Like so many other transplants to the DC metropolitan area, he chose to relocate his family not in the District of Columbia itself, but in the outlying suburbs. Springfield, Virginia lay six miles down the I-95, just inside the Capital Beltway, and like the neighbouring towns of Arlington, Annandale and Alexandria it was a popular destination for commuters working in the city or at the nearby Pentagon offices. As with other Northern Virginian towns, it had a transient population, with the shifting dynamics of working on Capitol Hill leading many families to relocate after four or five years in the area. Despite this, residents worked hard to foster and maintain a strong community spirit.
At the dawn of the 1970s the Grohls’ new hometown was a location suited to the patronising sobriquet ‘white-bread’. But, befitting a town ‘15 minutes from chicken farmers, and 15 minutes from the White House’, as Dave Grohl would later describe it, Springfield, VA also had a more schizophrenic character. Here, urbane, moneyed politicos – those ‘fortunate sons’ eviscerated in song by Creedence Clearwater Revival – shared street space with blue-collar Southerners with gun racks on their pickup trucks and Skynyrd and Zeppelin blasting from their Camaros and Ford Mustangs.
The family lived on Kathleen Place, a quiet cul-de-sac, in a house Dave Grohl remembers as ‘a tiny shoebox’. The children settled quickly into their new home. Lisa Grohl enrolled at North Springfield Elementary School, while Dave, fondly remembered by his mother as ‘a pretty rambunctious kid’ with a taste for mischief that cherubic looks and a beatific smile couldn’t always mask, was left to explore his new surroundings on his go-kart, with his faithful companion, a somewhat bedraggled Winnie the Pooh bear, glued to his side.
‘Springfield was a great neighbourhood to grow up in,’ recalls Nick Christy, the frontman of Grohl’s first real band Nameless, whose own family moved to Springfield from Massachusetts in the early 1970s. ‘A kid could have a lot of fun there. The houses weren’t fancy or spectacular, but it was a nice friendly neighbourhood. It was all middle-income white families, and people looked out for one another. I only later found out that all my friends’ parents were in the FBI or CIA or were senators from Washington.’
Seduced by the electric, politically charged atmosphere of his new environs, James Grohl switched careers soon after settling in Springfield, quitting journalism to take up a new position as a speech writer/ campaign manager for Robert Taft Jr, the Republican Senator for Ohio and grandson of former US President William Howard Taft. His wife also secured new employment, teaching English and drama at Thomas Jefferson High School in nearby Alexandria, where she was a popular addition to the staff.
‘Virginia Grohl was a great teacher,’ recalls Chet Lott, a student at Thomas Jefferson High from 1981 to 1984. ‘She was the type of teacher that took an interest in you personally, and got to know everyone, and she was definitely one of the stand-out teachers in my whole schooling. She was very cool, a very nice lady.’
In private, though, things were not going quite so well for the Grohls. Behind closed doors, and out of earshot of their children, James and Virginia Grohl’s marriage was slowly falling apart. In 1975 James Grohl walked out on his wife and young family. Virginia Grohl faced what would have undoubtedly been a difficult, stress-filled time with dignity and admirable stoicism, shielding her two children from both the harsh realities of separation and her own fears and concerns for the future.
‘Of course it caused a lot of pain and it caused a lot of struggle, but I don’t think I really understood what was going on,’ Dave would later recall. ‘By the time I got a hold of the situation, it was too late for me to have a freak-out. It just seemed abnormal for all my friends to have a father. I thought growing up with my mother and sister was just the way it was supposed to be.’
On a practical level, Virginia Grohl quickly realised that her $18,000 salary as a high school teacher in the Fairfax County public school system was never going to cover the cost of raising two children single-handedly. To supplement her income she took on part-time work: weekday evenings were spent working in a department store, while weekends were occupied by administration duties for a local carpet cleaning company.
In order to keep her children occupied and entertained while she was working weekends, Virginia Grohl would allow Lisa and Dave to listen to her record collection on a stereo borrowed from Thomas Jefferson High School. One day while the family were out shopping in a local drugstore Dave nagged his mother into buying him an album of his own, a K-Tel compilation which had been heavily advertised on television. Released in 1976, Block Buster promised ‘20 original hits by original stars’, and featured some of the biggest anthems of the era, from KC and The Sunshine Band’s ‘That’s the Way (I Like It)’ to Alice Cooper’s ‘Only Women Bleed’. Back home at Kathleen Place, Dave commandeered the stereo for the next few weekends, bugging the shit out of his big sister by lifting the stylus every three and a half minutes to play one particular track over and over and over again.
The Edgar Winter Group’s ‘Frankenstein’ was one of the 1970s’ more unlikely Number 1 singles. Originally a sprawling live jam, allowing the Texas-born Winter to demonstrate his virtuosity on a variety of instruments on his 1972 album They Only Come Out at Night, ‘Frankenstein’ was a spacey, synthesiser-led, progressive rock instrumental, featuring a spiralling saxophone solo and mid-song drum duel. The following year the track was used as the B-side of the band’s ‘Hangin’ Around’ single, but as disc jockeys nationwide began playing the track in response to listener requests, Winter’s label Epic flipped the seven inch and began plugging ‘Frankenstein’ as the single. In May 1973 the song reached Number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, eventually selling more than one million copies. As track nine on the Block Buster compilation, it would change one little boy’s life forever.
‘To me that was just the best sound I had ever heard in my life,’ Grohl later enthused. ‘To this day [it’s] still one of the most amazing songs you’ve ever heard in your life. Every time I hear “Frankenstein” it reminds me of being that young, just rocking out in my bedroom.’
On the wall of that bedroom, Grohl had tacked a poster of the cockpit of a 747 aeroplane. At the time the young man dreamt of becoming a pilot, of leaving Springfield behind and escaping to new places, experiencing new things. But if his next musical discovery taught him anything, it was that he didn’t actually need to leave his small bedroom in order to escape the realities of day-to-day life.
For American teenagers from Long Island to Long Beach, and all points in between, obsessing over Kiss was a rite of passage. On 31 October 1976 the quartet from New York stomped onto ABC’s The Paul Lynde Halloween Special in Kabuki make-up and stackheels, and proceeded to pout and prance through lip-synched versions of ‘Detroit Rock City’, ‘Beth’ and ‘King of the Night Time World’ for a national TV audience that numbered millions. For a generation of wide-eyed, awestruck young viewers this was their ‘The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show’ moment, only with added flashbombs.