Learn to Fly: My Thoughts on Depression, Hope, and Silliness, through Enjoying Foo Fighters

When I started writing this post, I was really struggling with why this was worth talking about.  You may have clicked on this post because of the serious topics mentioned in the header, but that’s not why I started writing this.  Like most things in my life, this little project started as a result of me enjoying people to a silly degree.  There’s a lot of silly stuff in this post; there’s stick figures, there’s looking at how the Four Sides of Calise enjoy music (from my angsty gothic succubus side to my lollipop-glitter princess side), there’s a lot of me going googly over how much I love men (in and out of women’s clothing), there’s a lot of 90s/00s nostalgia, and me watching music/concert videos way too closely.

And I started writing all that silly, basically because it wouldn’t leave me alone; my passion rarely will.  But I was seriously just screwing around.  I pictured the brief stick figure comic at the end of this post and thought I’d just preface it by how much I’ve come to love this music lately.  Honestly I was just having fun talking.  But as I was trying to quick-finish this post over a weekend (pfffft, when am I going to learn that I suck at brevity?!?) I was just struggling on repeat with why the &@%$= writing this mattered.

Like seriously, why the zombie (we’re making that an expletive now, roll with it) should anyone care that someone named Calise likes certain types of rock music, or gets really excited about the facial expressions someone makes while playing the drums??  And even more than that, why would anyone want to read something blissfully dancing around in silliness while the world just sucks right now?

Most of the people I know are having a “hard year.”  I literally cannot enumerate the number of people I care about who have or are currently struggling with heavy bouts of depression or anxiety.  And the number of times this year alone I’ve heard phrases akin to “I thought we’d be together forever,” as I’ve seen relationships come to an abrupt and heart-wrenching end.  People are in serious stomach-plunging freefall right now.

So who am I to be happy??

I mean none of the many people I’m referring to, across my internet work, office work, church and family have actually said or even implied that to me, not in a long time anyway.  But I worry about it.  I worry ad nauseum that being happy when others are struggling is the most insensitive thing a person could do.

Not that I don’t care or ever forget about their struggles; I think the majority of these people don’t suspect I’d even be thinking about them, let alone know how much of my mental energy goes to being concerned for them.  (I don’t lay awake at night worrying about other people’s worries, 😅 what are you talking about?) 

So I was really struggling: What’s the point of writing anything?  Who am I to think I could help?  And how insensitive to be having fun and being silly while so many people are suffering, their world a bleak and gray room with no way out.

By that token, what’s the purpose of anything, this attitude questions.  If life is a revolving wheel of obligations and debts for temporary highs… then why do it at all?

See how quickly an attitude that disdains silliness and vulnerable realness, stealthily drains the color from everything?  It dissects life until its disjointed, mutilated parts no longer resemble the whole, and the end goals of humanity are obscured in the fallacious chaos.

Without silliness, vulnerability, and realness, life loses its saturation.  The whole of living is more than the sum of its parts.

So I’m going to talk about stuff, both the silly and the serious.  Because in my mind they can’t really be separated.  To me, people are what make anything matter, and enjoying people is a rather silly venture.

So the song this post is titled after is from an album called There is Nothing Left to Lose, which was released November 1999; funny enough, that was exactly 20 years ago this month (I’m charitably still calling November 30th “this month”).  Which is why I’m posting this now, right?  Ha, nope.  I actually didn’t know the album’s release date until early November.  I started this post mid-August but it just kept getting bigger, with more important topics to me.  I was embarrassed and disappointed that there was too much left to say, there was no way I could finish by the end of October let alone September.  So the 20th anniversary of the album is a happy little accident that made me feel a little less stupid for how much life force I implanted into this block of text.

But in the first two weeks of August, I went absolutely bonkers for Foo Fighters.  Those two weeks felt like a lot longer than that, but that is a common Calise-process.  I’ll get excited about individuals from watching something that they’re in, then watch a couple other things with the same person/people.  And if multiple points make a line, then I get rapidly enamored and become an obsessed sponge, binge-absorbing anything I can, to see them and form a 3D rendering of their person-ness in my head.  I’ll watch anything I can get my hands on to pick up on the slightest nuance in how they move, and speak, and think.

It’s most often men because… well, I really like men 😅, but really I just love people.  Can’t get enough of them.  It’s something that I’ve always felt silly and invasive about, cataloging people and what they care about.  Although of course it’s the foundation of A Little Bit of Personality, and I’m still always shocked when people want to have their hearts observed and adored.

Because of this, this is usually how my exchanges in-person go:

People: “Have you seen Stranger Things?”
Me: [Has written a 50,000 word post about it] “Oh yeah, I love that show!”
People hearing me listen to Nirvana: “Have you checked out the ‘Unplugged’ album?”
Me: [In the middle of writing a 20,000 word post about the themes we can draw about depression and hope from the rise of Foo Fighters after Nirvana, and watches videos of entire concerts and analyzes every facial expression] “Yeah!  So good!  Super into them lately!”

Does that make me sound creepy?  It makes me sound a little creepy. 

Anyway, since August, the target of adoration has been the band Foo Fighters.  Which is really random to have “discovered” in the second half of 2019, considering they’ve been around since the 90s, and of course it’s not like I had never heard of them before.  Actually initially going through their discography, I kept realizing “Oh, that’s a Foo Fighters song?  And that one, and that one too?!”

Now being born in 1989, 90s and 00s music is really important to me.  (What do you call 2000-2009?  Back then I started calling them “The Oozies” which I still think is way cooler than any other term I’ve heard for them, although pubescent me couldn’t get it to catch on and was super bummed.)  Even songs that I didn’t personally know at the time, carry the vibe of the era that was the backdrop to my childhood and teen years.  I mean obviously, since I turned 2 a few weeks before the release date of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991, I wasn’t listening to a lot of Nirvana at their height; and as it was as I got older, it’s not like it was my family’s cup of tea either.  And in the late 90s when the Foos were getting big, I was going to art camp and making my councilor laugh by passionately lip syncing all the words to Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way”.

Now I think I’ve always had rather adult, rocker music taste.  I don’t know if it’s just a me-thing, or an environmental-nurture thing.  My mom educated me in the ways of the classics, things I still love like the Beatles, Electric Light Orchestra, Tommy James and the Shondells, and Yes; my dad gave me a taste of Phil Collins, Led Zeppelin, REM, and James Taylor.  Paul McCartney and Gene Kelly were my first crushes.  My first favorite song, and the first concert I remember were both Three Dog Night.  And being a youngest child, my older siblings’ music taste was something I was always sampling.  In the 90s and early 2000s, I picked up the aforementioned BSB obsession from my big sister, as well as loving the Goo Goo Dolls, Third Eye Blind and Three Doors Down, but I also (a little bit secretly) liked my brother’s taste in more alternative stuff, like Cake, New Found Glory, Blink-182 and Green Day (especially the earlier stuff).

On my 30th birthday, at the end of July, I made a YouTube playlist called “Story of Calise” with (to the best I can remember) all my favorite songs over the course of my life, in order, and I think it’s really funny that it has “Going the Distance” by Cake, right beside the Kim Possible theme song, lol.

From first glance, my genre taste is all over the place, but I’ve discovered most my favorites all tend to fall within whatever an era would consider “alt-rock”; so I love a lot of classic rock and punk from the 60s-70s, but then love alt-rock, new wave, and electronic from the 80s, grunge from the 90s, alternative and post-grunge from the 00’s, and indie/folk-rock stuff now.

However, I guess that’s unfair to Ecee especially, the notion that I only like alt-rock, although gobs of my favorites fall into that category (especially post-grunge, I learned recently).  As much as Callous loves to blast AC/DC and Nirvana with the car windows down, in the hopes of standing out, and coming off edgy and hot (🤦 Callous-motives are awfully embarrassing sometimes, guys), Ecee does genuinely love immersing herself in cotton-candy bubble music and feeling alive again.  Ecee loves boy bands, Owl City, Taylor Swift, anything Disney, 80s ballads, and still remembers all the lyrics to most Aaron Carter songs, to my chagrin.  (Callous and Ecee tend to be the most embarrassing of the girls, in completely opposite ways… *sigh*)

While we’re at it, Squeezy loves busting a lung singing to… well anything I remember the lyrics to, which is a lot of songs.  But she loves anthems, and is a sucker for Bon Jovi, Tears for Fears, “Jessie’s Girl,” and “Hold Me Now” by the Thompson Twins (which she’s quick to share that there were actually three of them, but the band was named for the TinTin characters.)  She also loves musical structure and anticipating minute changes in songs, like the way a word is pronounced in a chorus, or the moment the drums come in.  She loves playing “Name that Tune” while alone (and is excellent at it, across at least five decades 😤).  She gets so into a good mashup it’s not even funny.  (To which Justin says, “Well, it’s a little funny…”)

And Angelle?  She’s all about what a song means to the archetype of who we are and how we got here, or its place in a larger story.  Angelle likes to tune out everything else and just swim in a song.  She loves lyrical rock and instrumentals that make me feel like there’s a much bigger world beyond the here and now.  She’s my Of Monsters and Men, Imagine Dragons, Halo soundtrack, and Lord of the Rings score girl.

I have playlists on YouTube for each of the girls individually, but also each pairing of them, because I usually find that I love a song because it appeals to a combo of two of my sides.  It’s fun to listen to a song and see who’s piping up in favor of it. But it’s not super common for all four of them to love a song pretty equally.  More on that later.

All this has been to say that as my 30th birthday approached in July, I’d been in full-fledged nostalgia mode, and 90s/00s music was being a balm to my soul.  And I’d noticed when I listened to Gin Blossoms radio, for example, on Amazon Music, and would ask Alexa who a song I liked was by, that the frequency with which she’d answer “Foo Fighters” seemed to be increasing.  And back in May, Everlong had popped up on my radar because we went on a friend’s boat, and he surfed behind the boat to it, which was super cool, and I was like “Dang, this is a good song!”

(Tiny rant:  Also among the 90s/00s hits was that Kelis song, “Milkshake” which I hated the existence of as a teenager because her name was pronounced like mine.  Seriously, there was a boy in my Shakespeare acting class when I was 15 that called me “Milkshake” because of it.  Was he probably blatantly flirting with me?  Yes.  Was he actually quite attractive?  Very yes.  That’s beside the point, I still didn’t want to be associated with the song!  And no, I’m not linking it, lol.)

I guess you could call me a reverse-hipster: I tend to discover music past its heyday, but then I love it way past when it’s cool.  (I recently had a conversation with my friend in his 70s, who didn’t know what a hipster was, and I came up with a description I’m proud of: It’s like folk and grunge got together…and had a way more entitled baby. 😉)

Super unnecessarily long story short?  At the beginning of August, I didn’t know who Dave Grohl or Taylor Hawkins were, and I certainly didn’t know the joke that is made in the comments of literally every Foo Fighters video, that “Hey that singer kinda looks like the drummer of Nirvana!” (because he is, lol).  But it was the perfect set up, so that as I scrolled down a playlist of 90s/00s hits, and saw the following thumbnail, it was all over:

Now, I should probably state less vaguely over here, so I don’t have to keep linking the same aLBoP post in every post over here, for those who don’t know this about me: I have a thing for men crossdressing.  Like a really big thing.  Have since childhood, it never gets old; it’s a thing.  So I mean, let’s face it, that’s why I clicked on the video.  And I was far from disappointed.

But “Learn to Fly” (not to be confused with “Learning to Fly” by Tom Petty, which is also a great song, and I love Tom Petty) swiftly struck my heart for reasons other than how incredible the drummer, Taylor Hawkins looks as the female flight attendant.  Although it certainly helped 😉.

I watched the video to Everlong (😩 again, how does Taylor Hawkins look so good in drag??) and started watching interviews, and I was just smitten.  If it’s not clear already from the gobs of links in this post, I like a lot of music, and I get super into it, obviously, but I’m not necessarily impressed by the character of musicians very often.  I appreciate talent, but that’s not the same thing as liking and admiring a person, whose music reflects their selfness.

But I just love these guys!  Frontman Dave Grohl (drummer from Nirvana, remember) is just the most adorable goober, who gives himself 100% to everything, and yet accepts the honors that’s earned him with such grace and verity, while also having fun making a complete idiot of himself (ENTJ(ep) for aLBoPers’ reference).  And Taylor Hawkins is a powerhouse of musical context (INFJ(ej)… I think we’ve established by this point that I have a thing for INFJ(j) subs, including being married to one).

(I was considering how to describe Taylor, and Justin, who has second-hand absorbed so much about FF, from me watching them and talking about them constantly for over three months, lovingly provided “crazed wildman” as a description for Taylor lol.  But that illustrates differences between subtypes, and how the intentional control of (ij) sub (like Justin) sees the cannonball-through-the-wall approach of (ej) subs, or “edge” subs as we lovingly like to call them – INFJ(edge).  I see INFJ in everything Taylor does, and yet it’s so full-throttle, no brakes, compared to how Justin approaches the same Type Specialization.)

I love watching their faces while they play.  Like look at this clip.  Look at the pure glee on Taylor’s face in the first minute as he drums, and watch how Dave flirts with the audience and does his doofy-charming bouncing thing as he sings… while he chews gum so his mouth doesn’t get dry and he doesn’t end up puking on everyone.

I’m focusing more on the drummers of Foo Fighters, because Dave’s kind of the focal point of the Foos, and Taylor… well I just love Taylor… but the other guys are awesome too, imo.  Like guitarist Pat’s ESFJ(ep) adorkable dancing while he plays, bassist Nate’s Vision-like calm (ESFJ(ip)), lead guitarist Chris Shifflet, who is just like the epitome of cool (ESTP(ej)).  And… well I don’t know very much about keyboardist Rami Jaffee; he’s really quiet on everything I’ve seen.  *Looks up more…*  Ooh, but he was in the Wallflowers!  I know the Wallflowers… okay I only know One Headlight.  I also know he wears cool jackets and likes juicing.  That’s more than I knew about him before all this.

But on the whole, they just seem unfalteringly genuine, and that comes through in their music, in interviews, and in their endlessly ridiculous music videos.

Ultimately though, I realized that the reason this topic mattered enough to me to turn into a post – the people, the songs, the nostalgia, and the silliness – is the same reason people need to hear about this:  Hope.  Because when I look out at the world right now, the biggest dearth I see all around is lack of hope.

And Foo Fighters is a story of hope.

I wasn’t going to talk about Kurt Cobain.  Just wasn’t going to touch the topic.  Dave Grohl has gotten so many incessant and insensitive questions and comments about Kurt Cobain since the inception of Foo Fighters, and I didn’t want to be one of those people.  It seemed off topic and controversial, and having gotten into Nirvana in the last five years I hardly feel like I qualify as a Kurt Cobain expert.  I don’t even know all their songs.

But then, in the midst of writing this post, when my silly reasons for writing were running dry and I was really starting to wonder why this was important whatsoever, I learned of a suicide-related tragedy that had just happened to a friend of mine, which is going to change their life forever.

So I may not be an expert on Kurt Cobain (ISTP(ij)) but I am freakishly observant (is there a point to being modest about that at the moment?) and have watched hours worth of video of him too lately, in my Foo journey.  So hopefully no one minds if I share my thoughts on who Kurt Cobain was, and the Foo Fighters phoenix that rose from his ashes.

I’m not going to go into the whole history of Nirvana.  There’s plenty of places online that have beaten that topic to a pulp.  It was Seattle in the early 90s and grunge rose from the obscurity of a dirty underground, whose sound it reflected, into a limelight that kinda defied everything it was.  And at the forefront of that were three guys in a band called “Nirvana.”  I think to Kurt, music was the only thing in the world that felt transcendent, a release from a world of pain and emptiness.

Parents divorced when he was 9, mother a victim of domestic violence from his step-father, pushed to stay with religious family friends and not really sure what he wanted to be devout to, Kurt seemed to feel betrayed by the idea of a nuclear family; like once your parents broke your opportunity for a happy family, you were just screwed and didn’t have a place you belonged anymore.

The video for “In Bloom”, shows kind of quintessentially Nirvana’s and Kurt’s attitude toward their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, and the fakery of cookie-cutter dollhouse suburbia.  Filmed on real vintage 50s/60s cameras, it imitated an era where television’s purpose was to assert the “best” way to do things, where it was more important to look like you had everything together, than to actually be real.  That vibe heavily contrasted with Kurt’s dark vocals, singing the opening line, “Sell the kids for food” really paints a picture.  It sings of frustration with a culture that cares so much about the pretended honor of having all one’s visible actions and finances in a row, that the real festering underbelly of needs goes totally hidden.

(And no, I didn’t realize when I started watching the music video and decided it was perfect to reference, that they end up wearing dresses by the end.  Purely bonus.)

The chorus goes:

He’s the one

Who likes all our pretty songs

And he likes to sing along

And he likes to shoot his gun

But he don’t know what it means

Don’t know what it means

The disgust for their fathers’ generation is apparent, invoking a “clean cut” look of pasted smiles.  (Dave in the background is my favorite, with his blonde wig and overly perky 1950s facial expression… while still chewing Dave Grohl Gum™.)

It was an era that preached from the pulpit of television that all your wildest dreams will come true, if you just bow to the god of the white picket fence… and give up what even made you a self in the first place.  Are we really shocked that this birthed GenX in all their wild and flailing attempts to show themselves they were just allowed to be alive and feel things?  Culture is such a pendulum of blame where the extremes create each other.

The chorus describes (to me anyway), someone in charge in his life, but totally, willfully oblivious to the needs of anyone outside himself, willing to throw money at a band, so long as he doesn’t have to think about what anything really means.  The kind of person who sees the cost of everything, but the worth of nothing, and assumes anything should be at their own discretion, should they throw a large enough dollar sign at it.

The announcer even calls the band “Nirv-anna,” which I saw a clip of young Dave Grohl complaining about Canadians pronouncing the band that way, lol.  As the band got big, everyone was singing their songs because they were popular, having no clue what the songs were even trying to say.

Like in this video where Top of the Pops required they only pretend to play over their prerecorded music, so they just mocked the whole thing, Kurt singing the wrong lyrics in the wrong octave, while Dave and bassist Krist Novaselic just screw around with their instruments.  Their best known song mocked an “entertain me” audience, and yet those very people turned out in droves to their concerts.  (And you know, maybe I only remember almost all the words to Teen Spirit because Callous likes singing “My Libido!” at the top of my lungs, but I do try to learn and understand what songs mean.)

For the record, I am just as annoyed at all the emo-anarchists in the comments of Nirvana videos who are emotionally twelve, complaining about how they miss Kurt when they clearly don’t understand the songs either.

Kurt Cobain was scathing but not toward people who were genuine.  Unlike so many wannabes who would pretend to be “smart” like him; pessimistic nihilists who think they’re so smart always seem to take a dump on the “masses,” pretending to be intellectually special because they can quote people with a dreary outlook on the world.

When are people going to learn that nihilism is actually not practical?  That pessimism actually limits options rather than creating them, and doesn’t prepare you for anything that actually might go wrong.  Whereas hope, like sunlight, helps show possibilities, and motivate to action.  And I’m pretty darn tired of it being treated as naive and inexperienced to be happy.

If someone is struggling to believe there’s happiness to be had, that’s perfectly valid, and I make it my mission in life to help people understand happiness.  But pretending it’s smarter and more experienced to disdain optimism is just a painfully tired shtick that doesn’t hold up to experimentation.

(Besides which, nihilism at its core is really just an attempt to desperately claim meaning, by saying that there is no meaning.  Which is cyclical and dumb.  If nothing truly meant anything, why waste the breath to say so, because knowing nothing meant anything would be worthless, since nothing would be worth anything.)

One of my favorite Nirvana songs is actually this cover of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World”; I talked about the power of “being a Bowie” in the Jonathan section of the Stranger Things post.  I also used Kurt as an example of an ISTP(ij) for that section, before knowing this song.

Instead, from everything I’ve ever observed of Kurt Cobain, he just wanted people to be real.  He was sick of the saccharine and the shallow.  It seems to me he was sick of a culture where nothing was based on actual merit, but shiny accolades bestowed by group-appeal; from interviews I’ve heard him discuss it in music, politics, religion, medicine, directing, and art.  He was tired of a world where nothing was earned, only schmoozed.

Fakery annihilates hope, by making people believe that the pretended, synthetic shine of plastic is the best that remains possible.  It teaches that deception, even to oneself, is just a fact of life.  And says that no one ever actually achieves happiness, instead claiming happiness is something you’re born with or not, and that even those bestowed with it from some divine right have a high-fructose corn syrup version of joy.

I don’t think Kurt wanted to believe that the world was doomed to the crapsaccharine, but I think he truly struggled to believe there was hope of anything more.  I don’t think Kurt Cobain wanted a world where nothing mattered, and yet I think he felt like the meaning he found in music and good friends were just gasps of breath between being pulled back under a tarry black ocean of hopelessness.

Kurt wrote songs about problems he didn’t know how to fix, in the desperate need to do something.  Like we talk about on aLBoP, IP’s job is to ask questions, find real life plot holes, and that’s what Kurt did.  But he didn’t know the answers.  And as he made it big and traveled the world, answers seemed far more sparse than questions.

If there’s one thing I’ve gleaned about Kurt Cobain, it was that he loved women.  That he loved that they were not only sexy (which he certainly found them), but so strong, vital, passionate and courageous.  And I think he felt a great weight over the desire to help protect and save them.  I also think he liked that he was a man, but so wanted to do it right, to do it better than he saw it done, right and left.  He seemed very fascinated with male anatomy and what it meant to be a man, but so disgusted with how masculinity had been used as an excuse to suppress other selves, to control and dominate under one’s own desires.

“The problem with groups who deal with rape,” Kurt said, “is that they try to educate women about how to defend themselves.  What really needs to be done is teaching men not to rape.  Go to the source and start there.”

But even with a Nevermind sized microphone, it’s hard to change people who don’t want to change.  And Kurt’s hope at being able to truly affect people to the point of change seemed to shrink even as his audiences grew.  He kept seeing the “plankton” side of humanity – I say referencing what he called the kind of men who raped a girl while singing Kurt’s anti-rape lyrics at her.  The world needed answers, and Kurt Cobain had only questions.  He needed answers he didn’t have.

So without answers to give him hope amidst the darkness, Kurt fell into despair and tried to hide in the short-term high of drugs, the only escape he thought he had.

Addiction, as I understand it – whether it’s an addiction to heroin, crack, chocolate, or ice chips – comes from a substance or action causing temporary relief from some pain, whether physical, mental, or emotional, but then the pain outlasts the relief.  Then the mind or body believes that the substance or action that mollified the pain is the only available option to remove it again.  But the addiction does not fix the pain (and often even exacerbates it), and in most cases it takes more of the addictive thing each time, to pause the pain.  So as the pain goes unresolved, the situation calls on the sheer willpower of the addicted person and any semblance of a support structure they may have, to stop the addictive act, which really isn’t fair or safe.  And the pain remains, calling to the mind for relief.  And how long can someone in desperate pain, in their body or mind, resist that call, without true relief?

I’ve struggled with a mild version of trichotillomania, or compulsive hair-pulling.  At least I think it’s mild.  I’ve struggled with several obsessive-compulsive symptoms over the course of my life, from popping my wrists a certain number of times as a preteen, to being scared to dispose of literal trash when I’ve thought it could maybe be useful somehow, to having panic attacks in response to an empty stomach, after being homeless.  And the hair-pulling was on the more recent side.

When nervous, I’d obsessively look for split ends, and either break or cut off each one.  At worse times of stress, I’ll have ended up removing the entire offending shaft, and then ones with a weird texture for good measure.  I’ve created embarrassingly thin spots on my scalp when I’ve been really stressed.

It was just something I did, when I was thinking.  I noticed that sometimes I’d do it when I was worried or being hard on myself, but it was oddly fun and cathartic.  Satisfying.

But then it was commented on at work, by someone attempting to sensitively tell me it came off unprofessional.  Now, I’m not the poster child of professionalism, and with how I feel about fakeness, in a lot of ways I’m okay with that.  But this really knocked me down, and after they left the room, I tried not to cry at my desk, the rest of the day.  I was mortified and worried about the impression people had of me and Justin tried to talk me through it.

He was patient and soothing, while pointing out that it wasn’t because I was gross or anything, but that my body language would completely transform while I picked at my hair.  My confidence would go into hiding and I’d hold myself as small and worthless.

On reflection (with more tears), I realized what a fulcrum of my own self-nit-picking my hair had become.  (Not literal nits, somehow I’ve never gotten lice… knock on wood.)  I always loved my hair growing up, it was one of my favorite features, despite feeling like it would often become a crazy frizzy mess.  But (again) when we were homeless and I was malnourished, my hair took a serious beating and I disliked it for years.

Although my hair gets healthier all the time now, this mental, subconscious, pain was being a layover, that hair picking temporarily soothed.  When I picked at my hair, it made me feel like I was on top of finding flaws in myself before anyone else could. No one could attack me if I attacked myself first, and harder, my subconscious thought.

This was a fairly minor addiction, but it still would have been so difficult for me to kick without having the emotional pain causing it resolved first.  I still have the desire to pick at my hair, because it feels safe, even if my conscious mind knows it isn’t.  But I’ve been able to stop much easier, and with larger success, because I could remember to work on the pain causing my addiction in the first place, rather than believing my hair was really the problem.

But depression is the bubonic plague of our time, and we can’t keep pretending that people’s worldviews and skewed images of their own selves aren’t a huge determining factor.  I’m so sick of science and individuals pretending that if you stick a label on something it suddenly doesn’t need to be examined further, and can be cured with a magic pill more easily than a urinary tract infection.

And this is NOT to say that I’m blaming people for their depression.  To the absolute contrary, I’m merely tired of victims being told “hey, now pop this substance in your mouth and maybe then you’ll feel like your life matters.  No?  There couldn’t possibly be any other factors in your life contributing to how you feel like the entire world has gone gray.  So how about this one… This one?  Well keep trying, this time for sure!”

I’m not blaming the victims who dare to hope one more time that the temporary effects of a substance will become permanent, although I truly don’t see how it’s that different than hoping more addictive or illicit substances that give temporary escapes will save you from pain… Because nothing prescribed for depression is addictive, of course… (How, pray tell Hippocrates, is that “Do no harm?”)

Our current culture has a major approved-substance abuse problem, using labels and legal drugs to throw a band-aid on gaping wounds.  Using temporary solutions to pretend that everything is chemical, everything can be brushed away with a shiny new pharmaceutical.  People need hope and they need help.  They need to know that the life, the abuse and the pain they’ve experienced can’t just be cleaned up tidily with chemicals!

You know how people end up feeling when you tell them they’re just a bunch of chemicals?!  Like nothing matters.  So that’s not a vicious cycle or anything.

Everyone knows that depression is affected by how we see the world, and ourselves, and our emotions and our histories, but that’s become a strange taboo.

I liked Anthony Bourdain.  He was super charming, I believe he was a good man, and I appreciated how he gave different cultures all over the world a voice via food.  But if you watch most episodes of No Reservations, honestly his worldview is pretty dismal.  Now it’s not unusual for ENTJs to be a little pessimistic about people (he was ENTJ(ep), same as Dave).  But while I thought it was tragic that he took his life, I didn’t understand why so many people were surprised.  Hopeless world and people-views lead to… well hopelessness.  I don’t think that dooms anyone to take their own life, but I really can’t fathom why we don’t seem to consider it a factor anymore, as a culture.

I think part of the reason people are afraid to examine that aspect of depression, is how much everyone gets blamed for what goes on inside their minds, so much more than in their bodies.  I mean obviously there’s more control there.  But why are people expected to have the tools to heal themselves mentally, all by themselves, when we’d never put that kind of pressure on someone who has appendicitis or is hemorrhaging, to fix themselves.

And we act like if there’s a solution to depression, then someone should have been able to fix it on their own, like they magically should have known all along.  Therefore, if solutions are proposed, it’s interpreted as blaming the depressed.

Can you imagine if we had the same attitudes toward physical ailments?

“Hey, I have a cure for cancer!”
“How dare you blame Susan for having cancer!!”
“… What??  I’m not, I just think I have something that could help.  I’ve even seen it work for other people.”
“Susan can’t help that she has cancer!!”
“… When did I say it was her fault that she has cancer??  I just don’t want her to have to have cancer in the future, I’m not saying ‘how dare she have it!'”
“She’s a cancer patient, that’s just who she is.”
“I thought she was Susan who just happens to have cancer right now… you’re making it sound like she wants to have cancer.  I don’t think cancer is what makes her Susan.”
“You’re saying it could just go away easily, so she should have fixed it sooner.”
“…No, I’m saying that I have a solution that took a lot of hard work, and might be painful for Susan to take, but if it could permanently cure her, getting all the cancer out at its root, it’d be worth it, right?”
“You’re saying she should just suck-it-up-and-deal with her cancer.”
“That is literally the opposite of what I’m saying.”
“…Nah, I’m pretty sure booze will work better.  Probably just needs more of it, or a different brand.”
“You don’t think that might cause her liver to fail instead, so her body fails to heal even further?”
“She doesn’t notice feeling sick after she drinks, so that’s probably all she needs.”

If you’re struggling with depression or anxiety, I beg you to consider that there may be areas of your understanding of the world, people, or yourself that aren’t actually accurate.  And that that’s good news.  It means that the areas where things seem the bleakest are probably lacking information.

Attitudes that pretend “nothing matters” parse out meaning, and vivisect it until the whole is obscured in the mess of parts.  Smarmy attitudes that say that life is like an alphabet, just a jumble of letters.  Forgetting that a-p-p-l-e isn’t just a bunch of letters, the complete word more than the sum of its parts.  Put life together and it’s juicy and red and smooth and crisp.

You can look at a person as a jumble of insignificant body parts, or you can see the whole beautiful being, full of intelligence, will, desire and potential, their body a beautiful reflection of all those things.  (Which, I’m pretty sure, is what pisses people off when we say we can Facial Type.  It makes people a lot more comfortable to believe that faces and bodies are just a chaotic jumble of pieces, not a beautiful fractal microcosm of meaning.)

In this interview, Kurt talks about his digestive issues, which were so bad at the time, he considered suicide then.  He makes an interesting statement (timestamp): “’If I’m gonna die, if I’m going to kill myself, I [might as well try taking] some drugs’”, meaning pharmaceuticals, and then finally one of them worked.  But I’d use that same logic to say if pessimism isn’t working for you, and you find yourself in the pits of despair and everything seems colorless, try optimism instead.  Just experiment.

And I’m not talking about BS pretend-everything-is-okay “““optimism”””.  I’m talking about being real first.  I’m talking about the kind of hope that says something can be done, that takes the brave leap to believe that things can be improved with perspective, effort, and personal heroism.  Rising from the ashes is what humanity does.

And that’s what Dave Grohl did.

I get the impression that for the most part for Dave, being with Nirvana, he was just a kid jamming with friends, trying not to feel like the odd-man-out.

People make the legend of Nirvana into this hyped-up poetic glamor emo fest, and maybe it has elements of some of those things, but in my personal opinion, true poetry is formed when reality just speaks for itself.  Meaning is at its purest when it’s real.

Again, I don’t want to be one of those people who assume every Dave Grohl song is about Kurt Cobain (which we’ll hit more on later), but the following song Dave has actually said is about his Nirvana bandmates, written just after joining the band, while he was sleeping on Kurt’s couch.  In this interview with The Guardian (which was actually posted pretty recently, while I’ve been on my magical Foos journey 😮), Dave talks about the song “Friend of a Friend” which he recorded alone under the name “Late!” in 1990:

“I felt really alone,” he says. “I was stuck in this room that had cigarette butts all over the floor and this turtle tank.  Every night as I tried to fall asleep on a couch half my size, this f*ing turtle would just bang its head on the glass.  Kurt liked turtles.   I don’t even think it had a f*ing name.”  When Cobain went to bed, Grohl would record. “There was no TV.  We had four records: Divine, Mark Lanegan, Devo and a Bobcat Goldthwait comedy LP.  I was sick of those, so I recorded some songs whispering, barely playing guitar.  I didn’t wanna wake Kurt.”

And the result is such a pure, scared but real poetry that I think displays the band from a point of view that only Dave could have had, but with this beautiful out-of-body feeling as he refers to himself in the third person, like everything is being watched by a fly on the wall.  The version I’m linking is the re-record with Foo Fighters later, because it’s so hard to hear the lyrics in Dave’s original solo recording, but you can hear more of the young desperation and loneliness in the original.

The lyrics, for reference:

He needs a quiet room
With a lock to keep him in
It’s just a quiet room
And he’s there

He plays an old guitar
With a coin found by the phone
It was his friend’s guitar
That he played

He’s never been in love
But he knows just what love is
He says nevermind
And no-one speaks

He thinks he drinks too much
Cause when he tells his two best friends
I think I drink too much
No-one speaks (x3)

He plays an old guitar
With a coin found by the phone
It was his friend’s guitar
That he played

When he plays
No-one speaks (x2)
When he plays
No-one speaks

From what I’ve gathered, the first two stanzas are about Dave himself, the third about Kurt, the fourth about Krist Novaselic, and then it repeats again.  But the repeated line “no-one speaks,” ironically speaks volumes, I think, about the isolation of quietness, and unspoken elephants in the room.

(Am I using “ironically” wrong?  Eh, when talking about the 90s you have to use “ironic” wrong, it’s a rule.  To which my mind immediately follows up, “Taylor Hawkins played drums for Alanis Morisette!”  Not on “Ironic” though.  Well, I mean he did on tour, but not on the record.
…After all that I don’t think I actually used it wrong.)

On a personal note (which I guess I’m allowed because my name is in the url), “Friend of a Friend” has a vibe that reminds me of a short play I wrote for my theatre production class in college, while Justin and I were broken up.  I broke up with him, and it had just happened and we were in this awkward “I still love you and we’re best friends but we need to stop making out because I don’t know if I can make this permanent” stage.  And our two other best friends at the time were a guy and a girl, and Justin had gone out with her a little, I’d dated him, and they’d gone out together too.  So none of us were dating anymore, but we were all best friends and there was these raw, unspoken dynamics between us.  It was called “Jandalisily,” the portmanteau of the four of our names. 

My group in my theatre class didn’t pick my play to perform, instead they picked a slap-sticky comedy about mimes that everyone ended up hating by the end, and the guy who wrote it wasn’t even there for the performance.  But when I go back and read Jandilisily, there’s this lovely tragic time capsule of love and pain and memories that I’d never remember the same way had I not written it right from the midst of what I was feeling.

I’ve noticed that it’s difficult for people to show gratitude while suffering depression, by nature of the beast.  I could go into a Types of Information rant here, but it sufficeth to say that play, color, enjoyment, and gratitude go hand-in-hand.  And when you’re world feels low-saturation, it’s hard to enjoy or appreciate anything, including people who love you and work hard for you.  And we often appreciate the most dependable people the least, because we take them for granted, thinking they’re always going to be there, no matter how we act toward them.

And I think Kurt had a hard time making his bandmates feel appreciated.  It was different for ISFP(ip) Krist, who’d known Kurt since high school, and I don’t think felt the need to show his merit musically the same way Dave did, who has said he never felt appreciated musically in the band.

In this interview (after the footage about people’s reactions to In Utero, demonstrating how frequently misunderstood the band, especially Kurt’s, intentions were with the songs (the “finance major” guy is particularly classic, lol), and how frustrated Kurt seemed about people not understanding his songs were against things like rape), the band discusses collaborating on songs, and how Kurt looked forward to less of the pressure being on him to write… promptly insulting Dave’s guitar riff on a song as “Boneheaded.”  Dave immediately gets an expression that is trying not to show hurt.  Krist, who had just stood up for Dave’s contribution of the riff in the first place, laughs a little awkwardly like, “Dude, don’t air the dirty laundry!”  Then Kurt seems to realize the effect of what he’d just said and instantly follows with, “You know, we’re really passive aggressive people.”

Apparently that invalidating attitude from Kurt, I imagine repeated more in private than in public interviews, was still stinging Dave a couple years later, as he references it in this interview as he’s just striking out on his own.

He says (timestamp): “[I] had these ideas in my head, and I went in the studio and did it, and afterward I listened back to it and I thought like, ‘Wow!’  That’s the kind of song that I always wanted to write, but I was either too scared lyrically to express too much of myself, or I was too afraid to have such a *rolls eyes*  kind of ‘bonehead’, like hard-rocking riff or something.  And so after I finished I thought, ‘Wow, I actually accomplished what I was trying to do for a really long time.”

Seeing the gears turning in Dave’s head there, watching him be both proud and worry if he really has a right to stand on his own as an artist, and thinking he probably felt like he had to try and measure up against thoughtless things Kurt said about his musical decisions, kind of breaks my heart.

But I think it was a lot to require of a twenty-something guy who was trying to figure the world out, to be a leader and a way-paver in a band that was becoming so influentially loud, and had so many expectations suddenly riding on them.

I can’t find it again at the moment, but someone (I want to say one of the SubPop records guys) talking about Kurt said he was a self-contradiction, citing that he was suicidal, and yet wanted to drive a Volvo because it had the highest safety ratings; this person thought that a contradiction.  But I was watching that thinking, “That’s not a contradiction, that’s just depression.”  Everyone I’ve ever known whose had suicidal thoughts (which isn’t a small number) is also simultaneously terrified of death.  They feel like it haunts their steps, ever over their shoulder, ready to strike when they’re least in control.  They have graphic images of gory ways to die, ingrained into their minds that won’t leave them alone.  They’ll mention it, here and there, offhandedly, subtly, laying clues to their internal condition, hoping someone will notice and actually try and help.

But the lack of control over their own mortality is, from what I’ve seen, universally terrifying to people experiencing this sort of internal trauma.  And from what I’ve gathered, that’s a large portion of the lure of suicide:  The tantalizing idea of controlling your own future… even if that means merely controlling when it ends.

Kurt’s last recorded song.

And on April 5th, 1994, it was over, with a shotgun and a cold pot of tea.  Just a month before, Kurt had overdosed on heroin and champagne in Rome, but when Dave worriedly told him on the phone, “Hey man, I don’t want you… to die, okay?”, Kurt blew him off and claimed it was a big mistake.  That’s something I’ve seen as a trend among people with depression and suicidal thoughts, too: embarrassment and rewriting history because they don’t want to be in trouble, and they’re afraid of people seeing how much they’ve lost control, inside their own minds.

There’s all these conspiracy theories about Kurt being murdered instead of having taken his own life.  There are famous people who say it, as well as plenty of YouTube comments (because, y’know those are pretty trustworthy and reliable) who are opinionated on the topic.  But in my opinion, that’s really insulting to Kurt.  I’ve seen so many comments along the lines of, “He couldn’t have take his own life, he was such a good guy, so so-and-so did it!”  Um… excuse me?  I take issue with the idea that he couldn’t have been such a good guy and yet have fallen into a hole where he was unable to dig himself out of.

In his suicide note, Kurt talked about his unwillingness to be fake anymore.  “The fact is,” he said, “I can’t fool you, any one of you.  It simply isn’t fair to you or me.  The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I’m having 100% fun.”  He demeaned himself as weak, using phrases like “emasculated, infantile complanee,” and “an erratic, moody baby,” calling himself a “narcissist” and “too sensitive.”

He said, “On our last 3 tours, I’ve had a much better appreciation for all the people I’ve known personally, and as fans of our music, but I still can’t get over the frustration, the guilt and empathy I have for everyone.  There’s good in all of us and I think I simply love people too much, so much that it makes me feel too f*ing sad.  The sad little, sensitive, unappreciative, Pisces, Jesus man.  Why don’t you just enjoy it?  I don’t know!

“I have [a] daughter who reminds me too much of what I used to be, full of love and joy, kissing every person she meets because everyone is good and will do her no harm.  And that terrifies me to the point to where I can barely function.  I can’t stand the thought of Frances becoming the miserable, self-destructive, death rocker that I’ve become.

“I have it good, very good, and I’m grateful, but since the age of seven, I’ve become hateful towards all humans in general.  Only because it seems so easy for people to get along that have empathy.  Only because I love and feel sorry for people too much I guess.”

And then he signed off by referencing a Neil Young lyric: “It’s better to burn out than fade away.”

He didn’t know how to be okay with caring about people when they sucked so very much, something my heart has broken about a thousand times, too, throughout my life.  And he felt so ungrateful for being so unhappy after so much success.

The daughter mentioned, Frances Bean Cobain, just three years younger than me, recently posted this beautiful poem, originally by Jellaludin Rumi, on her Instagram (I found it here, but forgive the clickbait-y headline):

“This being human is a guest house.  Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide for beyond.”

I was very impressed to think that that’s how she thinks of depression, even after Kurt’s decision completely changed the course of the rest of her life, just a baby at the time.  She seems really tough and relatively normal despite everything in her life.  (She’s also really pretty and I like her fairy Halloween costume this year.)

But Kurt seemed unable to let the guests of his emotions be there, too scared to be real to his own emotion and internal frailty.

But the way that Dave Grohl responded to his own emotions, pain and mourning, in the wake of Kurt’s demise, is what really inspires me.  Okay, I’m just going to paste my cobbled together account from lots of different sources of Dave talking about this.  He’s been asked about it a million and two times, and I kept gathering quotes, but I’m just going to plop them down in an order that makes sense narratively.  If you really want to know where a particular quote is from you can just ask me in the comments.

“When I found out that he had killed himself,” Dave said, “I was kind of numb.  I knew that he was gone, but I didn’t know how to feel.  After Kurt died, I didn’t want to play music.  I didn’t want to play the drums.”

“I kinda don’t really remember a lot of that summer… [I] didn’t know what I was gonna do, I spent a lot of time doing… nothing.  No radio, no tv… nothing.  I just couldn’t stand the sound of music.  I was scared of music.  I remember being in Ireland, driving around the country, away from everything–just rocks and moss and sheep–and being totally disconnected from the rest of the world.  And I drove past this kid who was hitchhiking… and he had a f*ing Kurt Cobain shirt on.  I saw that and I thought, ‘I-I gotta do something, quick!’

“And then I realized that music was the one thing that was gonna help me out of that place.  So I started writing again.  Started from scratch.”’

“When I was a kid, like 11 or 12 years old, I was recording songs by myself,” he said, “I’d get two tape decks, I’d record guitar on one cassette, hit play so that guitar’s sound is coming out, and I’d sing along to it as I hit record on this other cassette.

“Yeah, I mean there’s plenty of songs I never wanted anyone to hear because I was mortified.  They just weren’t any good.  I was practicing, I was wood-shedding; I was writing just to exercise that muscle.  It was just… fun.

“I was in bands with brilliant songwriters, great singers; who the f*** cared about what I was doing on my time off??  So I’d come home from a tour, or come home from rehearsal, go into my basement, in the house I lived in with Barrett Jones, and he’d hit record, and I’d record some songs on my own.”

“Y’know, the last thing in the world that I ever wanted to do in Nirvana was disrupt the chemistry of that band.  What we had worked pretty well.  Kurt wrote these unbelievable songs, and all we had to do was plug in, and play.”

“At some point, I was finally motivated. *Shakes it off*  Vaaa, I’m gonna get myself out of this funk I’ve been in for the last… eight months or whatever it was.”

(It was actually six months, but I’m sure it felt like way longer.  Those bottleneck times always do.)

“I decided I was going to take my favorite songs that I had written over the last four or five years, that no one had heard, and I was going to record them at a [studio] down the street from my house.”

“I knew that everyone only knew me as ‘the drummer in Nirvana,’ but I felt like I had nothing left to lose.”

Like Dave laughed recently, in an interview with Ringo Starr: “Well, that’s the famous old joke: ‘What’s the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out? “Hey, guys, I got a song I think we should play.”’”

Dave had written something like 40 songs by the time Kurt died, very few of them reaching an audience yet.  So, not knowing if anything would come of it, but going forward for his sanity and for his soul, in October of 1994 Dave took five or six days in the same recording studio where Nirvana had last recorded, and recorded what he felt were his best songs… playing all the instruments himself.

Taylor Hawkins said in a recent interview (omigosh, love that interview, will quote more later), “[Dave] had made the first record all by himself, which is amazing–he did it in like five days of course… being Dave Grohl, the master of ‘Who gives a crap, but oh, look at what I did.’  He’s brilliant.”

He recorded 15 songs that week, playing drums, guitar, singing, the whole shebang, and made 100 cassettes.  He’d been reading a book about UFOs, came across the WWII term for UFOs, “Foo Fighters,” and thought “That’s a good band name,” especially because he wanted everyone to think the album was an actual band, instead of that one guy from Nirvana playing all the instruments.  Apparently if he had known it was actually going to go anywhere, he would have called it something else, because the name Foo Fighters is in his opinion “f*ing stupid”.

Dave got several offers, including being asked to play with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers after playing drums on SNL for him.  It would have been safer than going out on a limb and starting his own thing.  But Dave didn’t want to play it safe, he wanted to give this a real go.

He thought he had a “really stupid voice” and made jokes that he couldn’t hide behind the drum kit anymore, although he was almost skinny enough to hide behind the mic stand.  He seemed really nervous to be the focal point for a band, the mouthpiece for interviews and a leader of peers. “I feel like I’m just supposed to be this presence!  And I’m not.”

And the press sure didn’t make it easy to move on and start something brand new, brutally acting like gossipy old 19th century ladies who thought a widow shouldn’t be out of mourning yet.  (Don’t worry, I am so not going to talk about Courtney Love.)  They wouldn’t stop acting like who was he to try and start another band.

Song off the first album, demonstrates Dave’s irritation with self-centered people who acted like he “[owed] them anything.”  I also can’t unsee that the drummer isn’t actually playing on the recording, because the drums are so obviously Dave and the hand motions don’t match the amount of force needed to make those sounds, but anyway…

I love watching baby-Dave in interviews back then, and when he was asked stupid and invasive questions, he would look into the camera like he was confiding in the viewers, “I’m just going to talk to you, because these guys are crazy.”

“There were some people who really resented me for starting this band,” Dave said.  “‘How dare you f*ing start another band!’  They asked [me], ‘Why did you decide to carry on and make music that sounds like Nirvana?’ and I said, ‘Well, wait a minute, you mean like loud rock guitars and melodies and cymbals crashing and big-a** drums? … ‘Cause that’s what I do!  That’s… I was in that band and this… Like that’s what I do!  What, you want me to f*ing make a reggae record??’’

“The first couple of years, I really felt like I had to explain and defend what I was doing, because, ‘first of all, you’re just a drummer, and now what you’re trying to sing?!  And also you were in Nirvana so, what the f*** is this s***?!’  [You] just get to the point where you just think, ‘you [know]… *exasperated*  f*** you people!’”

Every single song was assumed to be about Kurt, for years and years (if not still).  As if I needed a reason to dislike Howard Stern more, this interview with him and the girl on his show asserting “My Hero” to be about Kurt… or at least about how your heroes always disappoint you (instead of what it’s actually about and what Dave keeps saying, that the people that are heroes to him, are just ordinary people just doing their thing), really irritates me.

People even gave Dave a hard time about the gun on the cover of the album because they asserted it as insensitive to how Kurt died, when in actuality it was supposed to be a reference to the band name instead, a little space raygun.

“And it’s also difficult when one of your friends or someone that you’re very close to, in real life, has become something more than a human being to others,” Dave said in that same interview with Ringo, talking about when people ask about Kurt and John Lennon.  “So you sit in an interview and someone asks you these questions that are really emotional, that you’d never ask another stranger.”

“‘How’d you feel when your brother died?’ ‘How’d you feel when your family member died?’  It’s just not something that you’d meet someone and say.  So it was tough for a while, but I realized that it was important for me to continue with life, and the thing that saved my life was music.  More than a few times before that, my life was saved by playing music.”

The band had serious ups and downs over the years, and for the first while it had a serious membership problem.  After a while people would ask, “Wait, who’s in the band now??” because it was hard to keep track.  (These days it’s hard to keep track just because they keep adding people and collaborating, lol.)

After having started Foo Fighters as just Dave alone, he needed other people in order to play live and make a go of a touring band of his own.  As the band Sunny Day Real Estate was dissolving, Dave nabbed bassist Nate Mendel and drummer William Goldsmith, and he called back in Pat Smear who had toured on guitar with Nirvana.

And that was working fine for touring, which they were doing a ton of, but recording a second album was a completely different thing.

“I hadn’t become a band leader yet,” Dave said. “It was still this experiment.  I had no idea what I was doing. I almost made that second record to prove the first one wasn’t a one-off.”  As good as the first album was, people were still treating Dave and this project of his almost like a novelty.  I mean the fact that he’s constantly still referred to as the drummer from Nirvana says how much people just wanted to pigeon-hole him.

But Nate and William, who hadn’t made a studio record with a producer and everything before, were struggling with it.

“This was my first real recording process,” Nate said, “and now there’s a producer, like someone who’s not just pressing play, but actually is saying like, ‘I think that should be a C… and you should also play that in time.’… I could tell when I had to do something a million f*ing times that it was taking longer than I wanted to, and it was just sort of my first realization, ‘Oh, I’m not a fully formed musician, I’ve got to keep getting better.’”

But William, (who seemed kind of immature, in my opinion, even before the recording situation happened) didn’t seem as focused on “this is an opportunity for me to step up,” as Nate was.

Taylor’s take, in retrospect was, “[Dave] knew it was a make or break record, and the drummer just couldn’t handle it.  Couldn’t handle the pressure, wasn’t used to the studio.  Y’know the studio’s a whole different trip.  It’s one thing [to] bash it out live; no one’s sitting there scrutinizing each *snare rhythm* I mean the snare’s gotta land in the same spot every time… but the drummer he just chunked it.”

He seemed to want the music to come to him, instead of him going to the music.  Both in how hard he worked at it, but also in how he wanted to have more say in how the drums sounded.

He resented that Dave had always already written the drum parts of each song, which of course Dave had.  He was playing the guitar and singing, but in the songs that he wrote, the drums were still his baby.  He was super perfectionist about the drums being right, because he of all people knew how much difference drums can make on a song.

William, in my opinion, had an attitude I’ve seen people have in so many other areas of life besides music, that they care more about being the person to do something praiseworthy, than they care about the result being praised.  When all you’re thinking about is claiming glory for having put your stamp on something, you’re not really caring about how the thing itself turned out, nor about the people receiving it.  It’s not about the song, or whatever it is you’re creating, it’s about you.

And honestly, Dave probably didn’t handle it the best he could have.  When the album had been fully recorded, Dave didn’t feel it was up to par, and re-recorded the drum tracks himself for the new album behind William’s back.  All of them.

But from everything I’ve seen of Dave, he wasn’t trying to be douchey, he just honestly cared deeply about the drums of all things being up to scratch.  He probably should have confronted William about it and told him to his face instead of going behind his back, but I wonder if that was a massively failed attempt to keep drama down.

I get the impression Dave, in his mind at the band’s inception, wanted the band to be a chill relaxed thing where everyone screwed around, but that wasn’t producing the music he knew could be made.  He didn’t want to stand up and be a leader of other adults.  But that’s what being a frontman is about, it’s about being a leader, and leadership is about making decisions even when they’re difficult or people are going to get mad at you and blame you for things.  It’s about doing the best thing for the group, even when it’s not popular.

Eventually when Dave did talk to William, he offered to have William continue to be their tour drummer, but William had taken Dave’s choices too personally to stay.

“He didn’t fire him,” Taylor pointed out.  “[Everyone] thinks he fired him.  He didn’t fire him, he said ‘Dude, you’re just not ready to make a record yet, and this record’s make or break.  And I’ve made records and I know what I’m doing.  Learn how to record.’”

From statements he made fairly recently, William still hasn’t forgiven Dave, 20+ years later.

So then Dave and Taylor fell in bromance love and the rest was history, lol.  Taylor said when they met he thought, “He was really nice to me and I was like, ‘Wow, he was nice to me… I’m not cool!  He was nice to me!’”

But Taylor struggled at first, knowing where he fit as the drummer, in The-Drummer-from-Nirvana’s band.

Taylor: “[We] started doing There is Nothing Left to Lose, which has ‘Learn to Fly’ on it.  And I got in a similar, somewhat, situation as the first drummer; I was just green.  And I was having a really hard time learning how to play in the studio, ’cause it’s just such a different thing… ’cause I mean, if you’re gonna play drums on a record for Dave Grohl, it’s gotta be really… top shelf.”

Interviewer: “I mean there’s a certain pressure there, inherent pressure, isn’t there?”

Taylor: “There is, and it’s not from him, actually, to be honest.  I mean he definitely knows what he wants.  But I think he was still struggling with, ‘Can I let another drummer play on my record?’ at that time… And because we had such a bro-ship, if you will, and such a great connection, live, that he had to [eventually] give up the reins so that it could be a real band.”

“[I] don’t play like Dave, I play differently.  So the first album I played on, I played half the drums on it, and Dave played the other half.”

Observational sidenote: The album liner for There is Nothing Left to Lose doesn’t credit who played drums on each song, which I’ve read was Dave’s idea.  If re-recording the drum tracks on the second album had been an ego trip for Dave, why wouldn’t he have cared to get credit for these songs?  He wants the music to be played well, no matter who is playing it.  Ergo, perfectionism, not ego trip.  (I’m proud, I hadn’t known at first that Taylor hadn’t played all the drums on the album, so I thought “Learn to Fly” had to be him drumming, but every time I listened to it I thought “That really sounds like Dave drumming though…”  And later I found out it is Dave drumming on the recording!  So I’m proud that I was able to pick out the difference.)

Taylor goes on, “[I] remember at one point, I was just like, ‘Dave, just you play drums on it.  I’ll tour, I won’t quit… I [still] have to learn how to do this.  You, you’re Dave Grohl, you’re a master already–’Smells Like Teen Spirit’–I’m a ding-dong, I’ve never done this before!  And I’m scared.’  And I had red-light fever, which is [what people call] whenever the recording lights are on you kinda freeze up, and I was doing that.

“And he kinda held my hand through half of that record and he did the other half of the tracks.  And there’s one song on there, called Aurora, which is the first song that I ever recorded, [basically]… that was the first time I ever went ‘ok, I can fit in this band, as the drummer.  Not just the live drummer, but I can be me, and still fulfill the role of being Dave Grohl’s rhythm man…’ Because he writes in rhythms, not only in melodies, but in rhythms.  So I have to meet him there. The next album, One by One...I played all the drums on that record, and I’ve played all the drums on all the records since… contrary to some belief!  That’s me!”

There’s a clip in the middle of Taylor’s interview, of Dave and Taylor in 1997 (which is just precious, lol):

Dave: “He [Taylor]’s an amazing drummer and we have two different styles, and so he does his thing and I do my thing, and he adds so much to the songs–“

Taylor: “Sometimes too much…” *laughs*

Dave: *grinning* “Did I say that??  No, [but] I could see other drummers being in a band and feeling weird and feeling intimidated and whatever, but we do two totally different things, and I think we have mutual respect for each other and just… it’s awesome!  It works perfect, you know?  And you couldn’t find a better drummer.  There’s no way.”

Taylor: *rolls eyes, flattered*

Dave: “So it works out just fine.”

I love their bromance, it’s so cute and non-competitive. 😩😍

Like in this video, where Dave is playing the drums at a concert, but instead of Taylor being competitive with Dave about the drums at all or drawing attention to his own awesome singing voice, he’s quite protective of Dave, insisting the audience appreciate that Dave is still coming and performing despite being too sick to sing.

Dave says in this video from a benefit (at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta!  I grew up near Atlanta, the Fox is so awesome!) last year, “I’ve never loved a man like I love Taylor Hawkins.  I don’t want to say he’s the love of my life, because you know those annoying couples where both of the people are exactly alike?  Where you’re like ‘I know why you’re in love with that person, because you’re in love with yourself,’… that’s how I feel about Taylor Hawkins.” 😂😍  He dedicates his own song to him, “This one’s for my love, for my boo: Taylor Hawkins.”

(He also says Taylor “hates the attention,” which is super INFJ-cute to me and reminds me of Justin.  “I want to do an amazing job, but if someone points it out to me and praises me, I totally don’t know how to handle it. 😳” lol ❤)

But they almost lost Taylor, and then almost lost the band, in the early 2000s.  A lot of the quotes below are from the 100min documentary about the band, Back and Forth which I ate up (it was available on Netflix, but they just took it down.  Super recommended… as long as you don’t mind it being rated Mature completely for language.  They use the f-bomb like 1500 times).

Dave: “Taylor had been struggling with drugs, I think.  He and I had talked about it a few times… I would tell him, I’d say, ‘Dude, I love you like a brother.  I’m not a cop, I’m not your dad or whatever.  But I’m worried about you, y’know?’”

Taylor: “I didn’t really know how to deal with the way you were supposed to be.  I thought that to be a ‘rock and roller,’ you have to be the f*ing Keith Richards, you have to be the dark partying, [the] real deal; that’s the only way it’s ‘real’ rock and roll.”

If that isn’t a Hercules Syndrome reason to have a drug problem, I don’t know one; Taylor feeling like being himself wasn’t “cool” enough to be a rockstar, like it didn’t matter how well he played, that he had to be “exactly like everyone else.”  That he could be liked, even loved… but only if he wasn’t really being him.  Only if he constantly fit in with what other people said was cool, instead of just rocking out, doing it well, and enjoying the music for the reasons he loved music.  (Which, from what I’ve seen is the cinematic grandeur and history of music, laid down by bands like Queen.  (He would draw Roger Taylor’s drum set as a kid, and if that isn’t the cutest thing ever, I don’t know what is.))

And then in London one night in 2001, Taylor overdosed on heroin and went into a coma.  It looked like he was going to die.

Dave was terrified; he stayed by Taylor’s side for those multiple weeks.  “It was so weird,” he said, “like he hadn’t died, but he had overdosed and *chokes up* I just felt so totally helpless, y’know?”

“I’ve seen so many people just lose it all with drugs and die, so I freaked out.”

Interviewer (really good interview): “It must feel that [you’ve] had to endure this – a helpless view from the fringes – too often.”

“Absolutely,” [Dave said quietly.]  “When Taylor wound up in the hospital I was ready to quit music.  Because, to me, it felt like music equaled death.  I started praying.  I’ve never been to church in my life, and I’m walking back from Taylor’s hospital to our hotel every night, praying out loud in the streets of London.  I don’t even know if I believe in God.  But I felt like, y’know, this is just not right, y’know, what kind of God would let this…” *makes fun of himself railing at the sky*

“So I sat with him for those… couple weeks, until he woke up.  Then when he woke up, I said to him, ‘Dude, it’s gonna be okay.’  And he looked at me and he said, ‘F*** off!’ *grinning*  And I thought, ‘Oh, good, everything’s gonna be okay.’ ” *Laughs*

Taylor: “Dave’s like my best friend.  And even more than like a best friend, he’s like a brother; he really is.  And [as] I’d be with him, if something happened to Dave where he was on the brink of death, I would be losing my mind.  And, y’know, he was losing his mind.”

So they got back after Taylor’s OD and a couple months later started trying to make their next record, but no one was feeling it.  They spent a million dollars on studio costs, but everyone was playing terribly and no one knew why they were doing it anymore.  Dave felt like everyone was taking the band for granted.  Everyone was grumpy at everyone else and the music was being crappy.  Poor Chris Shifflet was new to the band and was like, “Um, guys I thought we were going to record music and now everyone’s mad at each other.”

They “finished” the record under their own duress, and it was just lifeless and flabby.

And Dave, having lost the magic at home in his own band, went gungho with the band Queens of the Stone Age, playing drums on their record, and even going on tour with them.  The bad record was put on hold, and Dave jumped at the opportunity as soon as he got the call.  Taylor later said Dave was “in love” with Queens of the Stone Age, lol (apologies, I have watched probably a literal thousand videos in regards to Foo Fighters and Nirvana in the last three months writing this, and for the life of me I can’t find it right now).

Now, Queens of the Stone Age are cool, and I know Dave and Josh Homme, QOTSA’s frontman, are close and have projects still now (and omigosh, the drums on “No One Knows” are epically Grohl), but the way that Dave was approaching it at the time really seemed like escaping, or like Justin put it, like he was having a rebound fling with another band.  Like perhaps the fear and worry over the situation with Taylor made him afraid of getting too close, of investing emotionally in people and a project so important to him. Like seeing the frailty of the group and individuals he was coming to love (and after he had lost many people to a rock lifestyle, not just Kurt), like maybe he should detach emotionally before it was too late and he got hurt too badly again.

And playing drums for someone else probably felt safer and less emotionally taxing than leading his own band.  Less like he had to put himself out there and be the responsible one in charge.

“It’s a nice change of pace,” Dave said.  “Not being in the spotlight is kinda nice.  It’s really about just playing the drums.  I feel much more comfortable and confident doing this than trying to sing every night.”

But Taylor was pissed.  So there was so much left unspoken, but nothing was okay.  They got back together to play Coachella, and Dave was playing with QOTSA there too.  And in rehearsals everyone was tense, until Chris finally pointed out the elephant in the room (bringing those EP skillz to bear)… and everything exploded, especially between Dave and Taylor.

Taylor recounts (in Back and Forth), “[Dave] said he was ‘really upset’ that I didn’t come see him play drums, and how exciting it was for him to be back on stage playing with another band.  I’d just went through this awful trauma, and [I] was supposed to be happy …*claps sarcastically*  that Dave’s having such a good time.  But I wasn’t, y’know? I wasn’t f*ing happy for you to go play with another band.  Why should I be happy for that?”

They had a giant argument, and it seriously looked like the band might be over.  They were going to play this one last gig, and then Taylor said he was gone, and Dave was so over it.

Taylor went and watched Dave play with QOTSA the night before.  “At that point I was okay with it, I didn’t care anymore.  I was like ‘Well, this is probably our last show, so y’know maybe Dave will end up being Queens of the Stone Age drummer for now, or whatever, and that’ll be what it is.’

“And then we played the next day, and we played great.  Dave was like a new frontman… and it was really good, and after that me and Dave went for a walk and he said, ‘Let’s go back to Virginia, record a couple songs.’”

That’s where Dave’s from, and where they recorded There is Nothing Left to Lose, which they got the Best Rock Album Grammy for, when it was recorded in Dave’s basement.  (They also got a grammy for the “Learn to Fly” music video, so it’s good to know that sometimes there’s justice in the world.)

They thought they’d at least get together and try to jam together again, even though they didn’t know what would come of it.  And Dave wrote “Times Like These,” a song about him feeling torn, about not feeling like himself, about not being sure whether he wanted to go or stay.

“It’s times like these you learn to live again
It’s times like these you give and give again
It’s times like these you learn to love again
It’s times like these time and time again”
One of my favorites.

“I just thought, ‘Okay, I’m not done being in the band,’” Dave recalled, “‘I don’t know if they are, but I’m not.’”

And they re-recorded the entire album in a week, again in Dave’s basement in Virginia.  And it suddenly had life and spirit and vibrancy, all the same songs!  Like everything else, the music drew power from being real, from letting in emotions, from being raw and messy.  They called the first version of the album their “Million dollar demo tape”, since the entire practiced tweaked blandness was thrown out, for a beautiful whirlwind of reality.

But even more important than that album, they were really able to forge through it and become a team.

All the guys have side projects.  And Dave’s referred to himself as a “musical slut,” because he’ll play with anyone.

{Sidebar: I thought that was hilarious, both because of the self-feminizing connotation, of course, but also because in college I referred to myself as an “emotional slut” because I could go from meeting a guy to having him tell me about his dearest life ambitions, hopes and fears, in about 2. 5 hours.  Seriously, “What do you want to do with your life?”, “How did you feel when your dad left?”, and “If you were a girl what would your name be?” (a favorite of mine) were first-date type questions for me, and guys would open up to me like a can of pop biscuits.  This is why when my ex-boyfriend set Justin and I up on a blind date and said of me, “she likes to talk about deep stuff all the time,” Justin thought I was going to be a pretentious prick.  Instead he discovered his gushing over principles was foreplay for me, so we were married in 7 months, because you better believe that is a lot of time for me to dig into someone’s heart.}

Side projects are good; they let everyone explore creatively and get their wiggles out.  But what the Foo Fighters have together is special.  Foo Fighters is special.

They’re all around 50 now (Taylor’s the baby at 47, and Pat’s 60!) and they still play 2-3 hour sets.  And not demure sets either.  The way they throw themselves at it is so insane and incredible.  The kind of thing that much younger guys couldn’t keep up with.  (And they make fun of other bands for only playing like 90 mins, lol)  Dave’s finished a concert after falling off the stage and breaking his leg at the beginning of it, and having a doctor hold it the rest of the time, just so he didn’t disappoint the fans who were there.

Dave did become that presence, which he longed to be.  Now he enchants arenas of 85,000 people and flirts with his audience, and owns the stage like a demigod.  He’s still just a goober, but he’s a goober who’s really come to know and love himself in a way that is contagious to others and helps others feel like they can walk taller, run faster and fly higher.

But they’re so silly and hilarious about everything.  I’ve seriously watched so many clips and interviews, and yet it never gets old, because there’s always a new funny story, a new thing for them to joke about, or a new way for them to dress up and make fun of themselves.

“We take our music very seriously,” Dave said.  “Everything else is just such a circus, that I think the only way to survive is to take everything with a grain of salt, and just go with it.”

Interviewer: “Kylie [Minogue] will probably be remembered, amongst other things for her gold hotpants.  What would the Foos be remembered for?”

Dave, without missing a beat: “Chris’s gold hotpants.”

Chris: *laughs and looks down* “I’ve got them on now actually, under here.”

Dave: “Um… ‘What will the Foos be remembered for?’ … *Makes a very young-Dave face* Probably dressing up like women…”

I sure hope so, Dave.  It’s a glorious glorious thing.

And they’re so good at what they do, besides just being fun.  They work hard and play hard.

This is their climactic song for that Wembley concert.  Dave gets very sweetly emotional at 3:58 as the crowd shows him just how much the performance means to him and what he’s built.  But then watch at 4:04 when Taylor.exe totally freezes and he stares off into space 🤣 The comments on that part were like “I think your Taylor is broken,” “Someone want to check on Taylor?”  Really that’s pretty standard for INFJ, especially (ej), going into thought-mode, but it’s still really funny.

Taylor, talking about the drummer keeping everyone together while playing, “There’s no computers up on stage.  See, there’s so many bands now that [get] up on stage, and the drummer puts [the thing in his ear and it counts for him] and he plays along to a clicktrack, while this stuff is coming out of speakers that are on some computer behind the stage.  That’s fine, if that’s what you want to do.  That’s not what we do.  [So] the tempo of ‘Learn to Fly’ is going to be slightly different every night, depending on how scared or excited, [or] jetlagged [I am].”

“…when I walk up on stage [I] have major butterflies,” he says (and this interview was just posted this month.  He still feels that way after he’s been doing this for 20+ years).  “I’m scared crapless, every time. If there’s 30,000 people who paid good money, it’s a responsibility for me to hold the band together…  The drummer’s job, besides showin’ off, *twirls sticks* and doing drum solos, and being a show off, which I am a lot of the time, is to lay down [a] solid foundation for the band to play to.”

I don’t think I’ve heard any other band have the drums be quite so… lyrical?  It’s hard to describe.  I mean it makes sense where the primary singer/songwriter came into his own via drums, that they’d end up more central to the musical narrative than most bands, where the drums seem to mostly set a rhythmic backdrop.  Idk, maybe that’s unfair to most music.

Here, in one band, from what I can tell, are two of the greatest drummers in the world.  And you’d think that might lead to competition, but instead what you see in Dave and Taylor’s bromance is this epically precious camaraderie and respect of each other’s skills.  I’ve heard both refer to the other as “the greatest drummer in the world.”

But they play differently; I can hear when one is playing vs the other.  Like my friend put it, it’s just like having different singing voices.

And Taylor respects Dave’s vision of how the drums should sound on a piece.  Dave says Taylor is a more “technical” drummer. But to me Taylor plays like he’s got an entire universe in his drum kit 🌎.  While Dave plays, in the words of Kurt Cobain, like he’s “smashing heads open” lol. But they’re both sooo fast and so incredibly detailed at it.

But I constantly see in the comments, people are saying things like “Their best singer is the drummer and the best drummer is their singer”; people claiming Dave should be on the drums and Taylor on vocals, mainly.  And that makes me mad.

I love how Taylor sings, and he does have incredible range.  I love watching when they cover Queen and Led Zeppelin and Taylor sings, and it’s like holy moly.  But I love how Dave sings too. Like Queen’s Brian May said, Dave screams these melodies at you.  He transitions from soft to loud so powerfully.

And I love how they both play the drums.

I love hearing the the difference in their drumming.  If you want to compare for yourself, here’s the same song, with Dave drumming vs Taylor drumming (two examples of each. I love that song, Taylor wrote it.)  And in this one, they’re both playing drums!!  It’s like a martial arts dance-off of drums! 😍

And forgive me for going goopy when they both play air drums together (and “Rope” is one of my very favorites).  It’s the cutest thing, because they’re actually playing real stuff and so they get all synced up with it.

They have very different styles that are unique and fitting to the person they are, and both are incredible.  I think it’d be dumb to compare who’s “better” when they create such different things. 🤷‍♀️ Art isn’t just a sliding scale of how well you can do techniques.  Ability to infuse emotion into art to get good at your own style is a huge part of what makes “good” art actually good.  Music doesn’t have to be about “best” anymore than any other art.

Dave’s drumming often gets compared to Animal from the Muppets because of his wild intensity.

Taylor’s drumming sounds more open, almost hollow somehow, as opposed to Dave’s which sounds more like a brick wall.  Dave’s drumming sounds like a machine gun, while Taylor’s is like a horse dancing.

Dave’s hardest beats are with a tumultuous overhand, a distinctive “ba bum ba bum!” like in Teen Spirit; each beat is isolated and doesn’t bleed into the others.  Taylor lays it down the hardest by foot, on the bass drum, and emphasizes the rolls by hand, and the taps are tight together.  (It’s really hard to describe musical differences when you know absolutely nothing about instruments or musical terms, lol.  Case in point, I asked Justin, “What’s the foot drum called?” 🤦I’ve watched how their body language converts into specific audio, so I can hear the difference… that doesn’t mean I can describe it well.)

I always feel really insecure enjoying music so much when I don’t know anything about it, technically.  I took singing lessons for a few months when I was around ten and I think 2 guitar lessons which I swapped for an almost-as-short horseback riding career, because my hands were too small and the strings hurt.  I sing decently by ear and I can locate middle C on a piano, but I can’t read music at all.  I had no clue what a “high-hat” was until I started this post.

But music still means worlds to me.  It’s still people, and passion, and hope, and an endless sky.

I was afraid that such epic musicians as these guys who I’ve come to melt over would scoff at someone caring so much for music that, from my perspective, I have no credentials to be able to understand or appreciate.  Then I found this recent quote from Dave, that soothed me tremendously:

“I think air-drumming is important because you’ve connected with someone that has no f*ing idea how to play the instrument that they’re pretending to play, but you’ve made an impression on them in some way that’s just as musical as singing a song.

“I had one person, who will remain nameless, say to me once, in a publishing dispute, ‘Yeah, but drumming isn’t songwriting.’ And I said, ‘F*** you!  Why not?’

“Nobody told me what to f*ing play, and now whenever someone hears *air-drums the beginning of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit‘*, that’s the intro to the song.”

It was silly how shocked and relieved I was to read that he said this.  It’s okay that I try and fail to sing the drum parts on Nirvana and FF songs, while waving my arms around wildly??  They wouldn’t be turned off or offended by that, like snooty painters who ‘defy understanding’ if you’ve never lifted a brush?  I hit my elbow hard on my desk at work one time because I was air drumming to “In Bloom“!  Hurt the rest of the afternoon, lol.  It’s okay I get that into music!?!

I guess it’s akin to how silly I felt as a 10-year-old on vacation during the 2000 Sydney Olympics, swimming in the hotel pools pretending to be an Olympic swimmer.  Even at 10, I didn’t truly believe that I would dedicate my life to swimming and someday be on that podium. I’m a pretty crappy swimmer lol.  But seeing people who had achieved great things in their lives, that they had to work and push and strive for, and sharing in the joy of their life’s dedication, made me feel like just maybe I could do great things too.  And I still feel like that, even if my life accomplishments happen on laptop and phone screens, with word processors and messaging clients, rather than in Olympic swimming pools, or rock arenas.

Writing this post, I found myself fearing being credential carded for writing this without any sort of expert status in music or the history of these things.  But those are the exact attitudes that Nirvana detested.  They detested the pomp of celebrity, preferring the ardor of unknowns playing messily, but passionately, over those with approval stamped by labels gushing money and popularity charts.  And I think while Foo Fighters roll with the celebrity status, far more than Kurt seemed to know how, they’re still the down-to-earth ascended fanboys that made them great over 20 years ago.

That’s one of my favorite things about them; they’re still such boys geeking out about Queen, Led Zeppelin, Cheap Trick, and the Beatles, while now collaborating on music with the likes of Roger Taylor, Brian May, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Rick Nielsen, and Paul McCartney.

I love this video of them playing with the Led Zepp guys so much.  They look so excited to be playing with such legends, while they’ve made such names for themselves in their own rights. (Holy crap Taylor belting it.  And gleeful Dave drumming.)

Like Dave said in the D.C. episode of the gorgeous Foo’s tv series that he directed, Sonic Highways (omigosh, how I could go off about Sonic Highways and the premise of contextual music, and the concept of how we’re all unconsciously connected through musical roots and branches spreading out in both directions; “But in the end we all come from what’s come before“😍):

“The way the Foo Fighters work as a band, we’re like a family, and we try to treat everyone that way.  I honestly feel like that comes from… all of the bands I saw when I was young.  The message wasn’t, ‘We were rock stars and we are better than you.’  The message was that, ‘We are people, and we’re all in this together.'”

And that’s what the Foo Fighters are all about to me.

Punk and grunge are genres entirely built around playing music the way you want to, instead of the “right” way.  From the journey I’ve taken writing this post, I’ve learned a lot about how much of punk was born in an “apprenticeship” type way.  And by that I mean that these guys all have learned “on the job,” out of throwing themselves headfirst into music, and crashing into how to play along the way.  Nirvana first and then the Foos were born out of punk.  As far as I know, Dave Grohl still doesn’t read music.  He learned to play the drums on pillows on his room, which is why he says he hits the drums so hard.

Dave said on the Nashville episode of Sonic Highways, “What I eventually discovered is that I’m drawn to the outsiders: the people who try to work outside of that system… people who aren’t just willing to follow.  People who step outside of that conventional system and eventually find their ‘Congregation‘.”

I guess as someone who comes at both writing and human psychology from a very underground, anti-pretension kind of angle, it really speaks to me.  I feel like what we do on aLBoP is punk-psych.  We’re messy and I hate grammar, and I use run-on sentences that go on forever (and parenthetical inception (like this)), and our terms are names from goofy references–everything from The Land Before Time and Lord of the Rings to Parks and Rec and My Little Pony.  We make videos of us in Halloween costumes and with Justin in dresses (don’t worry, he knew what he signed up for, marrying me), and they get a pittance of views.

But what we write works.  And people say we’ve literally saved their lives.  And through us people have found future best friends, and even spouses, but more importantly they’ve found themselves.  But we’re still largely “underground” because we’re pretty much as far from mainstream-psych as you can get, without running around with tin hats on.

It can be so daunting, trying to change the world one elephant bite at a time.  But as Justin always says, the wheels of history are turned by the decisions of individuals.  Small and simple things can cause large wakes of change.  Man, sometimes I can feel like such an arrogant-eff for thinking I can do something new and different, without a stamp from someone recognized.  But it’s not just about believing I can start something great, from the ground up, it’s about standing up for the fact that anyone can do it.  I believe with enough bravery, and the understanding that it won’t necessarily be easy, anyone can be intrepid enough to start something that will actually make a difference in the world.  But that’s how punk-anything works; someone’s got to start.

My friend found this “shower thought” online, and I thought it was great because people really don’t think like that, don’t believe that some small thing they do now could radically change the course of not only their future, but others’.  But I had lost the pic and went digging for it, and found the thread where this was originally said, and was really disappointed to see that people had gotten intensely angry about someone saying this, had really emotionally freaked out about it… and the original poster kinda backpedalled in response.

People really hate the idea that our choices have that much effect, because then they feel guilty knowing that they could have that much effect and don’t.  But you don’t need permission to do something great.  You don’t need permission to stand up and make something beautiful, and change lives, any more than Dave needed permission to keep playing music.

And that’s the entire message of the whole story of Foo Fighters.

Wrapping up, my favorite Foo songs besides “Learn to Fly” are (not necessarily in order):

• Times Like These
• Rope
• Saint Cecilia
• All My Life (rocks so hard!  Although I got in my head that the chorus said “Don’t let it become a waste” instead of “Don’t let it go to waste”… which become is harder to sing but arguably more fun because you have to try and fit all the syllables in, and it rolls from the mouth.)
• Everlong (I don’t care that I already linked it, I get to watch it again! I love how the only thing that really seems out of place with Taylor wearing that is his manly hands lol.)
• The Sky is a Neighborhood (So cinematic.  And those are Dave’s daughters in the video!)
• Cold Day in the Sun (written and sung by Taylor)
• Next Year
• DOA
• Something From Nothing (explicit 😅), In the Clear, and Congregation from Sonic Highways (basically anything from Sonic Highways bc the context makes everything feel epic)
• These Days
• Cheer Up Boys, Your Makeup is Running (not just because of the name)
• Sunday Rain (Also sung by Taylor, with Paul McCartney on the drums! 😮)
• Long Road to Ruin
• The Pretender
• Best of You
• Skin and Bones
• Big Me
• Walk (That isn’t the official video, but it is a fanmade one the FF put on their channel, with Foo PUPPETS and the body language is in-frickn-credible.  Also the video they released to ask fans to make videos has more drag!!!  YAY! Dat hairflip at the end!)
• Wheels (maybe it’s my German heritage lol)

I didn’t mean to have over 20 favorites, but considering this post ranked their 157 songs including covers (which is kind of a dumb premise because people like music for entirely different reasons than each other) in 2014, so not including the 11 songs from their 2017 album Concrete and Gold… they have so frickn many songs!!  And do I care that several of my favorites are probably low on Dave’s list of favorites, like “Next Year” and even “Learn to Fly”?  I’m choosing not to.  He wrote great songs and if he doesn’t like them now then that is just too bad. 😝

I’ve taken to playing this “Which FF album is this from” game, and I’m pretty dern good at it now, based on the age and intensity of Dave’s voice, guessing who is drumming, and just overall vibe of each song.  (If you’re curious, Dave’s voice sounds the most loud and intense on The Color and the Shape, their second album, and Concrete and Gold, their latest album, followed maybe by Saint Cecilia, but Saint Cecilia is more of a perky loud.)

My different sides like different songs more than others; “Rope” is more of a Squeezy-Angelle of pure instrumental joy, “All My Life” gets Callous-Squeezy jumping around like an idiot, Angelle-Ecee likes “Cold Day in the Sun” and “Next Year”, while “Saint Cecilia” is Ecee-Squeezy, and “Cheer up Boys” seems to be an interesting Ecee-Callous affair, a headbanger of hope.

But all of me loves “Learn to Fly”, as well as the band as a whole.  So many of their songs are about hope, and being real and picking yourself back up again.

They teach us to “[learn] to walk again”, to “begin to begin again,” that “it’s real, the pain [we] feel,” and despite our “foolish plans,” there’s a bigger “world out there” than we can imagine; we don’t have to be “afraid that [we’re] the only one,” even if we feel like we’re trying to build “something from nothing,” starting from just a spark, or if we “feel like it’s all over; there’s another round” ahead.  “It’s times like these we learn to live [and love] again.”

I’ve come to truly love Kurt Cobain and everything he was as a person.  But he was wrong.  He was wrong about the world and he was wrong about people.  And being wrong doesn’t make you a bad person… but it does make you wrong.

How was he incorrect in what he believed?  Well, he couldn’t reconcile that people could both be so bad and so good at the same time.  He saw all the fake and shallow and horrifically cruel in the world, and couldn’t see hope beyond it.

But an ant can’t do great evil in this world.  It doesn’t have the intelligence, strength or capacity to make evil choices.  But it can’t do much good either.  Yet, as humans, we have access to that great pendulum of choice, to do massive evil or massive good, determined only by our own choices, which no one can take from us.

Human potential is what makes things matter in our lives, and yet there are so many attitudes in this world that would strip it from us.  Whether it’s dollhouse fakery that would have us all fit a narrow, dehumanizing mold, that makes the world out to be nothing but gray obligation; pessimistic nihilism that arrogantly insists there’s no point and we’re worth no more than the matter that makes up our parts; authoritarianism, medical or musical, that says you’re worthless without a stamp of approval from the They, and someone always knows better than you do, so why even try; competition and ego that claim that there’s a limited amount of happiness to go around, so how dare you try and claim it while being yourself; or our own inner pains that say just bandage our emotional holes one more time and maybe that’ll be enough, but that nothing can ever be truly fixed–all these attitudes tell us that there’s a ceiling that we can’t pass, and that the only way to a fleeting Russian roulette version of happiness is to give up on your own potential to grow and affect the world.

These bad attitudes are poison to understanding our own potential, and believing there’s hope for our lives and who we want to become.

Instead, as we accept where we currently stand, for all our flaws and mistakes and messiness and all the ways we’re wrong and humanly err, and as we let ourselves be colorful and silly and raw, then we’re able to raise our own ceiling, and see that humanity doesn’t have a roof, except that of our own making.  And that’s when hope comes in.

Don’t try and heal your perspective alone.  Just like a wound, you don’t have to be expected to heal your own depression or anxiety on your own with just your own life’s efforts and a pack of band-aids.  But at the same time, you can find hope in knowing that if your reality seems to be dark and empty, that you’re missing information.

Recognizing the perspective side of depression is not about blame, it’s about hope.  There’s hope in knowing that the world is full of things that you don’t know, daring to hope that those things will turn on the sun, should we only find them.

And that’s why I admire Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters, for valuing everything that makes us human.  For daring to love and enjoy color, for not taking themselves too seriously, for trying to inspire people, and just being real.

So “Learn to Fly” isn’t just a song to me, and it’s not just a music video that brings me a great deal of silly happiness.  It’s an anthem of hope that comes from admitting the journey along the way.

As I fell for this song, I noticed how each of the lines in the chorus matched with one of my Sides pretty perfectly, speaking to how that side of me feels.  (When I’m alone, I may sing the lines of the song in my best attempt at each of their voices… 😅) I made a stick figure comic of them each rocking out to their line… back in August 😛.  So here’s that, followed by my best attempt to describe what each line means to each piece of me, and why.

 

Angelle – Looking to the sky to save me

Despair is addictive.  Worry, what-ifs and catastrophic thoughts make us feel in control, which makes us feel safe, for a moment.  But since our own abilities are never really enough, when we gorge on worry and control, we end up craving more and more, and feeling less safe and less like the future is ours.

We know hope will nourish us, but it makes us feel in freefall, trusting our future to things outside our control.  I’ve often felt foolish for hoping, like optimism is weak, immature and flighty.  But in truth, hope is brave.

JRR Tolkien talked about despair in a way I love.  That despair claims certainty, and is therefore arrogant.  That when we despair we pretend that we know the future and it has to be bad.  It claims an omniscience that we don’t have.

In contrast, I love this from Tolkien about hope: 

“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while.  The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him.  For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”

Part of the beauty of hope is that it is outside of us, beyond our own limits.

My favorite quote of all time is Thoreau, from Walden, and I quote it way too often.  It’s where my Twitter handle comes from.  But it’s really a thesis statement for my very favorite things.  It goes, “Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous.  If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life [would] be like a fairy tale…”

The world is much bigger than you.  Reality is much bigger than you.  And that might seem scary at first, but over and over again I’ve seen that reality is in fact fairy tale fabulous…  Does that mean that situations and circumstances are fabulous?  Eff, no!  We’re constantly screwing up our lives and people are constantly disappointing us.  But there’s a world out there of concrete and forever true things, untouchable by the shadow of people’s selfish and terrible decisions, and it’s real, and beautiful and if we stop letting ourselves be deluded by despair, we can start to see the diamonds in the sky again.

And that might not be what Dave meant with this line, but that’s what my Angelle side feels when I hear it.

 

Ecee – Looking for a sign of life

It’s funny, I’ve never been worried about people not respecting me because I’m a woman.  But I’ve always been afraid of them not respecting me for being a girl.  For being open, and silly, and tender, and emotionally vulnerable to people.  I’ve felt treated my entire life like I was born yesterday because I am happy.

And you know what, for the first half and more of my life, I believed it.  I believed that I was just inexperienced and naive, being happy and loving people, and still letting myself get truly excited about things.  But it took me into my twenties to realize that people who pretend to be smart, solely based on how pessimistic and unhappy they are… umm, aren’t happy.  They aren’t confident, they don’t feel good about themselves, they don’t feel like they’re in control like they try to project.

It also took me forever to realize people were jealous of me being freely open and silly.  Like “What the crap?!  I’m just over here being embarrassingly myself all the time.  Why would people be jealous of that?!?”  (If you think who I am isn’t constantly embarrassing, you haven’t been reading this post closely enough lol)

But in a world that tells us that “cool” is defined by who looks the least messy and constantly has their crap together, we’re liable to believe that anyone truly confident, aka anyone who actually allows themselves to like themselves, has a perfect life we could never measure up to.  My life is anything but perfect, but I like Calise and I let that show.  (Yes, I just called myself cool.  Adolescent me just fainted.)

I’ve spent this entire year trying to believe that I’m safe to be messy, to be vulnerable and silly and real.  And I’m just starting to fully internalize that it’s not mean to be happy.  That you can’t be a lighthouse helping people safely to shore, if you aren’t willing to shine.  Showing other people what happiness looks like can show them how to find it, in time.

Being a total goober of silliness can show others that there’s signs of life to be had, that color exists and where it can be found.  Even if it’s squeeing over dudes in dresses or air drumming like a total idiot.  Silliness gives other people permission to be real and silly too.

 

Squeezy – Looking for something ‘help me burn out bright

As established, I hate to read Kurt Cobain into the lyrics of any Foo Fighters songs, although it would be hard to imagine Dave not thinking of Kurt’s reference to burning out instead of fading away.  But I take this as saying that we burn brightly in life, not when we exit at our peak, but when we keep chugging until we make a legacy we’re proud to have lived, full-throttle; that no matter how many mistakes we made, we got back up and tried again.

The movie Elizabethtown is fairly widely disliked, but it’s actually one of my favorites.  Without going into too much detail, it follows a guy who has just completely tanked his entire career, costing the company who invested in him a billion dollars in the process.  So he decides to commit suicide (which even that isn’t working for him)… until he gets a call learning his dad just died, and he takes a trip to the small town in Kentucky where his dad was from, and ends up finding himself.

It’s an adult coming-of-age film; I like those.  But one of my favorite lines from the whole movie is right at the beginning:

“It was then that I realized that success–success not greatness–was the only god the entire world served.”

Now I hope and believe that that’s not true, the “only” part, I mean.  Because it’s certainly an accurate trend. But as far as I can see, you can be the most successful person in the world and still not be happy or internally great.  But if you work to become great first, then success will be the easier part. Success can be taken away; greatness is a part of who you are.

This line speaks to my Squeezy: “I can be great.  I can find it, I can do it, I can get back up again. *Pops knuckles*  Watch me work…”

 

Callous – Looking for a complication, looking ‘cause I’m tired of trying

When I was a young teenager I was told by a source I have the utmost respect for, that my happiness stands out, and that as I went through my life, other people were going to wonder where that came from and why I was so happy.  And they promised me that as I was just real and genuine about that happiness, I’d be able to show other people how to be happy that way too.

I’ve tried my best to live up to that, and I have seen lives change as I’ve pointed them to how to have hope and believe in something bigger and better than the gray existence right before their eyes.

But one of the most difficult things for me is handling my heartbreak when people won’t let me help.  And I mean, you can’t fight other people’s battles for them; sometimes the best thing you can do is care.  But so often I feel like people see that there are tools, things that could truly change how they feel, but the known darkness is less terrifying than the unknown light.

I’ve never been able to suppress how much I care about people, even when I get hurt, even when they disappoint me, even when Ecee wants to curl up in a ball and sob because of how much I ache about people.  So often I want to be done caring, but I don’t know how to turn it off.  It’s really frickn tiring.

After a while of getting hurt on repeat, you’re always looking for a complication.  Callous frequently wants to give up because hope hurts too much, giving people your heart hurts too much.  Like Dave wanting to run away to Queens of the Stone Age, so as not to get hurt again.  Remaining aloof feels protective.

But then one day, you realize–just like Dave realized that, as much as music brings up feelings and pain, that music was the one thing that could heal him–you realize that people were the thing making life matter in the first place.  Relationships and connections can be a source of massive pain, but they’re also the very thing that can heal us us the most.

And even when it’s hard to find those good relationships, or when seeing people hurts, the bravery of trying, and of being ourselves, is worth it.

Life is complicated, but it doesn’t have to be tidy to be worth it.  Flying is complicated; aerodynamics and defying gravity are difficult affairs.  But don’t let the sluggish caterpillars in your life tell you that there’s no such thing as butterflies; that no one is really happy, and no one ever learns to fly.  Pupas are ugly and gooey and not put together, and so we can be convinced that the pupa stages of our lives aren’t worth it, that it’s better to stay on the ground and at least eat leaves and be scooting around.  But butterflies do exist.  Happiness exists and there is no ceiling on who you can become, should you buckle up through the terrifying darkness in your life, and take a leap of hope that light exists on the other side.

We can do it, and we don’t have to make it alone.  With hope, experimentation, a willingness to get back up when we fall down, and a whole lot of silliness, we too can learn to fly.

Much love,
<3 Calise