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  “Okay . . . ummm . . . so, this is the kick drum. Your foot goes there,” I said as Harper’s tiny sneaker rested on the bass pedal. “This is your hi-hat; your other foot goes there.” She settled into her seat, sticks in hand, ready to whale. Not knowing what the hell I was doing, I fast-forwarded past all of the confusing right-left-right-left bullshit that Lenny Robinson had shown me (all respect, Lenny) and went straight to teaching her a beat. “Ummm . . . okay . . . here’s a simple kick-snare pattern . . .” After a few frustrating attempts, I stopped her and said, “Wait. I’ll be right back,” as I ran out of the room. I knew what she needed. It wasn’t me. It was AC/DC’s Back in Black.

  I put on the title track and told her to listen. “Hear that?” I asked. “That’s the kick drum. And that’s the hi-hat. And that’s the snare drum.” She listened closely and started to play. Her timing was incredibly solid, which any drummer knows is more than half the battle. She had a natural, built-in meter, and once she settled into the coordination of her movements, she started playing with tremendous feel. I jumped and cheered as my heart swelled with pride, headbanging and singing along with the lyrics as Harper played. Then something curious struck me: her posture. Her broad back arched forward slightly, angular arms and skinny elbows positioned out a bit, chin raised above the snare . . . and I saw it. SHE WAS A MIRROR IMAGE OF ME PLAYING THE DRUMS AT HER AGE. I felt as if I were time-traveling and having an out-of-body experience all at once. Not only that, but here was my mini-me, my grinning twin, learning to play the drums exactly as I had thirty-five years before: by listening to music with her parent. I wasn’t necessarily surprised, though. Like I said, I always knew this was coming.

  As I offered in the foreword to my mother’s book, From Cradle to Stage, I believe that these musical impulses aren’t so much a mystery as they are perhaps predetermined, residing somewhere deep within the DNA strand, just waiting to be unlocked.

  I wrote, “DNA is a miraculous thing. We all carry traits of people we have never met somewhere deep within our chemistry. I’m no scientist, but I believe that my musical abilities are proof of this. There is no divine intervention here. This is flesh and blood. This is something that comes from the inside out. The day that I picked up a guitar and played Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’ by ear, I knew that all I needed was that DNA and a whole lot of patience (something that my mother clearly had an abundance of). These ears and this heart and mind were born of someone. Someone who shared that same love of music and song. I was blessed with a genetic symphony, waiting to perform. All it took was that spark.”

  In Harper’s case, that “spark” had just come the day before as she sat in her seat at the Roxy nightclub on Sunset Boulevard, watching her older sister, Violet, play her first show at the ripe old age of eleven.

  Yes, I knew that one was coming, too.

  Violet was an intensely verbal child. By the age of three, she was already speaking with the clarity and vocabulary of a much older kid, often stunning unsuspecting waiters at restaurants from her booster seat with fully enunciated requests like “Excuse me, sir? Could I please have some more butter for my bread?” (I practically pissed my pants laughing every time, watching people do a double take as if we were a twisted ventriloquist act.) Once, while she was having a tantrum over something at the dinner table at home, I tried to calm her by saying, “Look, it’s okay, everyone gets angry sometimes. Even I get angry!” to which she responded, “I’m not angry! I’m just FRUSTRATED!” (I still don’t know the difference, but Violet does.) I eventually realized that she had a strong aural memory and an advanced sense of pattern recognition, which made it easy for her to imitate or repeat things perfectly by ear. That soon led to doing accents by request, where she would run through spot-on imitations of an Irish person, a Scottish person, an English person, an Italian person, and so on, all before she was even out of her smoothie-stained car seat.

  Before long, Violet’s love of music attuned her ear to pitch, key, and tone. As she sang from the back seat, I began to hear her zeroing in on the subtle movements of each of her favorite singers’ voices. The harmonies of the Beatles, the vibrato of Freddie Mercury, the soul of Amy Winehouse (perhaps the most memorable, as there’s nothing like hearing your five-year-old daughter sing “Rehab” word for word while wearing Yo Gabba Gabba! pajamas). It was clear that she had the gift. Now it was only a matter of time before she found the spark.

  That spark eventually became a wildfire, and music became her life’s divining rod, until in time she formed a rock band with her classmates. She became stronger and more confident with every performance, with a voracious and wonderfully diverse ear for music, singing along to everything from Aretha Franklin to the Ramones, widening her range as she set forth on a path of discovery and inspiration. Her genetic symphony was in concert, and all we could do was sit back and listen. After all, this is something that comes from the inside out.

  That day of Violet’s performance at the Roxy on Sunset Boulevard, the first “official” show with her band, I sat with my family in the audience as she sang her set. “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey, “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” by Pat Benatar, and “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses were my personal faves, but during the performance, I had to stop and take in the moment. To my left, Harper’s eyes were filled with dreams of becoming a musician someday; to my right, my mother was proudly witnessing another generation of her family baring their soul to a room full of strangers. It was a profound experience, best summed up in a text my mother sent the next day that read, “Now YOU know what it’s like to nervously sit in an audience as YOUR child steps onstage for the first time to follow their life passion with a funny haircut, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt.” She was right. THIS WASN’T DIVINE INTERVENTION. THIS WAS FLESH AND BLOOD.

  Since then, I have performed with both of my children in front of thousands of people around the world, and each time I am filled with a feeling much like my mother’s pride on that humid summer afternoon at One Step Down so many years ago. It is my life’s greatest gift to see the passion and courage of my own children as they take that leap, and I hope that someday their children will somehow feel the same joy and echo the final words that I wrote for my mother’s book years ago:

  “But, beyond any biological information, there is love. Something that defies all science and reason. And that I am most fortunate to have been given. It’s maybe the most defining factor in anyone’s life. Surely an artist’s greatest muse. And there is no love like a mother’s love. It is life’s greatest song. We are all indebted to the women who have given us life. For without them, there would be no music.”

  The Heartbreak of Sandi

  Courtesy of the author’s personal archives

  Her name was Sandi.

  And she was my first heartbreak.

  It was 1982, and as a gangly thirteen-year-old entering seventh grade, I was overwhelmed with the nervous excitement of meeting all the new, unfamiliar faces at Holmes Intermediate School. Life up until that point had been confined to my quaint little North Springfield neighborhood, surrounded by the same kids I had grown up with since kindergarten in our suburban maze of rolling hills and crowded cul-de-sacs. Just twelve miles south of Washington, DC, North Springfield was nothing more than a rural crossroads until it was eventually subdivided in the late 1950s and early ’60s and developed into winding streets lined with small, cookie-cutter brick homes. The American dream. There were only three types of houses where I’m from: the one-level econo-model, the split-level Brady Bunch model, and the two-story mac-daddy party crib (all under 1,700 square feet), planted on tiny lots, yard after yard. Take a wild guess which one I lived in. That’s right, econo all the way, baby. With three bedrooms and one bath, it was just enough space for my mother to comfortably raise two children on her meager Fairfax County Public Schools salary. We never had much, but we always had enough. North Springfield was a tight community of mostly young families; there were no real strangers
there. It was a community where everyone knew your name, which street you lived on, and which church you attended after your juicy divorce. In turn, each block hosted its own gang of scruffy hoodlums who terrorized the otherwise friendly sidewalks (mine included), and I spent my childhood climbing trees, chewing tobacco, playing hooky, lighting firecrackers, searching the creeks for crawfish, and spray-painting walls with the best of them. A faded Kodachrome portrait come to life, this was true seventies Americana shit. Banana-seat bikes and BB guns. A life somewhere between Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me and Tim Hunter’s classic River’s Edge.

  The prospect of moving on to another school filled with kids from different, outlying neighborhoods seemed practically international to me. I had been walking the single block to my elementary school around the corner my entire life. I had carefully prepared for this next step, though. With a few new shirts purchased at the discount fashion outlets off the Pennsylvania Turnpike and a fresh bottle of Old Spice, I looked forward to branching out and finally finding my niche. Maybe even meeting my suburban soul mate beneath the fluorescent lights of the locker-lined hallways at my new school. I had never been in love, but I knew she was out there, somewhere.

  With a big plastic comb tucked into the back pocket of my corduroy pants and dirty Nike sneakers, I boarded that bus every day in hopes that I’d make it to the final bell without either getting my ass kicked or getting expelled. I was a fucking horrible student, and I was already in the early stages of my punk rock chrysalis, having discovered the B-52s and Devo on Saturday Night Live, somehow connecting to the subversive, radical aesthetic of their music, so I was taking baby steps in the shadows. AS MUCH AS I WANTED TO FIT IN AND BE ACCEPTED WITHIN MY CIRCLE OF FRIENDS, DEEP DOWN I FELT DIFFERENT. It would be years before I found the courage to embrace my individuality, but at the time I was almost closeted, hiding my love of alternative culture for fear that I would be ostracized by the cooler kids. I played along, I suppose, but knew that I wasn’t necessarily cut out for the Key Club or the football team. I was a bit of a misfit, longing to feel understood, waiting for someone to accept the real me.

  And then, I saw her.

  Sandi was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Ice-blue eyes, feathered blond hair, and a smile so blinding it could have charged every Tesla from Brentwood to Beijing, had Teslas existed in 1982. Farrah Fawcett had nothing on her. Cheryl Tiegs, eat your heart out. Bo Derek? Christie Brinkley? Not even close. My knees went weak the moment our eyes met from across the crowded hallway, and I felt what could only be described as love at first sight. Like I’d had the wind knocked out of me with a sledgehammer, I was crippled by her beauty. Like a deer in headlights, I was paralyzed by her stare. Some people find angels in burnt tortillas. I found an angel in lip gloss and Jordache jeans.

  I was no Casanova, by any means. My giant horse teeth and knobby knees were no help in my quest to find a girlfriend, and I was painfully shy around the ladies, so if anything I was shown a bit of sympathy or charity by the opposite sex, as they certainly didn’t see me as a candidate for best hickey at the homecoming dance. Sure, I had played my share of spin the bottle at basement parties all over North Springfield, but George Clooney, I was not. More like Barney Fife with a skateboard.

  Nevertheless, I had met my match, and I could not rest until I made Sandi mine. I would race home from school every day, slam my bedroom door, and write her poems and songs on my Sears Silvertone guitar, spilling my heart out to her in god-awful melodies for no one’s ears but hers. She had become my muse, my beacon, and every waking moment was devoted to daydreaming of our perfect, inevitable communion. I was hopelessly in love, and my skinny little heart surely could not survive another day without even just a sliver of her reciprocation. I rehearsed my proposal to her over and over in my mind every day, and after what seemed like a never-ending period of painfully awkward courtship (handwritten notes passed between classes, phone calls after school . . . I laid it on pretty thick), I somehow seized the opportunity and managed to turn on enough charm (and Old Spice) to ask her to go steady with me. To my amazement, she said yes (again, charity came into play), and we soon took that grand leap from just walking side by side between classes to walking hand in sweaty hand between classes. I felt like a king. A nerd god. I, DAVID ERIC GROHL, WAS NOW FORMALLY COMMITTED IN A MUTUAL RELATIONSHIP WITH THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN THE WORLD . . . OR AT LEAST IN OUR GRADE. I had finally found my suburban soul mate, the love of my life, the person I would grow old with someday, surrounded by litters of loving grandchildren. I had found my other half. And she had found hers.

  Or so I thought.

  To be honest, I’m not even sure it lasted a week. I don’t really know what happened. From my perspective, things were going great! We were young, happy, and free! Like Burt Reynolds and Loni Anderson, David Copperfield and Claudia Schiffer, Siegfried and Roy, a power couple of epic proportions and infinite possibilities! The world was our middle school oyster, and we had a lifetime of devotion to look forward to. And then, out of the blue, she dropped the MOAB (mother of all bombs) on my ass . . .

  “You know . . . I’m new here . . . and I don’t really want to get tied down.”

  Completely blindsided, I was frozen in my tracks by such devastating sacrilege. Time stood still. My mind went blank. My throat clenched and I could not breathe. My entire universe was suddenly ripped out from beneath my feet, and with those words like a poison scythe slicing through my heart, I was struck down and reduced to a puddle of agony. I agreed and shrugged it off with a smile, of course, but I was officially dead inside. Annihilated.

  Forlorn, I returned home to my volumes of nauseatingly romantic scribblings, gathered them all, and burned them in a ceremonious ritual at the altar that I had of course built for Sandi in the carport. Okay, maybe I just threw them in the fucking trash can outside, but I did purge my pages of puppy-love poetry so as to cut the proverbial cord and try to get on with my boring preteen life. I should have known she would never love me. After all, I was just a skinny weirdo who listened to strange music while wearing torn Toughskins who no one would ever understand.

  That night I had a dream. I was on a giant stage, drowned in colored lights as I played a triumphant guitar solo to a sold-out arena of adoring fans, blazing the fretboard with a proficiency never delivered before by a mortal man. The rapturous response from the audience was so deafening, it practically drowned out the sound of the mind-bending riffs I was laying down on those motherfuckers. Looking out at the thousands of screaming faces as I tore through my lead, I suddenly noticed Sandi in the front row, arms outstretched to touch me, sobbing uncontrollably, clearly consumed with regret that she had dumped me, the world’s greatest rock star superhero, earlier that day (though we were still thirteen in my dream). I woke with a start, and that hopeless feeling of sorrow and dejection had disappeared, now replaced with a sense of inspired empowerment. AS I LAY THERE STARING AT THE CEILING, IT DAWNED ON ME THAT MAYBE MY GUITAR WAS THE LOVE OF MY LIFE AFTER ALL. Maybe I didn’t need Sandi. Maybe my Silvertone could help me heal my wounded heart. Maybe I could write my way out of this mess. I was more determined than ever to make this rock and roll dream come true.

  This is perhaps the impetus behind every song that I have ever written. Not to exact revenge on Sandi, of course, but to guard my most vulnerable corners by using heartbreak as fuel. What could be more inspiring than the exposed nerves of a wounded heart? In a way, I cherish my numerous heartbreaks almost more than the actual love that preceded them, because the heartbreak has always proven to me that I can feel. Trust me, the sweet sting of a love refused is powerful enough to send any scribe scrambling for pen and paper, aching to find beauty in the pain of being eighty-sixed by another. And more often than not, the result is good, because it’s real, and it fucking hurts so bad.

  Over the years, Sandi and I drifted our separate ways. Different friends, different schools, different paths in life, eventually losing touch and becoming just childhood memories for one
another. I bumped into her once at a bar in our twenties, and we laughed together in a crowded room for a while, but that was all. The magic was gone. Again, we drifted our separate ways, returning to adulthood and the people that we eventually became. Bygones, you know.

  Until one day on the Foo Fighters’ 2011 “Wasting Light” tour, a mutual friend called and asked if I could put him on the guest list for our Washington, DC, show at the Verizon Center downtown. It was our first sold-out arena in my hometown, and my guest list was a virtual high school reunion, with over a hundred old friends all coming to the concert to celebrate and spend one night reliving our distant past. It was almost like I was going to finally experience the homecoming dance I had never been invited to! My friend kindly asked if he could get a plus-one, adding in, “Guess who’s coming with me? Sandi!” Holy shit. I couldn’t believe it. It had been almost thirty years since she and I had met and I had given her my heart, only for her to smash it into a thousand bloody pieces on the ground before me (please laugh), so I was more than happy to have her come hang out with me and all of our old friends from the neighborhood. This was shaping up to be a night to remember.