Over the past year, Dave Grohl has been one of the busiest people in all of music. We can list the many, many, many, many things he’s done, including the new Foo Fighters album and tour, but what’s the fun in that? One project that little has emerged from (until now) has been anything to do with his upcoming memoir, The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music.
Out in October, it takes the concept of what he was sharing on his Instagram account, Dave’s True Stories, and brings those memories to a wider scope. Today, Grohl shared an excerpt from the book, that pays tribute to his cousin Tracey. Here, he describes Tracey, who he calls his “cousin,” but is the daughter of Grohl’s mother’s longtime friend rather than a blood relative. He gets into it by describing the nature of how they met and would hang out every summer when his family would road trip to the Chicago area to hang out with hers, and eventually how she turned into a “postapocalyptic superhero,” a.k.a. a punk rocker.
Grohl goes on to describe how she showed off her new collection of music, which included seven-inches and albums from “band names that I had never heard of—the Misfits, Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains, Germs, Naked Raygun, Black Flag, Wire, Minor Threat, GBH, Discharge, the Effigies . . . too many to name here,” which he described as “the first day of the rest of my life.”
He continued by saying Tracey took him to see Naked Raygun at the Cubby Bear in Chicago (not far from Tracey’s Evanston home) and his life was forever changed as a 13-year-old. Grohl brought this story up during the Foo Fighters’ Lollapalooza set a few weeks ago and now, it has much more context to it.
You can read the full chapter here.
