The Passion of Dave Grohl

Grohl himself is “pretty fucking presidential,” claims Hawkins, 42, a lanky live wire who is practically Grohl’s double in enthusiasm and profanity. “Dave’s always been like, ‘I’ve got some great fucking songs. I know what I want them to be. Let’s do this.’ He’s never just sat there and gone, ‘Fuck, what should we do?’ – never.”

“Dave has a vision,” confirms Smear, 55, who was in the seminal L.A. punk band the Germs and first played with Grohl in Nirvana, in the year before Cobain’s death. “Our job is to meet that vision or do something that exceeds it.”

Grohl, who grew up in Springfield, Virginia, has threaded his own stories – like the Naked Raygun epiphany and his lessons in self-reliance as a teenager in Washington, D.C.’s punk scene – into Highways. “Check yourself/Wreck your brains/Where is that P.M.A.?” Grohl demands in “The Feast and the Famine,” citing the acronym “Positive Mental Attitude,” coined by D.C. punks Bad Brains.

“He’s an appreciator,” says Virginia Grohl, Dave’s mother. “He has a respect for history and roots.” She raised Dave and his older sister, Lisa, after divorcing their father, James, a journalist and occasional poet, when Dave was six. A high school teacher of English and public speaking, Virginia had no qualms about letting Dave quit his education at 17 to tour Europe with his first serious band, Scream.

“We used to talk about music and the future,” she says. “Money was never part of the conversation. It was always about being with a band and getting to see other bands. He was determined then.” Virginia pauses. “He is driven now. I don’t know what gear he’s in at this point. It’s beyond anything I can describe.”