Dave Grohl learned that Kurt Cobain died a month before the suicide

Dave Grohl had to endure the pain of Kurt Cobain’s death not once but twice.

In his new memoir, “The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music”, the rocker recounts how he received a call – after a Cobain overdose at a hotel in Rome on March 3, 1994 – saying that his bandmate Nirvana had passed away. .

“My knees gave way and I dropped the phone as I fell to my bedroom floor, covering my face with my hands as I started to cry,” writes Grohl, 52, in her book, which came out on Tuesday.

“He was gone. The shy young man who gave me an apple at our first presentation at the Seattle airport was gone. My calm, introverted roommate with whom I had shared a tiny apartment in Olympia was gone. The loving father who performed with his beautiful baby daughter backstage every night before each show started I was overcome with a sadness deeper than I had ever imagined.

This deep sadness, however, was quickly greeted with immense relief when Grohl received another call telling him that Cobain was in fact still alive – and that he was going to be okay with it.

“Within five minutes, I went from the darkest day of my life to feeling reborn,” he writes. “From that day forward, I built my walls higher. “

But in a cruel twist, Grohl is expected to relive that trauma just a month later, when news of Cobain’s suicide arrived early in the morning of April 8 (although police concluded he was in fact dead on April 5). self-harm from a gunshot wound to the head).

“This time it was for real. He was gone, “he wrote.” There was no second phone call to right the wrong. To reverse the tragedy. It was final.

Losing Cobain twice in 30 days, Grohl struggled to grieve properly.

“It was stuck somewhere deep inside me, blocked by the trauma of a month before when I had been left in a state of conflicted emotional confusion,” he writes.

” Empathy ! Kurt wrote in his suicide note, and there were times I begged my heart to feel the pain it must have felt. Ask for it to break. I tried to tear the tears out of my eyes as I cursed those fucking walls I had built so high, because they kept me from feeling the feelings I desperately needed to feel.

Today, however, Grohl can feel all the pain from the first time he got the call. “To this day, I am often overwhelmed by that same deep sadness that sent me to the ground the first time I was told that Kurt was dead,” he wrote.

The leader of the Foo Fighters also shares memories of everything from life with Cobain in their one-bedroom apartment in Olympia, Wash. I had never known someone who used heroin before and knew very little about it, so I was shocked.

Interestingly, there isn’t a single mention of Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, in the 384-page book.

And now – 30 years after the release of Nirvana’s classic “Nevermind” on September 24, 1991 – “not a day goes by” without the drummer thinking of Cobain.

“But it’s when I sit in front of a drum set that I feel Kurt the most,” he wrote. “It’s not often that I play the songs we’ve played together, but when I’m sitting on that stool, I can always imagine him in front of me, wrestling with his guitar as he screamed at the top of his lungs in the microphone.”