When Kurt Cobain died by suicide in 1994, the world lost a songwriter who was one of the most important artists of Generation X . The surviving members of Nirvana lost their friend, band and sense of purpose.
“When Kurt died and it all ended, I didn’t know what to do with my life,” Nirvana’s drummer, Dave Grohl, told “The Graham Norton Show” in 2021. “I couldn’t listen to music anymore because it hurt too much so I tried to escape and went to Ireland to soul search.”
To grieve his friend's death, he visited the Ring of Kerry in Ireland and disappeared to the “most remote place on Earth.” There, a chance encounter with a young Irishman would change the trajectory of his life and career.
Why did Dave Grohl start the Foo Fighters?
“I was driving around in my rental car on a country road and I saw this hitchhiker kid. And I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ll pick him up’. And as I got closer to him, I saw that he had a Kurt Cobain t-shirt on,” Grohl said. “It was Kurt’s face looking back at me…in the middle of nowhere!”
The drummer had traveled to the other side of the world to get away from his grief and realized his past was inescapable.
“I realized like, ‘Oh. I can’t outrun this’. So I need to go home and f**king get back to work. And so I did,” Grohl recalled. When he returned home, he started recording the first album of his new band, the Foo Fighters.
Who was the Irish hitchhiker who inspired Dave Grohl to start the Foo Fighters?
Nearly thirty years after Grohl encountered a stranger in a Kurt Cobain t-shirt who would change the trajectory of his life, the hitchhiker, Lorcan Dunne, has come forward to share his side of the story. His cousin, Eoin Tighe, shared a video on Twitter of Dunne telling his story, which his sister, Claire Tighe, edited together.
“We were down on the Beara Peninsula on a holiday and we hitched up to this place to go swimming. I was running and I saw a car there, so I thought I’d run up and hitch. When I was hitching, I looked into who was sitting in the passenger seat – but it was David Grohl,” Dunne shared in the video.
Tighe told Upworthy that his cousin was 15 years old at the time.
“I didn’t recognize him firstly, but I saw this look of shock on the guy’s face… and I had a Nirvana t-shirt on with Kurt Cobain on it,” Dunne continued. “It was black tie-dye, the one with Kurt where he has the mascara on his face. I saw the look of shock and the next thing, the car just tore off, away. And I turned round like, ‘That was David Grohl, lad!’ Nobody believed me!”
Two weeks before the video was filmed, Dunne came across a video of Grohl talking about his experience in Ireland. Dunne had no idea that he had played a role in the birth of the Foo Fighters and finally had confirmation from Grohl himself that he met the drummer all those years ago.
“So you made the Food Fighters!” a friend of Dunne’s screams at the end of the video, to which Dunne responds emphatically, “Yeah!”
Grohl released the Foo Fighters' eponymous debut album on July 4, 1995 . He played every instrument on the album save for one guitar part by Greg Dulli of The Afghan Wigs. The album would go on to be a hit, selling over 3.3 million copies, and now, as a Foo Fighter, Grohl would go on to enjoy one of the greatest second acts in rock history.
As of the time this article was published, Tighe told Upworthy that Grohl has yet to respond to the tweet.
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