‘Trading tapes and buying singles and ordering fanzines by mail, all of those things became so special to you. You’d get a single by a band from Sweden in your mailbox and then a year later they were playing the shithole down the street? You can imagine the feeling: you’d walk in and see them in person and then they’d plug in and play the songs that you loved from that single that you ordered for two dollars a year ago and it meant the world to you, it was fucking huge. So that spirit, I consider it now to be just the spirit of rock ’n’ roll, that spirit of music meant more to me than anything else.’
On his trips into the city, two local bands in particular stole Grohl’s heart: Bad Brains and Virginian hardcore heroes Scream.
‘The first time I saw Scream was at one of those Rock Against Reagan shows,’ he recalls. ‘Scream was legendary in DC. They were from my neighbourhood, from Bailey’s Crossroads in suburban Virginia, which was maybe ten miles away from North Springfield, and if ever the DC scene seemed elitist or insular or hard to crack it didn’t matter, because Scream were from my fucking neighbourhood! We were so proud of that because not only were they one of the best American hardcore bands, but they were the best in DC: Bad Brains had moved to New York, Minor Threat were gone and Rites of Spring were amazing, but they weren’t playing hardcore. And Scream played everything. You would go to see them and they would play the first three songs off [their 1983 début album] Still Screaming, which are unbelievably bad-ass hardcore songs, and then bust into [Steppenwolf’s] “Magic Carpet Ride” and then do some weird space-dub shit for a couple of minutes and then pile back into something that sounded like Motörhead. They were so fucking good. They didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought of them, they didn’t give a shit. They were the under-dogs because they were from Virginia. And we looked up to them so much.
‘But nobody else blew me away as much as Bad Brains,’ Grohl admitted in 2010. ‘I’ll say it now, I have never ever, ever, ever, ever seen a band do anything even close to what Bad Brains used to do live. Seeing them live was, without a doubt, always one of the most intense, powerful experiences you could ever have. They were just … Oh God, words fail me … incredible. They were connected in a way I’d never seen before. They made me absolutely determined to become a musician, they basically changed my life, and changed the lives of everyone who saw them.
‘It was a time when hardcore bands were these skinny white guys, with shaved heads, who didn’t drink and didn’t smoke and made fast, stiff and rigid breakbeat noise. But the Bad Brains when they came out, it was like if James Brown was to play hardcore or punk rock! It was so smooth and so fucking powerful – they were gods, man, they were way more than human. To see that kind of energy and hear that kind of power just from a guitar, bass, some drums and a singer was unbelievable. It was something more than music and those four people onstage. It was just fucking unreal.
‘The DC scene wasn’t a huge scene,’ Grohl remembers. ‘If a local band like Scream or Black Market Baby or Void played you’d probably have maybe 200 people show up, the same 200 people every time: if you had a band like Black Flag play, then there’d maybe be 500 or 600 people there. We called those extra people the “Quincy Punks”, people who had seen one punk rock episode of [popular NBC crime drama] Quincy and then heard that Black Flag was coming to town. Those were usually the shows that had the most trouble. But the other gigs would have just a few people so you just started seeing the same people around. I’d be starstruck and intimidated when I would see, like, Mike Hampton from Faith or Guy [Picciotto], because these people were my musical heroes and I knew every word to every one of their songs, but you’d be singing along with a band and ten minutes later they’d be diving on top of your head when the next band was on. There was no separation between “bands” and “fans”, and that was my idea of some sort of community.
‘For me, punk rock was an escape, and it was rebellion. It was this fantasy land that you could visit every Friday evening at eight o’clock and beat each other to bits in front of the stage and then go home.’
It was at a Wilson Center show by Void, a chaotic, impossibly intense punk-metal quartet from Columbia, Maryland, that Grohl first met Brian Samuels in autumn 1984. At the time Samuels’s band Freak Baby were seeking to add a second guitar player to their line-up, just as scene elders Minor Threat, Faith and Scream had done the previous year, and Samuels invited the young guitarist to an audition at the group’s practice spot in drummer Dave Smith’s basement. Grohl wasn’t the best guitar player the band had ever seen – Chris Page remembers him as being merely ‘competent’ – but what he lacked in technical dexterity he made up for in terms of the energy, enthusiasm and infectious humour he brought to the band. In addition, Grohl’s simple but effective rhythm playing neatly complemented Bryant Mason’s more proficient lead guitar work. Freak Baby’s newest member made his début with the band that winter, playing as support to Trouble Funk at Arlington’s liberal-minded, ‘alternative’ high school H-B Woodlawn. It would prove to be the band’s one and only show as a quintet.
Freak Baby’s demise was sudden and brutal. One afternoon in late 1984 Grohl was behind Dave Smith’s kit at practice, trying out some of the rolls, fills, ruffs and flams he had been practising for years in his bedroom of his family home in Springfield. He had his head down, and eyes closed: his arms and legs became a blur as he hammered out beats to the Minor Threat and Bad Brains riffs running through his head. Lost in music, Grohl was oblivious to his bandmates urging him to get back to his guitar. Standing six foot five inches tall, and weighing in at around 270 pounds, skinhead Samuels was not a figure used to being ignored. Grohl didn’t notice his hulking bandmate rise from the sofa, so when Samuels yanked him off the drum stool by his hair and dragged him to the ground, he was more shocked than hurt. The rest of his band, however, were mortified. They had felt that Samuels had been increasingly trying to assert his authority and control over the band, but this was too much. As Grohl stumbled back to his feet, Chris Page called time on the day’s session. Within the week he would call time on Freak Baby too, reshuffling the line-up to move Grohl to drums, Smith to bass, and Samuels out the door. With the new line-up came a new name: Mission Impossible.
With the domineering Samuels out of the picture, initial Mission Impossible rehearsal sessions were playful, productive and wildly energetic: all four band members skated, and at times Smith’s basement resembled a skate park more than a rehearsal room, with the teenagers bouncing off the walls and spinning and tumbling over amps and furniture as they played. But there was also an intensity and focus to their rehearsals. Songs flowed freely as they bounced around ideas, fed off the energy in the room and experimented with structure, tone, pacing and dynamics. Just two months after forming, the band felt confident enough to record a demo tape with local sound engineer and musician Barrett Jones, who had helmed a previous session for Freak Baby. Jones fronted a college rock band called 11th Hour, North Virginia’s home-grown answer to R.E.M., and operated a tiny recording studio called Laundry Room, so called because his Tascam four-track tape deck and twelve-channel Peavey mixing board were located in the laundry room of his parents’ Arlington home. Now running a rather more sophisticated and expansive version of Laundry Room Studios out of South Park, Seattle, Jones has fond memories of the session.
‘I’d recorded a tape for Freak Baby with Dave on guitar, but when he switched to drums their band was just so much better,’ he recalls. ‘They went from doing one-minute hardcore songs to doing … two-minute hardcore songs! But those songs were more ambitious and involved and dynamic.
‘Back then Dave was probably the most hyper person I’d ever met,’ he adds. ‘When we did that first Freak Baby demo he was literally bouncing off the walls. They were a hardcore band, so they all had that energy, but he was something else. But musically his decision to switch to drums was definitely the right one.’
‘Once Dave got behind the drums he was very obviously something special,’ says Chris Page. ‘He was doing stuff that nobody else was doing, incorporating little riffs and ideas that he’d pinched from some of the great rock drummers he listened to. He took great pride in us being the fastest band in the DC area, but there was so much more to his playing