As the title might suggest, Dave Grohl's new book The Storyteller isn't really a conventional memoir, in that it's neither remotely exhaustive nor always strictly linear; on the contrary, each chapter focuses on specific formative moments, episodes or periods in his life. When lockdown hit, the same restless creative energy and relentless work ethic that have catalysed his whole career brought him to commit these stories to paper rather than take the opportunity to sit back and enjoy a hard-earned breather.
Recent BBC documentary When Nirvana Came To Britain may have implied that Nirvana weren't always the angsty, troubled grungers that they were often made out to be, but Grohl paints a different picture. Unlike Scream and Foo Fighters, Nirvana, it seems, were no band of brothers - or at least not for Grohl, who only joined the band in 1990 - and so the cracks quickly began to show when Nevermind blew up a year later. He's honest enough to admit that Kurt Cobain's death largely left him numb, whereas it was the loss of childhood pal Jimmy Swanson that really smarted.
The chapters on Nirvana form a small fraction of The Storyteller, though, and cast only a temporary shadow over Grohl's generally cheerful account of encounters and experiences that most of us can only dream of, so it would be misrepresenting the book to dwell too long on them - even if they do hold the greatest interest for me personally.
Anyway, here's my review for Buzz.
No comments:
Post a Comment