Faced with such widespread attitudes and beliefs, it’s understandable that when John Grohol and his wife Anna, herself a Slovakian immigrant, started their own family, their four sons – Joseph, John, Alois and Andrew – were encouraged to adopt the less obviously Slovakian, more Americanised surname Grohl in order to better assimilate into the prevailing culture.
Ethnic conflict was not, however, confined to the United States. Tensions were also running high in Europe, with questions of sovereignty, race and national self-determination causing division and toxic discord. The 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, by Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip acted as the catalyst for a breakdown in international diplomacy in the Balkans, a situation which ultimately led to the outbreak of the First World War.
By the time America entered the Great War in April 1917, the Grohol family themselves had crossed state lines and moved to Canton, Ohio, setting up home at 116 Rowland Avenue, in the north-east of the city.
Canton was a hard, working-class town, built around its steel mills, which had embarked upon massive recruitment drives required to accommodate the increased productivity needed for the war effort. As his second eldest boy, John Stephen, enlisted in the United States army, John Grohol senior took up a position as a hammerman in one such factory. During this period Canton’s population swelled significantly – the 1920 census recorded the town as being home to 90,000 residents, a leap of almost 40,000 from figures collated just a decade previously – but among this new influx of citizens were less savoury elements, attracted by the town’s increased prosperity.
By the mid 1920s Canton had acquired the unwanted nickname ‘Little Chicago’ in recognition of the growth of underworld gangs busying themselves with organised prostitution, bootlegging and gambling operations in the town’s newly established red-light districts. Suspicious of the local police force’s apparent unwillingness to crack down on such illicit activities, newspaper editor Donald Ring Mellet conducted his own investigations, exposing the collusion between gangsters and police in a series of searing articles published in the Canton Daily News. Mellet paid a high price for his crusading efforts: on 16 July 1926 the journalist was shot dead at his home in a cold-blooded execution which sent shockwaves through the local community. This was not the American Dream as John Grohol had envisaged it. It was time for his family to move on once more. They headed north-east, this time for Ohio’s industrial heartland.
Residents of Warren, Ohio refer to their hometown as ‘The Festival City’ in recognition of the various celebrations of heritage, culture and art held throughout the year for the local community. In the summer of 2009, one such event – the inaugural Music Is Art festival – attracted thousands of music fans to the city’s downtown Courthouse Square. On display from 26 July to the first day of August were no less than 48 acts, a rich variety of musicians and artists. But on the afternoon of 1 August there was little debate as to the festival’s headline attraction.
‘Is this the most beautiful day of your life?’ Dave Grohl asked the crowd gathered on the lawn of the Trumbull County Courthouse as he was presented with the key to the city on the Music Is Art stage. ‘Because it is mine.’
‘I was born here, at the hospital just down the street, over at Trumbull Memorial,’ Grohl continued. ‘Most of my family is from the Niles and the Youngstown and the Warren area: my mother went to Boardman High School, my father went to the Academy …’
Standing alongside Grohl’s father James and mother Virginia, Warren Police Sergeant Joe O’Grady felt a surge of pride as he watched the city’s most famous son address his audience. Dave Grohl had perfected the art of speaking to a large group as if he were having an intimate one-to-one conversation with a close friend, and the crowd listened rapt as he spoke in his easy-going, everyman manner of his family’s history in Ohio: about his paternal grandfather Alois Grohl’s work at Republic Steel in Youngstown, his maternal grandfather John Hanlon’s employment as a civil engineer on the Mosquito Dam building project in the 1940s, and his own pride in hailing from the town.
The Music Is Art festival was Sgt Joe O’Grady’s brainchild, and it was his idea too to lobby the city council to rename a downtown street in Dave Grohl’s honour. This tribute, he argued, would bolster civic pride, and in saluting Grohl’s musical achievements the city elders would send an inspirational message to the youth of Warren about fulfilling their own potential. In September 2008 Warren City Council passed O’Grady’s resolution, and Market Street Alley was officially renamed David Grohl Alley.
On the morning of the dedication ceremony, Joe O’Grady walked Dave Grohl through downtown Warren to meet with one young man whose story had become entwined with the police officer’s own vision and passion for the project.
Throughout the summer of 2009, Jacob Robinson, an eighteen-year-old skater and aspiring rapper, had worked long days in David Grohl Alley, sweeping the asphalt street and removing weeds and leaves from every crack in the bordering walls, so that artists from the Trumbull Art Gallery could paint murals along its length. Initially these chores were undertaken as part of a community service programme, after a fracas with a local police officer who’d apprehended him for skateboarding on a public street (a misdemeanour under the city’s penal code).
But as O’Grady explained to Grohl, as Robinson’s involvement in the project deepened so too did the teenager’s sense of self-esteem. In Robinson’s story Grohl heard an echo of his own formative years: himself a self-confessed ‘little vandal’ during adolescence, he saw in Robinson another creative, frustrated, headstrong young man in need of direction. In a log cabin adjacent to Monument Park he spoke with the young skater as he signed his skate deck, telling him, ‘You and I are a lot alike.’
‘When I was your age, I was into skateboarding and I was into music,’ said Grohl. ‘I did my best to be myself and stay out of trouble …’
The sentence was left hanging, but its subtext was clear enough to both Robinson and the listening Joe O’Grady. This was precisely the kind of non-judgemental pep talk to which Robinson could connect, the kind of positive message the progressive policeman would himself repeat in the months and years ahead to other kids who felt both disillusioned and disenfranchised growing up in Warren.
‘A kid who’s fifteen years old doesn’t feel there’s hope,’ O’Grady told a local entertainment website. ‘But just because you’re born here doesn’t mean you’re a nobody.’
David Eric Grohl was born on 14 January 1969 at Trumbull Memorial Hospital in Warren, just one mile from the street that now bears his name. He was James and Virginia Grohl’s second child, and a brother for their daughter Lisa, then still a month shy of her third birthday. Speaking with Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad in 1993, Grohl described his parents as being positioned ‘pretty much at other ends of the spectrum’: in his eyes, his father was ‘a real conservative, neat, Washington DC kind of man’, his mother ‘a liberal, free-thinking, creative’ type, but in the early years of the couple’s relationship their shared passions evidently eclipsed such ideological divisions.
Virginia Jean Hanlon met James Harper Grohl while working in community theatre in Trumbull County. She was a striking, smart and sassy trainee teacher, he a quick-witted, charming and confident young journalist. Grohl was a classically trained flautist – nothing less than a ‘child prodigy’, according to his son – and a keen jazz buff; Hanlon sang with high school friends in an a cappella vocal group named the Three Belles. The pair also shared a love of poetry and literature, particularly the provocative counter-culture writings of Beat Generation authors Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. In later years, in the company of his son’s more artistic, liberal-minded friends, James Grohl was fond of wheeling out an anecdote about Ginsberg (unsuccessfully) hitting on him when the