As history goes, Dave Grohl made the jump to join Nirvana after his Washington, D.C.-based group Scream disbanded, but what if he had taken a different path and ended up in GWAR? Grohl reveals to Rolling Stone that it was something that was actually in consideration at one point in his life.
According to Grohl, the GWAR opportunity came up while he was still a teenage drummer living in the D.C. area. “GWAR were looking for a drummer, and I talked to their guitar player Dewey about it,” recalled Grohl. “And he’s, like, ‘It’s great, and you get to design your own costume.’ As drummer, you don’t want something that covers your face fully. You want your arms to be free. So I was, like, ‘Cool.’ So I started kind of drawing this thing. At the time GWAR was a band that would draw like 700 people, right? Which is huge.”
But Grohl admits he ended up having a change of heart. “The more I thought about it, am I really gonna invite my uncle to see me play when there’s like fake blood and cum shooting all over the place?,” he recalled.
GWAR went through four drummers in the ’80s before Jizmak Da Gusha (aka Brad Roberts) claimed the drum throne in 1989 all the way through to present day, making him the longest tenured drummer in band history.
Grohl, meanwhile, went on to join Nirvana, formed the Foo Fighters after Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994 and had other opportunities over the years including a discussion about potentially joining Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and sitting in with Queens of the Stone Age as an official band member in 2001 and 2002, handling drums on their Songs for the Deaf album.
His other drumming credits include helping to recreate the music for the Beatles-centric film Backbeat, making guest drum contributions on albums for Buzz Osborne, Mike Watt, Tenacious D, Tony Iommi, Killing Joke, Nine Inch Nails, The Prodigy and more.
