At the time of his son’s birth, James Grohl was a journalist for the Scripps Howard news agency, a division of the multi-platform communications empire built up by the tough-talking Illinois-born media mogul Edward Willis Scripps. With a culture encouraging independent thinking, instincts for social reform and a healthy disrespect for authority, it was a fecund environment for any ambitious young journalist. For James Grohl, this avowed policy of fearless, scrupulous news-gathering was never more important than when he was called upon to cover the student protests at Kent State University in nearby Kent, Ohio in May 1970.
Founded in 1910 as a teacher training college, Kent State was officially accorded university status in 1935; then, as now, the college prided itself upon a commitment to ‘excellence in action’. By 1970 the student body, which included future Pretenders singer Chrissie Hynde, then an eighteen-year-old art student, numbered 21,000 across all programmes. That student body had become enraged when US President Richard Nixon, a man elected two years earlier on a pledge to end the war in Vietnam, announced on 30 April 1970 that US combat forces had invaded neighbouring Cambodia, an act widely interpreted as an escalation of the conflict.
When sporadic rioting broke out in the city in the wake of an anti-war demonstration on the university campus on 1 May, Mayor Leroy Satrom declared a state of emergency, and Ohio Governor James Allen Rhodes sent the National Guard to Kent to quell the disturbances and restore order.
On 4 May, when 2,000 protestors gathered on the university commons for another scheduled protest, they were ordered to disperse. When it became clear that the protestors were not prepared to comply with this injunction, the Guardsmen fired first tear gas, then live ammunition, into their midst. Four students were killed, and nine more injured.
Dubbed ‘the Kent State Massacre’ by the media, the killings galvanised the American anti-war movement. In the wake of the shootings, angry demonstrations were held on college campuses nationwide, and on 9 May an estimated 100,000 people converged upon Washington DC to protest against the Vietnam War and the horrifying events in Ohio. In response, the Nixon administration called upon the military to defend government offices, as the President was secreted from the District of Columbia to Camp David in Maryland for his own safety. White House staffers viewed the tense stand-off with mounting panic: upon seeing armed soldiers in the basement of the executive offices, one Nixon aide later commented, ‘You’re thinking “This can’t be the United States of America. This is not the greatest free democracy in the world. This is a nation at war with itself.”’
James Grohl’s dispatches from Ohio marked him out as a rising star within the Scripps Howard news service. In 1972, while working in Columbus, Ohio, he was asked to consider a move to Washington DC, the nation’s capital and political nerve centre, to develop his career further. For Grohl, the timing was perfect. This was the age of the crusading journalist, with Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward being hailed as American heroes for their incisive and explosive investigations into a seemingly trivial burglary at the Watergate Hotel on 17 June 1972, which exposed a botched attempt to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee offices and uncovered a paper trail all the way to the White House, leading to the resignation of ‘Tricky Dickie’ Nixon on 8 August 1974. What upwardly mobile young reporter wouldn’t wish to join the pair on the frontline in their tenacious pursuit of the truth? It was an opportunity Grohl accepted without reservation.
Like so many other transplants to the DC metropolitan area, he chose to relocate his family not in the District of Columbia itself, but in the outlying suburbs. Springfield, Virginia lay six miles down the I-95, just inside the Capital Beltway, and like the neighbouring towns of Arlington, Annandale and Alexandria it was a popular destination for commuters working in the city or at the nearby Pentagon offices. As with other Northern Virginian towns, it had a transient population, with the shifting dynamics of working on Capitol Hill leading many families to relocate after four or five years in the area. Despite this, residents worked hard to foster and maintain a strong community spirit.
At the dawn of the 1970s the Grohls’ new hometown was a location suited to the patronising sobriquet ‘white-bread’. But, befitting a town ‘15 minutes from chicken farmers, and 15 minutes from the White House’, as Dave Grohl would later describe it, Springfield, VA also had a more schizophrenic character. Here, urbane, moneyed politicos – those ‘fortunate sons’ eviscerated in song by Creedence Clearwater Revival – shared street space with blue-collar Southerners with gun racks on their pickup trucks and Skynyrd and Zeppelin blasting from their Camaros and Ford Mustangs.
The family lived on Kathleen Place, a quiet cul-de-sac, in a house Dave Grohl remembers as ‘a tiny shoebox’. The children settled quickly into their new home. Lisa Grohl enrolled at North Springfield Elementary School, while Dave, fondly remembered by his mother as ‘a pretty rambunctious kid’ with a taste for mischief that cherubic looks and a beatific smile couldn’t always mask, was left to explore his new surroundings on his go-kart, with his faithful companion, a somewhat bedraggled Winnie the Pooh bear, glued to his side.
‘Springfield was a great neighbourhood to grow up in,’ recalls Nick Christy, the frontman of Grohl’s first real band Nameless, whose own family moved to Springfield from Massachusetts in the early 1970s. ‘A kid could have a lot of fun there. The houses weren’t fancy or spectacular, but it was a nice friendly neighbourhood. It was all middle-income white families, and people looked out for one another. I only later found out that all my friends’ parents were in the FBI or CIA or were senators from Washington.’
Seduced by the electric, politically charged atmosphere of his new environs, James Grohl switched careers soon after settling in Springfield, quitting journalism to take up a new position as a speech writer/campaign manager for Robert Taft Jr, the Republican Senator for Ohio and grandson of former US President William Howard Taft. His wife also secured new employment, teaching English and drama at Thomas Jefferson High School in nearby Alexandria, where she was a popular addition to the staff.
‘Virginia Grohl was a great teacher,’ recalls Chet Lott, a student at Thomas Jefferson High from 1981 to 1984. ‘She was the type of teacher that took an interest in you personally, and got to know everyone, and she was definitely one of the stand-out teachers in my whole schooling. She was very cool, a very nice lady.’
In private, though, things were not going quite so well for the Grohls. Behind closed doors, and out of earshot of their children, James and Virginia Grohl’s marriage was slowly falling apart. In 1975 James Grohl walked out on his wife and young family. Virginia Grohl faced what would have undoubtedly been a difficult, stress-filled time with dignity and admirable stoicism, shielding her two children from both the harsh realities of separation and her own fears and concerns for the future.
‘Of course it caused a lot of pain and it caused a lot of struggle, but I don’t think I really understood what was going on,’ Dave would later recall. ‘By the time I got a hold of the situation, it was too late for me to have a freak-out. It just seemed abnormal for all my friends to have a father. I thought growing up with my mother and sister was just the way it was supposed to be.’
On a practical level, Virginia Grohl quickly realised that her $18,000 salary as a high school teacher in the Fairfax County public school system was never going to cover the cost of raising two children single-handedly. To supplement her income she took on part-time work: week-day evenings were spent working in a department store, while weekends were occupied by administration duties for a local carpet cleaning company.
In order to keep her children occupied and entertained while she was working weekends, Virginia Grohl would allow Lisa and Dave to listen to her record collection on a stereo borrowed from Thomas Jefferson High School. One day while the family were out shopping in a local drugstore Dave nagged his mother into buying him an album of his own, a K-Tel compilation which had been heavily advertised on television. Released in 1976, Block Buster promised ‘20 original hits by original stars’, and featured some of the biggest anthems of the era, from KC and The Sunshine Band’s ‘That’s the Way (I Like It)’ to Alice Cooper’s ‘Only Women Bleed’. Back home at Kathleen Place, Dave commandeered the stereo for the next few weekends, bugging the shit out of his big sister by lifting the stylus every three and a half