A Week In The Life - Dave Grohl

Classic Rock


Dave in the pool

Fuelled by a 'full English' and a Mexican lunch, the Foo Fighters manworks off the weight by blasting clay pigeons. he'd like to learn to fly but he's often too busy shopping at Ikea.

"My normal week when I'm not on the road is time spent making up for time away. So it's all of the things I wished I was doing while I was on the road, all of the things I neglected while I was away, or all the things I need to accomplish before I go away again. It's pretty menial bullshit, just chores and lots of trips to Ikea - lots of trips to Ikea; recharging your car battery; lots of trips renewing the licence plates on your motorcycle; repairing everything... you know. Shit dies if you leave it alone, and that's what happens to all my shit. I spend more time in the Department of Motor Vehicles than anywhere else! "It's breakfast in the morning. I'm a breakfast person. I wake up every day and drink my coffee. Some days it's the full breakfast, it's kind of on and off. Full breakfast 'Monday, muesli Tuesday, fruits on Wednesday, full breakfast again on Thursday. Lunches are usually fast, usually Mexican. In Los Angeles you get some good Mexican food on the go, super-fast, super-cheap.
  "And then it's visiting family - visiting mum and visiting the sister. And then usually dinner with either a member of the family or friends - dinner out. I don't usually go out for drinks much. It's usually drinks with dinner and then go home. I save the drinking out for when I come over here [the UK].
  "I'm an early riser. I'm a bad sleeper. I usually go to sleep with my wife. She falls asleep, and I go straight into my little Pro-Tools studio and start recording riffs. I'll be up until three-thirty, and then I go to bed and I start waking up at six-thirty or seven o'clock. So it's rare that I get more than six and a half hours of sleep. I just can't do it. And I wake up all night long, too. And I'm a crazy, vivid dreamer. I love that, man. It's exercising the imagination. My fucking mind's on overdrive all night long and then it shuts down; it backfires like a car, and you have all this crazy shit going on in your head. I think that's why night time is the right time for making music, because your brain has been conditioned to be at its most imaginative.
  "It's nice to be around at night when all of the world has shut down. I live on top of this hill where I can see the whole San Fernando Valley and mountains, and when I walk out my back door at three in the morning it's cool to just stand there and watch the entire city sleep. Lots of coyotes and rats and shit. And trees.
  "I always feel like I'm catching up, even with music. It's the same at home. I have a list of things to do. I'm big on lists, I go through the day with a list, crossing shit off, and every day there's a bigger list. That's how it goes.
  "What do I do to relax? Fucking drink, ha ha. Nothing relaxes me more than Indian food and absinthe. It sounds painful but it's kind of true. I love swimming, too. If I can wake up and start the day with a swim then that's good. I swam a lot when I was a kid and had a lot of time by the ocean. It's fun and it's good exercise. It's better than running. Fuck that. I was an athletic kid, a soccer kid, but that stopped when I discovered weed, that kind of stuff.
  "I'm a skeet shooter [US version of clay-pigeon shooting]. Fucking dead shot, too. I was in a league about three or four years ago. I got into it when I was young, growing up in Virginia. It's like golf with guns. It's great fun. It's a big sport, especially on the eastern shore. It's weird, cos it's sort of a posh sport and also kind of a super-redneck sport.
  "That's about as athletic as I get. Apart from bowling, but that's not a sport. The great thing about bowling is that you get better the more beer you drink. It's like a pub sport. I've never broken 200, my high score is 198.
  "I went to the pro shop on the bowling alley to get fitted for my own bowling ball. I looked in the catalogue and it was called The Beast - a purple ball made of reactive resin and, in almost Misfits lettering, 'The Beast'. And the guy said, 'What's your name?' and I said: 'Dick'. So it had 'Dick - The Beast' on the side. That was great. But I never broke 200, though.
  "I love flying. I never learned, but I wanted to. It was around the time of the [Foo Fighters'] 'Learn To Fly' video. How about Bruce Dickinson, flying chartered jets? I heard he was flying boy bands around and stuff. I really wanted to learn. I started getting the instructional video tapes and wanted to sign up for classes, but you can't half-ass it if you're learning to fly. You have to be devoted, and I just couldn't do that.
  "At one point I was horrified of flying. When I was young I never flew anywhere. But when Nirvana got popular we were flying everywhere and it really freaked me out. We'd hit turbulence and it scared me. And I got weird about being stuck in the aluminium tube 30,000 feet up in the air. So I got this flight simulator for my computer to play around with. And when you start learning the basic principles it makes sense. Then I got into it.
  "[Ex-Nirvana bassist] Krist Novoselic did it. he flies himself allover the place. He flew himself down to our wedding. I remember him telling me how he misread some maps once and was heading straight for the Cascade Mountains and had to make a massive deviation. It was the guitarist from Queensryche, Chris DeGarmo, who inspired him to fly.
  "Dave Grohl's ideal day? Pot of coffee, nice swim, BBQ with a keg of beer and some good friends. A good show - go see a proper band. A lot of drinks, a bottle of water and some Advil, go to sleep.