Dave Grohl’s Teenage Christmas on Mushrooms
Dave Grohl recalled how he had taken mushrooms during a Christmas party held by his mom for their family and her teacher colleagues, and then spent the night failing to learn a Led Zeppelin song.
The Foo Fighters frontman said he shouldn’t be telling the old story as he related his teenage adventure to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. He want on explain that if his band ever released a Christmas single, it would signal the end of the group.
“I grew up in a house that was really small, and every Christmas night, people just knew to come over to the Grohls’ little house,” he said. “We would all just sit around and listen to music and drink and stuff like that. By the time I was like 14 or 15, now I’m in a punk-rock band, my punk-rock friends are coming over. Then my mom’s teacher friends are coming over and then my sister.”
He remembered "this one year, I think I was like 15 or something like that … my friend gave me mushrooms for Christmas, right? I’d never taken them before. So I thought, ‘Okay, I probably shouldn’t take them at this party because all of my mother’s friends are coming over.’ … They’re teachers at the school that I go to.”
He ignored his own instincts and took “a little” sample of the mushrooms before the party. “I was out of my fucking mind,” he admitted. “So much so, one of the teachers from the school pulled me into the bathroom at one point and was like, ‘Are you doing cocaine?’ I was like, ‘No, no!’ So then after everyone left, I stayed up and tried to learn that Zeppelin song, ‘Bron-Yr-Aur,’ that acoustic thing, until like six o’clock in the morning. I never figured it out. I thought I figured it out, but I didn’t really figure it out.”
Grohl recently marked the holiday season by releasing a series of cover versions for Hanukkah and a version of "Run Rudolph Run," but when he was asked if the Foo Fighters would ever write their own Christmas song, he rejected the idea.
“It’s kind of tricky,” he replied. “You’re so used to the classics. … We’ve been asked to do it, but I wouldn’t even know what to say. ... No, we’ve never even tried. I don’t know if people would want us to do that. I’m not sure. Maybe the day that we decide we don’t want to do this anymore, we make a Christmas song and then we ride off into the sunset.”