Kevin Bronson on March 15th, 2013

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Dave Grohl is a nice enough fellow.

Overall, he’s had a charmed career – from middle-class roots, he fell for punk rock early, embraced DIY, paid his dues and, of course, fell into a buttertub by landing a gig as Nirvana’s drummer. After Kurt Cobain’s tragic demise, he soldiered on, turning Foo Fighters into one of the biggest bands in the world and in the process becoming rock ’n’ roll’s affable goodwill ambassador.

Nobody could accuse him of being a game-changer on par with recent South by Southwest Music Festival keynote speakers like Bruce Springsteen, Bob Geldof or Quincy Jones, but his address on Thursday to a packed hall at the Austin Convention Center was a wildly entertaining pep talk during which he traced his roots from punk-rock kid to arena-rock god, all the while preaching the gospel of DIY.

“The musician comes first,” Grohl said. “Am I the best drummer in the world? Not a chance. Am I the best singer-songwriter? Not even in this room. … But I’ve been left alone to find my voice. What matters is that it’s your voice, cherish it.”

Grohl said his first inspiration was a song from a 1975 K-Tel compilation, the Edgar Winter Group’s instrumental “Frankenstein” – and to quite a bit of laughter he scat-sung the guitar riffs from it. He joked that his high school band wasn’t very good, but they had a sense of humor: “We once played the Rolling Stones’ ”˜Time Is on My Side’ at a nursing home.”

He later discovered punk rock through his cousin Tracy and her collection of 7-inches. He remembered being awed by the Rock Against Reagan punk festival on the National Mall in 1983. “Music had the power to start a riot,” he said.

Throughout his hour-long talk, Grohl interspersed some over-the-top-of-his-reading-glasses humor, mostly very dry. His first guitar and Beatles songbook, he said, “set my life in one direction.” As a kid, a career in music never entered his mind: “Surely those faces on my KISS poster weren’t getting paid for doing this … Gene Simmons? No …” And on the very basic, un-guilty, pleasure of music: “Pitchfork, Pitchfork, come in – we need you to determine the value of a song.”

Grohl’s Nirvana anecdotes were nothing new to students of the trio. “Nevermind” was “the sound of three people playing as if their lives depended on it,” almost unimaginably going from “ripple [to] tidal wave.” And what followed: “How do you deal with success? How do you even define success? … How do you process going from one of us to one of them?”

He rebounded from Nirvana by going back to his DIY days – early in the talk, Grohl demonstrated how he made his first multi-track demo using two portable cassette recorders – playing all the instruments on 13 recordings that eventually became Foo Fighters’ first release and reveling in the freedom of his creative process.

“There was no right or wrong,” he said of making that music, and of starting his own label to release it, “because it was mine.”

Photo by Jeff Miller