After quickly tearing through Tony Hillerman’s The Blessing Way (even further cementing my love for the Southwest), I started reading The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music by Dave Grohl and let me tell you, this man’s lust for life rivals mine.
Dave Grohl, the lead singer and guitarist for the Foo Fighters, former drummer of Nirvana, wrote himself a book. I finished The Blessing Way too quickly and didn’t have another book lined up to start reading. I’d bought this autobiography for Brandy a while back and she’d yet to crack it open so I thought I’d take a peek.
Within the first hundred pages, it was clear that Grohl has a lust for living life as passionately as I do. He talks about seeing the country, really seeing it for the first time, when on his first national tour with his first real band, Scream. There’s a point where he waxes Kerouac:
To really see America, you need to drive it mile by mile, because you not only begin to grasp the immensity of this beautiful country, you see the climate and geography change with every state line. These are indeed things that cannot be learned from an old schoolbook under the cold classroom lights; they must be seen, heard, and felt in person to be truly appreciated.
Excerpt from The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music by Dave Grohl
Grohl continues to entertain the reader with tales of adventures (and misadventures) throughout his childhood and young adulthood that fueled his appreciation for life (granted, some of that appreciation was for the improved quality of the weed he was able to get his hands on as he traveled further west, but hey, if that’s an appreciation for life that you can relate to, then you do you.)
Shortly after writing that line, he wrote, “Every day was a blank page, waiting to write itself.”
The stories he tells in the book quickly became frenetic, fraught with an ADHD-like sensibility but he never failed to project that passion for being able to live his life to the fullest. He tells fantastic stories of the people he was invited to play with like Tom Petty and Paul McCartney, he told a story where he flew from Australia to LA for a daddy-daughter dance then back to Australia, all within 22 hours. I can only imagine the physical toll that kind of lifestyle would take on one’s body, maybe a toned-down version of that kind of life is what I should aim for…
Anyway, the book was absolutely fantastic and I will likely read it again at some point in the future.
I just had to get that off my chest.
-Phil