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“Everlong” – Foo Fighters
(Words: Dave Grohl, Music: Foo Fighters, available on The Colour and the Shape, Capital 1997) 

Saying that Dave Grohl was the reason I started playing the drums would be false, but it’s not out of line to suggest that I might not have stuck with them without him.  Grohl was to me what Bonham was to a previous generation.  At first, before learning form, I emulated his power, later returning to admire the technique behind the bombast.  Back in February I wrote about coming home from school and bashing along with the mid-tempo songs on Nevermind, but it was the quicker, nimbler Foo Fighters songs I looked up to from the beginning.  “Everlong” stands out in particular, in part because it was the first song that made me listen to the radio for hours in order to hear it.  At the end of 2009, I could listen to a new song through a variety of channels before purchasing the album, but in 1997, I stayed glued to the radio hoping to hear those muted notes segueing out of a Smash Mouth song.

Part of this obsession grew out of my admiration for Grohl’s drumming.  Sure, it was Taylor Hawkins wearing the dress behind the drum kit in the video, but Grohl played most of the drum tracks on the album, including “Everlong.”  I remember putting on my headphones, turning the anti-shock skip protection on my discman on, and trying vainly to play those sixteenth note fills.  I don’t have a precise body count, but I attribute at least two bloody knuckles, half a dozen broken sticks, and one cracked ride cymbal to “Everlong” alone (and far more sticks and the rest of my started set of cymbals to the Grohl school of bashery).  This became my goal – I wanted to grow beyond playing like Grohl in the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video and into the more technically proficient (yet aggressively fueled) playing that “Everlong” represented.  Through about half a decade of drum lessons, I improved yet never could nail every single fill in “Everlong” – in fact, I got just good enough to fake my way through the song.  Maybe I took Grohl’s ode to infatuation to heart, or maybe I just felt the exact same way about “Everlong,” but anything less than a full speed, fully embellished version felt like an incomplete tribute.  Rather than regret this, I look back at a time where I put everything I had into emulating something I loved and smile.

(For what it’s worth, I’m confident that with ten minutes of warmup and a couple Tylenol, I could probably “fake” my way through “Everlong” today, rust be damned!)

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