Life After Nirvana

Dave Grohl is being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for a second time. He’s got a lot to reflect on.

- By Craig Jenkins

I meet Dave Grohl the day after a mid-September Foo Fighters gig that almost didn’t happen. A lingering fog had left the band’s private jets stranded on the JFK tarmac for almost four hours; Live Nation asked the members to record a video to play inside Syracuse’s St. Joseph’s Health Amphitheater, which seats more than 17,000, announcing the show had been canceled. Moments before Grohl made the call, he got the all-clear from the pilot. Foo Fighters raced into St. Joe’s flanked by a police escort, opening with the triumphant “Times Like These.” Weather delays are no sweat for the rock lifer, whose path to arena-front-man status wove through Scream, the venerable D.C. punk outfit he left in 1990, to Nirvana, whose meteoric ascent ended abruptly with the death of Kurt Cobain. Foo Fighters, a project that began as a batch of solo demos and ballooned into a brotherhood of punk and emo vets, will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this month, making Dave a two-time honoree after Nirvana’s induction in 2014. Between the ceremony and the rollout of his new memoir, The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music, Grohl is in a reflective mood.

It’s the fall of 1991. Nirvana is in the middle of a club tour when Nevermind is released. It sells a few thousand copies in the first few weeks. By the end of the year, it’s selling hundreds of thousands per week. At what point do you notice things have changed?