When Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994, the world lost a songwriter who was one of the most important artists of Generation XThe surviving members of Nirvana have lost their friend, their band and their meaning in life.
“When Kurt died and everything ended, I didn’t know what to do with my life,” said Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl “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 search for my soul.”
To mourn the death of his friend, 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 course of his life and career.
Why did Dave Grohl form the Foo Fighters?
“I was driving my rental car down a country road and I saw this young hitchhiker. And I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ll give him a ride.’ And as I got closer, I saw he was wearing a Kurt Cobain T-shirt,” Grohl said. “It was Kurt’s face staring back at me… in the middle of nowhere!”
The drummer had traveled to the other side of the world to escape his grief and realized that he could not escape his past.
“I realized, ‘Oh. I can’t run away from this.’ So I have to go home and get the hell back to work. And that’s what I did,” Grohl recalled. When he returned home, he began recording the first album by his new band, the Foo Fighters.
Who was the Irish hitchhiker who inspired Dave Grohl to form the Foo Fighters?
Nearly thirty years after Grohl encountered a stranger in a Kurt Cobain T-shirt who would change the course of his life, hitchhiker Lorcan Dunne has come forward to tell his side of the story. His cousin Eoin Tighe shared a video on Twitter of Dunne telling his story, edited by his sister Claire Tighe.
“We were on holiday on the Beara Peninsula and hitchhiked to this place to go swimming. I ran and saw a car there, so I thought I’d drive over and hitchhike. As I was hitchhiking, I looked to see who was in the passenger seat – but it was David Grohl,” Dunne said in the video.
Tighe told Upworthy that his cousin was 15 at the time.
“I didn’t recognize him right away, but I saw this shocked look on the guy’s face… and I was wearing a Nirvana T-shirt with Kurt Cobain on it,” Dunne continued. “It was black tie-dye, the one with Kurt where he has mascara on his face. I saw the shocked look on his face and the next thing I knew the car just sped away. And I turned around and thought, ‘That was David Grohl, boy!’ Nobody believed me!”
Two weeks before the video shoot, Dunne came across a video of Grohl talking about his experiences in Ireland. Dunne had no idea he had played a role in the birth of the Foo Fighters, and eventually got confirmation from Grohl himself that he had met the drummer all those years ago.
“So you made the Food Fighters!” shouts a friend of Dunne at the end of the video, to which Dunne emphatically replies, “Yeah!”
Grohl released the Foo Fighters’ eponymous debut album on July 4, 1995. He played every instrument on the album, except for a guitar part by Greg Dulli of The Afghan Wigs. The album became a hit and sold over 3.3 million copies, and now, as Foo Fighter, Grohl would enjoy one of the greatest second performances in rock history.
At the time of publication of this article, Tighe told Upworthy that Grohl had not yet responded to the tweet.
