(Credits: Far Out / Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Some of the greatest rock stars almost don’t feel human after a while. As much as people like the idea of their favourite artists being around forever, they are all mortal people like you and I, and when they get up onstage, they are doing their job to a much bigger crowd than any of us see every single day. Although Dave Grohl has made it a point to act like a regular person every time he gets onstage, he felt that some of the people he has collaborated with have been etched in stone in his mind.
That’s not exactly unusual, though. When the only reference point that anyone has of their favourite band is the poster on their wall, it’s easy for them to believe they are some sort of superhero. A handful of them might be a little on-the-nose like Gene Simmons of Kiss, but looking through some of the greatest rock stars of all time, they are all perfectly normal people when you break them down.
Sure, Robert Plant had christened himself a ‘Golden God’ back in the day, but the more that you look at him in the present, he seems content to play any type of music that he wants rather than living up to the bare-chested kid that was in the videos for The Song Remains the Same. And when Grohl rose to prominence, he didn’t even pretend to be the kind of macho rockstar figure everyone expects.
After all, Grohl was meant to be the goofy one sitting at the back of Nirvana’s stage for the rest of his life, but once he got into the frontman role, he had no choice but to ham it up a little bit, even if it meant taking the piss out of himself. But when you look at what Grohl does compared to someone like Bruce Springsteen, it’s like watching two completely different genres of music at times.
Both of them play stadiums around the world, but whereas Grohl looks to have some fun every time he performs, what Springsteen does means more for everyone sitting in that crowd. He knew that rock and roll could move people, and when looking at the interaction between him and the E Street Band, he’s creating a rock and roll church onstage every night, where the hymns are written by Chuck Berry and the parables are about the kids born on the wrong side of the tracks.
So for someone like Grohl, performing the song ‘London Calling’ with Springsteen in honour of Joe Strummer was like watching a figure of history resurrected before his eyes, saying, “ I wasn’t too sure about the phony Beatlemania thing; I left that to Bruce [Springsteen] and Elvis [Costello]. Standing next to Springsteen freaked me out. It’s like meeting Abraham Lincoln without the hat.”
While Springsteen could have sung any line Strummer wrote and made it work, he was so perfect because of what both he and the Clash frontman stood for. They both approached rock and roll on their own terms, and with one of them as the leader of the punks and the other as the father of heartland rock, each of them reminded everyone that being a kid in the middle of nowhere was more than enough to make it in the industry.
So, really, Grohl seemed like an amalgamation of every kid who was touched by Springsteen’s music when he got up on that stage that night. Anyone can look back on the legendary performances throughout history and gawk at artists that are larger than life, but very rarely does someone have the experience when they could reach out and poke them as they are performing.
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