Dave Grohl was told his Nirvana bandmate Kurt Cobain had died a month before he committed suicide in 1994.
In his new memoir, The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music, the Foo Fighters frontman reveals he got a call telling him his Nirvana bandmate had died after Cobain overdosed at a hotel in Rome, Italy on 3 March 1994.
“My knees gave out and I dropped the phone as I fell to my bedroom floor, covering my face with my hands as I began to cry,” he recalled in the book, reports the New York Post. “He was gone. The shy young man who had offered me an apple upon our first introduction at the Seattle airport was gone. My quiet, introverted roommate who I’d shared a tiny little apartment with in Olympia was gone. The loving father who played with his beautiful baby daughter backstage every night before each show was gone. I was overcome with a more profound sadness than I had ever imagined.”
However, he soon discovered that Cobain was actually alive and felt great relief, adding, “In the course of five minutes I had gone from the darkest day of my entire life to feeling born again… From that day forward, I built my walls higher.”
But just over a month later, Grohl would have to relive that trauma all over again after Cobain died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in early April 1994 at the age of 27. He struggled to grieve the loss of his close friend properly after thinking he had died twice in such a short space of time.
“This time it was for real. He was gone… There was no second phone call to right the wrong. To turn the tragedy around. It was final,” he wrote. “It was stuck somewhere deep within me, blocked by the trauma from a month before when I had been left in a state of conflicted emotional confusion.
“‘Empathy!’ Kurt wrote in his suicide note, and there were times where I would beg my heart to feel the pain he must have felt. Ask for it to break. I would try to wring the tears from my eyes as I cursed those f**king walls I had built so high, because they kept me from the feelings I desperately needed to feel.”
Grohl’s memoir was released on Tuesday.
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