and so fucking powerful – they were gods, man, they were way more than human. To see that kind of energy and hear that kind of power just from a guitar, bass, some drums and a singer was unbelievable. It was something more than music and those four people onstage. It was just fucking unreal.
‘The DC scene wasn’t a huge scene,’ Grohl remembers. ‘If a local band like Scream or Black Market Baby or Void played you’d probably have maybe 200 people show up, the same 200 people every time: if you had a band like Black Flag play, then there’d maybe be 500 or 600 people there. We called those extra people the “Quincy Punks”, people who had seen one punk rock episode of [popular NBC crime drama] Quincy and then heard that Black Flag was coming to town. Those were usually the shows that had the most trouble. But the other gigs would have just a few people so you just started seeing the same people around. I’d be starstruck and intimidated when I would see, like, Mike Hampton from Faith or Guy [Picciotto], because these people were my musical heroes and I knew every word to every one of their songs, but you’d be singing along with a band and ten minutes later they’d be diving on top of your head when the next band was on. There was no separation between “bands” and “fans”, and that was my idea of some sort of community.
‘For me, punk rock was an escape, and it was rebellion. It was this fantasy land that you could visit every Friday evening at eight o’clock and beat each other to bits in front of the stage and then go home.’
It was at a Wilson Center show by Void, a chaotic, impossibly intense punk-metal quartet from Columbia, Maryland, that Grohl first met Brian Samuels in autumn 1984. At the time Samuels’s band Freak Baby were seeking to add a second guitar player to their line-up, just as scene elders Minor Threat, Faith and Scream had done the previous year, and Samuels invited the young guitarist to an audition at the group’s practice spot in drummer Dave Smith’s basement. Grohl wasn’t the best guitar player the band had ever seen – Chris Page remembers him as being merely ‘competent’ – but what he lacked in technical dexterity he made up for in terms of the energy, enthusiasm and infectious humour he brought to the band. In addition, Grohl’s simple but effective rhythm playing neatly complemented Bryant Mason’s more proficient lead guitar work. Freak Baby’s newest member made his début with the band that winter, playing as support to Trouble Funk at Arlington’s liberal-minded, ‘alternative’ high school H-B Woodlawn. It would prove to be the band’s one and only show as a quintet.
Freak Baby’s demise was sudden and brutal. One afternoon in late 1984 Grohl was behind Dave Smith’s kit at practice, trying out some of the rolls, fills, ruffs and flams he had been practising for years in his bedroom of his family home in Springfield. He had his head down, and eyes closed: his arms and legs became a blur as he hammered out beats to the Minor Threat and Bad Brains riffs running through his head. Lost in music, Grohl was oblivious to his bandmates urging him to get back to his guitar. Standing six foot five inches tall, and weighing in at around 270 pounds, skinhead Samuels was not a figure used to being ignored. Grohl didn’t notice his hulking bandmate rise from the sofa, so when Samuels yanked him off the drum stool by his hair and dragged him to the ground, he was more shocked than hurt. The rest of his band, however, were mortified. They had felt that Samuels had been increasingly trying to assert his authority and control over the band, but this was too much. As Grohl stumbled back to his feet, Chris Page called time on the day’s session. Within the week he would call time on Freak Baby too, reshuffling the line-up to move Grohl to drums, Smith to bass, and Samuels out the door. With the new line-up came a new name: Mission Impossible.
With the domineering Samuels out of the picture, initial Mission Impossible rehearsal sessions were playful, productive and wildly energetic: all four band members skated, and at times Smith’s basement resembled a skate park more than a rehearsal room, with the teenagers bouncing off the walls and spinning and tumbling over amps and furniture as they played. But there was also an intensity and focus to their rehearsals. Songs flowed freely as they bounced around ideas, fed off the energy in the room and experimented with structure, tone, pacing and dynamics. Just two months after forming, the band felt confident enough to record a demo tape with local sound engineer and musician Barrett Jones, who had helmed a previous session for Freak Baby. Jones fronted a college rock band called 11th Hour, North Virginia’s home-grown answer to R.E.M., and operated a tiny recording studio called Laundry Room, so called because his Tascam four-track tape deck and twelve-channel Peavey mixing board were located in the laundry room of his parents’ Arlington home. Now running a rather more sophisticated and expansive version of Laundry Room Studios out of South Park, Seattle, Jones has fond memories of the session.
‘I’d recorded a tape for Freak Baby with Dave on guitar, but when he switched to drums their band was just so much better,’ he recalls. ‘They went from doing one-minute hardcore songs to doing … two-minute hardcore songs! But those songs were more ambitious and involved and dynamic.
‘Back then Dave was probably the most hyper person I’d ever met,’ he adds. ‘When we did that first Freak Baby demo he was literally bouncing off the walls. They were a hardcore band, so they all had that energy, but he was something else. But musically his decision to switch to drums was definitely the right one.’
‘Once Dave got behind the drums he was very obviously something special,’ says Chris Page. ‘He was doing stuff that nobody else was doing, incorporating little riffs and ideas that he’d pinched from some of the great rock drummers he listened to. He took great pride in us being the fastest band in the DC area, but there was so much more to his playing than just speed and power. And that started to affect our songwriting, because even though our songs were maybe only one minute or a minute and a half long we wanted to showcase his talent and build in space for those parts.’
The first Mission Impossible demo neatly captured the quartet’s combustible energy. It provides a snapshot of a band in transition, mixing up vestigial Freak Baby tracks and goofy cover versions (most notably a take on Lalo Scifirin’s theme for the Mission Impossible TV series, with which the band opened every gig) with more nuanced shards of hardcore rage. Across twenty tracks the shifts in tone occasionally grate – the decision to include a screeching romp through a BandAids advertising jingle alongside a thoughtful, articulate song such as ‘Neglect’, in which Page delivers a spoken-word lyric juxtaposing the privileged consumer lifestyles of the suburbs with the poverty and pain he encountered on visits to inner-city DC, rather betrays the quartet’s youthful over-exuberance – but at their best Mission Impossible were a genuinely thrilling prospect.
Among the more light-hearted selections on the tape, two tracks stand out: ‘Butch Thrasher’ is Grohl’s mocking paean to the macho knuckledraggers who considered punk rock moshpits their private battlefields, while ‘Chud’, inspired by the kitschy 1984 horror movie C.H.U.D., sees Page screaming ‘Chaotic Hardcore Underage Delinquents! Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers!’ while trying to keep a straight face. Of the more sober tracks, ‘Different’ deals with the hassles devotees of punk rock faced from parents and peers unsympathetic to the lifestyle, while ‘Life Already Drawn’ echoes the sentiments Ian MacKaye expressed in the song ‘Minor Threat’ with Page screaming ‘Slow down!’ at teen peers who seemed in an unseemly haste to join the adult rat-race.
Two Dave Grohl-penned originals also warrant mention: ‘New Ideas’ stands as the fastest song in MI’s repertoire, packing whammy bar divebombs, squealing harmonics, two verses, three choruses and a jittery, atonal Bryant Mason solo into just 74 seconds. Elsewhere ‘To Err Is Human’ was arguably the demo’s most sophisticated track, its driving rhythms and sudden dynamic shifts in tempo and key bearing the influence of Grohl’s favourite new band, SST’s Hüsker Dü, the brilliant Minneapolis trio whose stunning 1984 double album Zen Arcade had rendered hardcore’s perceived boundaries obsolete, and drawn favourable comparisons to The Clash’s London Calling album in mainstream music publications. ‘To Err …’ was significant not only for highlighting the increased maturity of Grohl’s songwriting, but also for flagging up to his new friends issues in his personal life, specifically in regard to his relationship with
