. In later years, Grohl would claim to have listened so intently to the album that he could hear every squeak of drummer John Bonham’s bass drum pedal.

‘To me, Zeppelin were spiritually inspirational,’ Grohl wrote in a 2004 essay for
Rolling Stone
. ‘I was going to Catholic school and questioning God, but I believed in Led Zeppelin. I wasn’t really buying into this Christianity thing, but I had faith in Led Zeppelin as a spiritual entity. They showed me that human beings could channel this music somehow and that it was coming from somewhere. It wasn’t coming from a songbook. It wasn’t coming from a producer. It wasn’t coming from an instructor. It was coming from somewhere else.’

To Grohl, Zeppelin were the ultimate rock band, experimental, ambitious, mysterious, dangerous, sexual and dazzlingly adroit, capable of shifting from thunderous blues-rock riffing to gossamer-fine acoustic lullabies at a flick of Jimmy Page’s plectrum. That US music critics largely
despised
Zeppelin (for all their subsequent sycophantic backtracking,
Rolling Stone
’s review of the quartet’s self-titled début album, released on 12 January 1969, just two days before Grohl’s birth, dismissed the band’s songs as ‘weak’ and ‘unimaginative’) only enhanced their standing in Grohl’s eyes. To Grohl, guitarist Page, the conductor of Zeppelin’s light and magic, was a ‘genius possessed’ while bassist John Paul Jones was ‘a musical giant’. But it was John Bonham’s masterful drumming which truly blew his mind.