Originally Published: Washington Post • June 26, 2015
NEW YORK — Even before he fell off a stage in Sweden and broke his leg, Dave Grohl was feeling creaky. He is 46, drinks too much coffee, and wakes up at 6 wherever he is, even on days he doesn’t need to pack lunches and get the kids into the Honda Odyssey. When he’s touring, his back aches and the muscles in his neck hurt from screaming.
“The pre-show now is, like, a couple whiskies and a couple Advils,” he said with grinning derision one day in May…
The Foos frontman is a man of delightfully meandering anecdotes, most of which are tame save for a recurrent verbal tic that rhymes with “muck” and serves as the equivalent of “um.” His appetites are wide-ranging and ravenous. At one point during an interview in the cafe of the Park Hyatt, to make a point about the power of music to connect, he expounded upon the lyrical beauty of the quintessentially cheesy ’70s pop hit “Escape (the Piña Colada Song),” which he learned to appreciate only recently, when it came on the radio while he was stuck in traffic.