The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music by Dave Grohl
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I don’t typically read rock biographies, but when I saw Dave Grohl‘s The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music in the bookstore, I couldn’t help myself because Grohl is just one of the most likable musicians on the planet.
The book isn’t really a memoir. Instead, it leaps around in time offering up a series of vignettes loosely connected by themes, which turned out to be a marvelous way to peak into Grohl’s life. So much of life is looking back at events and connecting them together into a story, and the book’s structure really lends itself to that. (Plus, it’s an easy read because each story kind of lives separately from a larger narrative so you don’t really have to remember what happened before!)
The other thing that sets this apart from a traditional memoir is that Grohl oftentimes writes stories as if he is a fan instead of the main character, particularly when he’s recounting the famous people he’s interacted with over the years. The book is as much a tribute to all of those people as it is a story about his life. (More than once, he comments on how bizarre it is that this is his life, which is exactly how one assumes it would feel to be famous around the world.)
And for a GenXer who grew up with grunge as the soundtrack for my twenties, it transported me back to that magical time in the 90s when that punk rock, DIY aesthetic felt like it might change the world.
