LET'S DANCE
“Taking this shit too seriously can be the death of any band.”
Dave Grohl
Dave Grohl has many great memories of Lemmy, but there’s one in particular that’s imprinted on his brain
It was late morning in Los Angeles years ago, and the Foo Fighters frontman was en route to The Rainbow, Lemmy’s Sunset Strip hangout of choice, for an early-doors meeting with the Motörhead mainman. Halfway there, Grohl got a call: could he come to Lemmy’s apartment instead? Sure, said Grohl. After all, he’d never been through those hallowed portals.
“So I got to the apartment,” says Grohl, laughing, “and I was shocked at how fucking disgusting it was. These aisles of magazines and VHS tapes stacked three to four feet high, Lemmy sitting on the couch, in his black bikini underwear with a spiderweb on them, after just dyeing his hair black, doing a phone interview, with a videogame on pause on the television.”
Lemmy beckoned for Grohl to take a seat on the sofa next to him as he finished the interview. When it was done, Lemmy asked him if he wanted a drink. “It was fucking eleven-fifteen in the morning,” says Grohl. “I said: ‘Sure.’”
And there Grohl sat for the next five hours, on Lemmy’s couch, knocking back Lemmy-sized measures of Jack Daniel’s, with Lemmy in his underpants next to him. They listened to old Dudley Moore tapes and the new Motörhead album, during which the man who wrote and sang it stared into Grohl’s eyes and mouthed every lyric as it came through the television speakers. For a bourbon-fuelled Motörhead fan, this was as good as it gets.
“I will never, ever forget every little detail of that day,” Grohl says now. “Especially not the black underwear with a spiderweb and a black widow spider right where the dick is.”
Jack Daniel’s, Motörhead, spiderweb underpants, it’s a very Lemmy story. But it’s a very Dave Grohl story too. He may lead one of the most successful rock’n’roll bands of the past 25 years, but there’ll always be part of him that will forever be that teenage rock’n’roll fan. For all the record sales, the stadium gigs and the A-list names in his phone – and there are a of those – Dave Grohl is still one of us.
