Dave Grohl on the time his "rock'n'roll fantasy" came true, and he had a private jam session with Prince.
We had high hopes for Dave Grohl's new True Stories Instagram account when he launched it last month, and he's delivered the historical rock'n'roll goods by recounting that time he jammed with Prince. No big deal, eh?
"This was not just another conversation in just another backstage room on just another Friday night…" the Foo Fighters frontman writes as he begins to set the scene of how this all came about, adding that it was "a proposition that I had wished for my entire adult life, but never in my wildest dreams imagined possible," once the invitation was put forward to Dave to jam with Prince and his band at soundcheck at The Forum in Los Angeles nine years ago.
With a week-long run-up to this moment, Dave recalls the agonising wait for his phone to ring to confirm all the details with Prince – and drops in a cheeky reference to yours truly with a fact that most people don't know about him: he's not very good at keeping his phone charged (now we can add a 21st entry into our list of 20 things you probably didn't know about Dave Grohl – thanks, mate!).
"First of all, let me tell you something about myself that you might not find on Wikipedia or Kerrang.com: I'm that guy whose phone battery is always hovering between 4 and 11 per cent," he continues, explaining how he deliberately kept his phone battery at 100 per cent for the entire week, because, of course, "no fucking way" was he gonna miss a call from Prince.
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As their long-awaited jam session finally rolled around, Dave remembers that Prince asked if he wanted "to play some drums" for him, and as the Nirvana sticksman started out with a simple groove, "Prince watched, inspecting me with a grin."
The performance – which had "not a soul in sight to witness it" – culminated in a “symphony of rock/funk/gospel/psychedelia”, before Prince then began jamming along to one of Dave's favourite bands: Led Zeppelin.
“It fucking slammed,” he says. “Fat, funky, big bottomed swing as he let loose solos that would make your teeth curl. My rock'n'roll fantasy was coming true, and I couldn’t fucking wait to share it with an arena packed full of die hard Prince fans like myself!”
While Prince suggested Dave come back the next Friday to play for the crowd, the Foo Fighters frontman "never did make it back".
“In a strange way," he concludes, "I didn’t need to. I had fulfilled a life dream, with no evidence of it to share with anyone, other than a memory that will stay with me forever. I only saw Prince once after that. We just smiled and said hello. And when I heard he had passed, I sat in my car alone, crying, feeling both blessed to have shared these moments with him, and heartbroken that there would be no more. There will never be another like him. We were lucky to have him while we did. I miss him dearly.”
Read the full, epic story below:
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