I can personally tell you that Dave Grohl is a huge GWAR fan. Ask me how I know some time. Turns out the Washington D.C. native was almost a full-fledged member of the band in his early drumming days around the D.C. scene. Grohl revealed as much in a new interview with Rolling Stone.
Grohl revealed things were moving so far along that he even began conceptualizing his costume:
“GWAR were looking for a drummer. And I talked to their guitar player Dewey [Rowell, a.k.a. the original ‘Flattus Maximus’] about it. 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. And then 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?”
Interestingly, Rolling Stone reached out to GWAR frontman, and former bassist Mike Bishop a.k.a. Blothar. Bishop, out of character revealed how it all went down “Our guitar player Dewey [a.k.a. Flattus Maximus] was booking shows in Richmond at the time,” Bishop says in an e-mail. “And we had all seen Dave play with his bands Dain Bramage and later on in Scream. He was already one of the greatest, hardest-hitting drummers I had ever seen. He still is. Dewey called and started the conversation with him about joining GWAR.”
Bishop was excited to play with Grohl and joked "Just think, he could have been working his ass off playing drums in a rubber monster suit all these years. Boy, did he make the wrong choice."
Meanwhile, Blothar also offered a comment to Rolling Stone noting the Foo Fighters frontman is remembering things all wrong. “Grohl remembers this all wrong,” The Berserker Blothar writes. “He used to hang around the track with all the other young punks jacked on gak. This is back before he lost all his teeth. We hired him and then called him back immediately and fired him. He was in the band for around seven and a half minutes. He was holding us back.”
Can you imagine Dave Grohl being the drummer of GWAR all this time? Rolling Stone amassed a few more interesting revelations from Grohl's upcoming memoir, which you can see here.
The Storyteller – Tales Of Life And Music, will be a collection of essays telling stories of his various experiences over the years from coming up in Washington, D.C. through Nirvana and beyond. The book comes out on October 5th via Dey Street Books. Pre-orders for the book are available through davegrohlstoryteller.com.
