Southwest Airlines Spirit Magazine, Your destination for travel resources and entertainment.

How a rock star taught a ‘Drooling Fanatic’ to stop whining and embrace happiness.

by Steve Almond

I was asking Jimmy at the valet stand where I might find some decent food, because we were on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, where all the tourist joints smell like frathouses. “There’s an In-N-Out down there,” Jimmy said.

“How far?” I said. “Walking distance?”

Jimmy looked at me like I’d asked to lick one of his tattoos. “Whatsamatta,” he said, “you don’t got a car?”

A drunk guy came stumbling out of the hotel. He had a sideways Mohawk and a profane T-shirt. His female companion was the color of the cheese mix you add to Kraft macaroni. Something in his manner, the belligerent public inebriation I guess, suggested he might be a rock star.

“Hey,” I said, “was that guy a rock star?”

Jimmy made a sound like he was going to spit. “None of these people are rock stars. They’re rich Eurotrash who come here so they can act like rock stars. The Strip is all poseurs now. Not like it used to be. Man, you don’t even wanna know how crazy it used to get.” Jimmy was right. I didn’t really want to know how crazy it used to get.

I was only chatting with Jimmy because the rock star I was supposed to be interviewing—Dave Grohl, former Nirvana drummer and current Foo Fighters front man—had blown me off. It was Labor Day, 2007, and I’d been in Los Angeles for 48 hours and had yet to spend a single minute with Grohl. Instead I’d spent those hours fielding increasingly frantic calls from my editor, who wanted to know why I had yet to spend a single minute with Dave Grohl.

I was so far from knowing the answer to this question that it had become an indeterminate philosophical inquiry. There was an entire circuitry of power and influence crackling around me, a network of publicists and managers and agents and editors, all of whom were yelling at one another on cell phones about access and contingencies and deadlines and all of whom sounded helpless. My life had become a Beckett play, as adapted for the stage by Chuck Klosterman.

My editor was taking it the hardest. It was his tush in the sling. To make up for lost time, he wanted me to fly to Las Vegas to join the Foos for the MTV Video Music Awards, a plan that sounded glamorous until you realized that it would almost certainly involve me sitting in a hotel room, listening to my editor stroke out on the phone.

“Oh, hey,” Jimmy said. “There’s a California Pizza Kitchen down on Holloway.”

My cell phone rang and it was not my editor. It was a publicist from the firm employed by the Foo Fighters. He informed me that he had flown from New York to Los Angeles for the express purpose of making sure I got access to Dave Grohl. The Foo Fighters, in other words, had just paid thousands of dollars to lobby themselves on my behalf.

I turned off my cell phone and fled Sunset on foot. On Santa Monica, I passed an open-air club called RAGE where young men in underpants danced on raised boxes. The patio bars were packed for Labor Day. Billboard faces loomed over the avenue, vast and pale, like planets of narcissism. My cell phone buzzed. I had six new messages.

If you’re wondering what it’s really like to write a magazine story about a rock star, this is what it is like. You spend a lot of time talking to people like Jimmy at the valet stand and staggering through hotel lobbies on the verge of nervous collapse.

As to why I took the assignment, this was a complicated question. I’d begun my career as a pop music critic in El Paso, Texas, two decades ago. This had meant, for the most part, reviewing heavy metal and country bands, with occasional Latin respites. (If memory serves, I reviewed Menudo three times.) Back then, there was nothing I could have dreamed of more glamorous than writing a profile for a music magazine.

But in the years since, I’d more or less sworn off rock criticism. This is not to say that I’d given up on music. On the contrary, I’d become a Drooling Fanatic. This is a technical term of my own invention, meant to describe the sort of person for whom music is essentially the only pathway to feeling fully alive. You know a Drooling Fanatic or two, if you aren’t one yourself.

We’re the ones who are constantly lobbying you to come out to live shows and besieging you with new album recommendations, or worse, handing you homemade CD mixes and calling you up that same night to ask what you thought of them, specifically the syncopated handclaps on track 14. Chances are we once dreamed of being rock stars ourselves, but lacked the talent or courage to make it happen. Chances are we have a few favorite bands, and that our devotion to them is both loud and evangelical. Chances are we have music collections that most people would consider excessive.

In my own case, the exact number of albums is unknown. My wife’s estimate would be a million. My own (more reasonable) guess would be 5,000. These are mostly CDs, with a few hundred cassettes thrown in for good measure. Most of them are stored in our basement, in what my wife refers to as the Serial Killer Room. The rest are piled in my attic office. Oh, and a sliver of the archive has taken up residence in the trunk of my car.

My wife is forever imploring me to burn this music onto my computer, and I am forever heading down to the Serial Killer Room, full of good intentions. Because I am a Drooling Fanatic, however, what happens is that I start sorting through the milk crates and finding all these incredible albums I haven’t listened to in, like, 10 years. And so naturally I have to put them on the crappy little CD player downstairs and dance in an embarrassing manner, while reliving what Bruce Springsteen would call my “glory days.” Hey, it beats working for a living.

Given all this, shouldn’t music writer rank as my dream job? Well, it should. But as my love of music deepened into a full-blown obsession, I ran smack into the Rock Critic Paradox. Using words to describe music struck me as increasingly futile, like “dancing about architecture,” as the saying goes. After all, if you try to write about your favorite song, you’ll probably get as far as a few adjectives, a list of instruments, maybe a line or two from the chorus. Even critics with extensive musical training—and mine, by the way, consisted of abusing my mother’s piano for a few years—can’t do much beyond providing technical explanations.

Songs aren’t made of technical explanations, though. They are made of notes and chords and rhythms and harmonies and words that emerge from the singers as exultant and wavering tones, dozens of sonic elements, in other words, which the listener—adding his or her own emotional needs to the mix—experiences as a singular thing: the song.

Back when I was still trying to be a music critic in El Paso, I would often ask the kids at metal concerts what they thought of particular songs. The answers were always the same:

“Awesome!”

“Killer!”

“Rad!”

Because for them the concert wasn’t about words at all, but the annihilation of words, a return to the primal state in which the only appropriate and honest response is to howl and bang your head.

This is why, after just three years—and three Menudo concerts—in El Paso, I gave up on the dream of being a professional music critic, and become a full-time Drooling Fanatic. As it should happen, this was a better use of my rather manic energies. It allowed me not only to amass an unreasonable number of records, and to alienate my friends and family with incessant recommendations but to support and eventually stalk some of my favorite musicians on earth.

None of these musicians were household names, of course. No, for the true Drooling Fanatic, worshipping at the same altar as the masses is to be avoided. The folks I revered were brilliant-but-unsung types, guys like Nil Lara, a Miami crooner who sounds like Stevie Wonder crashing the Buena Vista Social Club. And Boris McCutcheon, a soulful troubadour who, along with his rollicking band, spent much of 2004 camped in my Somerville, Massachusetts, apartment. And Dayna Kurtz, a sublime chanteuse who once granted me the privilege of driving her to Pat’s Towing in Somerville, when her car was towed after a gig.

More recently, I’d taken it upon myself to start meeting overlooked artists. I told them I was working on a book about rock and roll, a book that was, at best, half-formed in my own mind. Mostly, I just wanted to hang out with them. I wanted to rub myself against their genius. I was hoping they’d hire me on as their personal tour biographer, or possibly adopt me.

This is all by way of explaining why a rock star like Dave Grohl wasn’t exactly my dream interview.

At the same time, some crucial part of me did want to see what it was like to be a Big Famous Rock Star With No Integrity, and how such a life might differ from other sorts of lives, such as my own. Whatever cultural sophistication we might aim at, no matter how many Obscure Rockers With Integrity we might stalk, the Drooling Fanatic remains essentially covetous. Also, I would make more money than I had earned in 10 years as a short story writer.

Foo headquarters was in the San Fernando Valley, which meant numerous trips over the dirty yellow mountains that divide the hip part of L.A. (movie studios, glitterati) from the unhip part (strip malls, worker bees). The first time I arrived at the Foo compound, some jerk in a black Beemer pulled up behind me and laid on his horn, then burned rubber into the parking lot. That was the closest I would come to interacting with Dave Grohl for the next two days.

Instead, I was left to skulk accusingly while the Foos got their photos taken by Japanese magazines and huddled with managers and rehearsed, in private, for the MTV gig. I wasn’t even the only reporter on the premises. A guy from GQ was getting major face time with Dave. I was eventually reduced to eavesdropping on the band’s inane conversations during photo sessions.

Why couldn’t I just set up a time to interview Dave Grohl? Because there was a protocol, one that operated on two levels. The first was practical. Grohl was a rock star who ran his own multimillion-dollar-yet-still-impressively-disorganized corporation. He had no fixed schedule and 80 people required his attention at all times. The second level was psychological and largely subconscious. It was predicated on the fact that a reporter was an interloper, a non-famous person, an envoy, in fact, from the larger world of non-famous people. The idea that a non-famous person would make a demand on the time of a famous person is inherently offensive to the keepers of celebrity.

Journalists are dependably loyal to this protocol, because their professional stature depends on access. When that access is promised then suddenly denied in irrational ways, when you are basically standing around in a strange place far from home with an unctuous publicist as your only ally, it makes you angry, but more than that, it makes you very, very needy. And so when you finally get to talk to the rock star (or movie star or politician or athlete) in question, it’s like they’ve rescued you from a terrible nightmare, which is the nightmare of your own helplessness and your unfamousness and your accession to the stupidity of fame, and by your affiliation with them you are temporarily elevated into the world of the semi-divine. This is one of the reasons celebrity profiles are so fawning: because they manage to capture a spirit of slavish gratitude on the part of the reporter.

I hope this helps explain why, the first time Dave Grohl spoke to me, approximately 59 hours after we were first supposed to meet, six hours before my return flight to Boston, I was so instantly grateful, so star-struck, so possibly and confusingly in love, that I could only nod my head and fight back tears. Grohl didn’t just say hello. He walked up in plain view of his posse and smiled at me and said, “Hey, Man, you’re always so mellow. I love this guy. We’ve got to get some time to hang out. Can you hang out tonight?”—an outburst of such diabolical psychological brilliance that for a few moments I actually felt guilty. I was going to have to blow Grohl off to catch my flight: Man, I’m sorry, Dave.

But then I realized that this was how they got you, these famous people. They offered to hang out with you at a time they knew you were unavailable.

So I said, “Could we talk right now?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sure, Man.”

There was nowhere private we could go except the bathroom. I wasn’t sure where to sit, but Dave dropped right onto the floor and I sat across from him, a bit closer to the toilet than I maybe would have liked. Here’s the thing about Grohl, though. It didn’t even matter. Because he was so completely the opposite of what I expected (egotistical, bratty), he came off as the least neurotic person I’ve met. Within a space of about five minutes, he had confided in me about his idyllic childhood, how he met and wooed his wife, the drug overdose that nearly killed his best friend, drummer Taylor Hawkins, how this trauma helped convince him to have a baby, and how much he adored his baby. Then he lit up a cigarette and offered me one. We’d just had celebrity-profile sex.

A minute later, Grohl’s manager knocked on the bathroom door and told him that the crew from Wal-Mart had arrived to shoot the official Wal-Mart promotional video for the new album. The Foo Fighters headed into their studio and proceeded to tear through half a dozen songs. They were very tight and very loud and Grohl himself sang in such a manner that the veins in his neck turned red and sort of vibrated. It was impressive.

Afterward, I stood in the lobby of Foo HQ, considering what would happen if I didn’t get any more time with Grohl. And what I realized (depressingly) is that I already had enough material. It almost doesn’t matter what you write when it comes to celebrity profiles. The only salient point is that you got access. As I was thinking this, Grohl strolled over and invited me to swing by his house. This, too, was a calculated move, because he knew that I had a baby daughter at home and he, too, was a new father; this would give us something over which to bond. So I followed him up to his mansion in the hills above Encino and interviewed him on the veranda and met his stunning wife and watched him goof around with his stunning daughter and change her diaper. Calculated, all of it.

But here’s the strange thing: While I recognized that Dave Grohl and I were engaged in a deeply contrived scene, staged expressly for PR purposes, hanging out with him made a deep impression on me. He was the first musician I’d met—the first artist, really—who’d achieved stardom without sabotaging his life. Who, on the contrary, had maintained the tranquility of his domestic life despite the pressures of fame. In fact, the reason he’d blown me off for the first two days of my visit was so he and his wife could interview nannies.

Grohl’s calm struck me as even more remarkable given that he’d spent his early 20s backing Kurt Cobain, the modern archetype of self-destructive rock stardom. I assumed Grohl, having spent so many years in Cobain’s shadow, would avoid talking about him. But I was wrong. As we sat out on the veranda, Grohl, apropos of nothing, volunteered that he’d been watching a YouTube clip that morning, of Kurt’s home movies. “He’s hanging out with his family in a park,” Grohl explained. “Sitting by this stream as these little girls run around, and it broke my heart because I knew when that was, and I knew that he wasn’t necessarily happy at the time.” Grohl shook his head. Down below him, the L.A. sunset stood ready to flare. A few feet away, his beautiful toddler, Violet Maye, was circling a barbecue grill, murmuring to herself, “Hot hot.” Grohl said softly, “He couldn’t fully experience the joy of life. And I’m at that point now where I can.”

Grohl looked dour for a moment. Then he looked over at Violet and scooped her up, and suddenly, I had a pretty good idea why Cobain’s ghost had been hanging around. It had nothing to do with the burden of living up to Cobain’s genius or even his loss as a friend. It was the simple and horrifying fact that Cobain was, at the time of his death, the father of a girl almost exactly Violet’s age.

So there I was talking to Dave Grohl, but what I was thinking about was my friend Lee, who wept the day after Kurt Cobain died and insisted that he was our generation’s John Lennon. I hadn’t said this to Lee at the time, or to any of the millions of other Drooling Fanatics (Nirvana Division) voicing similar sentiments, but this struck me as dead wrong. Lennon wrote hundreds of songs, in a wide range of emotional and musical vernaculars, and became one of the most important political activists of his era before he was murdered. Cobain wrote in one genre, in two moods at most, and took his own life. He was instantly canonized for this act.

So what I was thinking about, really, was the Myth of the Suffering Artist, the stubborn notion that success should come at the expense of happiness. I was thinking about Boris and Nil Lara and Ike Reilly and other personifications of the Myth, guys who had twice the talent necessary to be stars, but who remained essentially neglected figures. And I was thinking about myself (as usual) and the ways in which I identified with these guys because of my own knack for greeting creative triumphs with self-punishment.

When I paid the supremely talented Austin, Texas, musician Bob Schneider a visit, he’d told me a story about touring with Dave Matthews, and how charming Matthews was to everyone and how much this had made everyone want to help him. His point was that charm was the crucial ingredient to making it big. But I saw something more fundamental in Grohl. He struck me, above all, as an empathic guy, someone who had resolved his internal conflicts, the despair that bars us from the kingdom of happiness. Maybe he wasn’t Saint Kurt of the Wounded Heart, or Mozart or Van Gogh or Rimbaud, but he was a genuine artist doing his best with his given portion of talent and being kind to the people around him.

Hokey as it may sound, the guy struck me as a role model just then. Because so often in my life I’d assumed that the only score that mattered was the one for artistic merit, and that I was almost duty-bound to mess up everything else on the behalf of my writing. That wasn’t how I wanted to measure success anymore. I wanted to be a loving husband and father, a conscientious citizen, someone whose life affirmed the compassion of his work. Maybe that meant that I’d never be anything but a mid-list toiler. But why did I need to be anything more? Why did anyone?

Wasn’t the very concept of “fame” a modern pathology? For most of our history as a species, after all, fame—that label we apply to everyone from Paul Newman to Paris Hilton—didn’t even exist. The only true celebrities were figures from mythology or religious stories. And there was no commercial barrier to creative expression. It was enough to be able to sing or tell a story or ride a horse with grace or make a beautiful shoe; these talents were recognized for the immediate pleasures they provided.

But somewhere along the line we’d convinced ourselves that acts of imagination only had value if strangers would pay for them, or if they won fancy prizes, or if critics decided they had merit, notions that had proved a boon to the Myth of the Suffering Artist. Because now, in addition to the difficulty of making art, artists now had to endure this vile process of certification.

It was a crock, and I wanted to tell Dave Grohl as much. But we were too deep into our own fame charade to turn back at this point. Grohl did his best to make it bearable. He remained friendly and self-deprecating, and even though his estate was at the top of a mountain and contained a tennis court and a waterfall, he made a joke about how the terra cotta roof tiles reminded him of a Chi-Chi’s franchise. When I mentioned that I’d be back in L.A. soon, he asked why, and I told him for a reading, and he said, “Hey, I’ll have to check that out.”

We were standing in Dave Grohl’s circular driveway, gazing down upon the Valley of the Non-Famous, unto which I would be descending momentarily. A gleaming turquoise Harley was parked beside a tiled fountain. I wanted to say, Look, Man, you don’t have to try so hard. But it seemed important to Dave Grohl that he be the sort of rock star who would show up at a reading given by the reporter interviewing him. And it seemed wrong, given all he’d taught me, to dash his hopes.

Steve Almond is the author of six books. This article is excerpted from his upcoming book, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (Random House, April 2010).