Friday, here comes Friday night and I’m just gonna go off ,’ said Morris. ‘I hate my boss, I hate the people that I work with, I hate my parents, I hate all these authoritative figures, I hate politicians, I hate people in government, I hate the police: everybody is kinda pointing the finger at me, everybody is picking at me, everybody is poking at me and now I have a chance to be with a bunch of my own type of people, and I have a chance to go off. And that’s basically what it was … BOOM!’
Dave Grohl’s first punk rock epiphany came not in one of the community centres, church halls or housing co-op basements that provided the setting for the incubation of Washington DC’s nationally regarded hardcore scene, but in Evanston, Illinois, a prosperous suburb of Chicago. Located on the shores of Lake Michigan, Evanston was largely populated by wealthy old money families, aspirational middle-class professionals and a transient student population taking classes at the nearby Northwestern University. It was also home to Virginia Grohl’s best friend, her former Boardman High School classmate and Three Belles bandmate Sherry Pelz, by then the married Sherry Bradford, and her teenage daughter Tracey, a sassy, feisty punk rock girl who within the space of ten days in the summer of 1982 turned Dave Grohl’s world upside down.
Tracey Bradford became a punk after seeing Dead Kennedys and Chicago’s own Naked Raygun and Articles of Faith destroy her hometown’s Club COD one ‘fun, crazy’ night in September 1981. An instant convert to the cause, within weeks she had shorn her long brown hair and swapped pretty, preppy dresses for bondage pants and ripped T-shirts. None of this, however, had been relayed to Dave Grohl before he knocked on the Bradfords’ front door that summer.
‘So we showed up that year,’ he recalls, ‘and Tracey came down to the door in engineer boots, bondage pants and an Anti-Pasti T-shirt, with a crew cut and a fucking motorcycle chain around her neck and spikes. And I was like, “You are my hero!”
‘We ran up the stairs of their mansion to her bedroom and she had, honestly, a collection of punk rock singles that would be worth like $100,000 today, singles that are considered impossible to find, like first-pressing Dischord singles, legendary shit you just don’t see. And I went through every single one of those records. And that definitely set my life in the direction it’s been in for thirty fucking years.’
Now a care home nurse living in Florida, Tracey Bradford has fond memories of her ‘cousin’ Dave’s visit.
‘It’s funny, I don’t ever remember thinking, “Wow, Dave thinks I’m cool!”,’ she laughs. ‘I don’t really recall him being really impressed. I just remember that Dave was always a really nice guy. He was pretty young the first time he came to visit – I remember him visiting with his little Winnie the Pooh bear – and he was a good kid, always super, super nice.’
As Grohl rifled through her record collection, Bradford dropped another bombshell: she wasn’t just a punk rock fan, she was also the singer in her own punk rock band, Verboten.
‘Verboten were a pretty cool little band,’ remembers Steve Albini, now frontman of noise rock provocateurs Shellac and a world-renowned recording engineer, then a journalism and fine art student at Northwestern University, taking his first faltering steps towards punk rock godhead with his misanthropic dorm room solo project Big Black. ‘Chicago had such a small punk rock scene and everybody knew everybody. That was a really inspirational period: it seemed like everything was permissible, like all the misfits and losers and people who couldn’t function in regular society could get along quite comfortably with each other and that sort of created a punk rock scene. There was nothing fashionable or chic about it like it was in Los Angeles or New York where you’d have hip socialites dropping in on the punk
Dave Grohl’s first punk rock epiphany came not in one of the community centres, church halls or housing co-op basements that provided the setting for the incubation of Washington DC’s nationally regarded hardcore scene, but in Evanston, Illinois, a prosperous suburb of Chicago. Located on the shores of Lake Michigan, Evanston was largely populated by wealthy old money families, aspirational middle-class professionals and a transient student population taking classes at the nearby Northwestern University. It was also home to Virginia Grohl’s best friend, her former Boardman High School classmate and Three Belles bandmate Sherry Pelz, by then the married Sherry Bradford, and her teenage daughter Tracey, a sassy, feisty punk rock girl who within the space of ten days in the summer of 1982 turned Dave Grohl’s world upside down.
Tracey Bradford became a punk after seeing Dead Kennedys and Chicago’s own Naked Raygun and Articles of Faith destroy her hometown’s Club COD one ‘fun, crazy’ night in September 1981. An instant convert to the cause, within weeks she had shorn her long brown hair and swapped pretty, preppy dresses for bondage pants and ripped T-shirts. None of this, however, had been relayed to Dave Grohl before he knocked on the Bradfords’ front door that summer.
‘So we showed up that year,’ he recalls, ‘and Tracey came down to the door in engineer boots, bondage pants and an Anti-Pasti T-shirt, with a crew cut and a fucking motorcycle chain around her neck and spikes. And I was like, “You are my hero!”
‘We ran up the stairs of their mansion to her bedroom and she had, honestly, a collection of punk rock singles that would be worth like $100,000 today, singles that are considered impossible to find, like first-pressing Dischord singles, legendary shit you just don’t see. And I went through every single one of those records. And that definitely set my life in the direction it’s been in for thirty fucking years.’
Now a care home nurse living in Florida, Tracey Bradford has fond memories of her ‘cousin’ Dave’s visit.
‘It’s funny, I don’t ever remember thinking, “Wow, Dave thinks I’m cool!”,’ she laughs. ‘I don’t really recall him being really impressed. I just remember that Dave was always a really nice guy. He was pretty young the first time he came to visit – I remember him visiting with his little Winnie the Pooh bear – and he was a good kid, always super, super nice.’
As Grohl rifled through her record collection, Bradford dropped another bombshell: she wasn’t just a punk rock fan, she was also the singer in her own punk rock band, Verboten.
‘Verboten were a pretty cool little band,’ remembers Steve Albini, now frontman of noise rock provocateurs Shellac and a world-renowned recording engineer, then a journalism and fine art student at Northwestern University, taking his first faltering steps towards punk rock godhead with his misanthropic dorm room solo project Big Black. ‘Chicago had such a small punk rock scene and everybody knew everybody. That was a really inspirational period: it seemed like everything was permissible, like all the misfits and losers and people who couldn’t function in regular society could get along quite comfortably with each other and that sort of created a punk rock scene. There was nothing fashionable or chic about it like it was in Los Angeles or New York where you’d have hip socialites dropping in on the punk
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