from The Colour and the Shape (1997)

It must have been during the fall of 2003, because I was in grad school then and wrote a lot of poetry since I was studying it intensively and since I thought someone else might one day give a damn, that I had a dream which I commemorated thusly:

Last night Dave Grohl came to me in a dream
And today I’ve been very paranoid,
So I’m thinking the dream, which was vivid,
Is what so much affected my poor brain.
We jammed; Dave was on drums, me on guitar;
And after he complimented me on
My playing (this was my dream), Dave Grohl said,
“You can’t take everything so personally.”
Though I only know his music, and some
Footage of interviews and talk show spots,
And he’s never met me and may never,
I feel that, because I once said his scream
Was like that of God, only he, or God,
Could say words that I hear and understand.

Emily Dickinson, eat your heart out. I love ya, but you’re not the only one who can invoke God to give a poem some extra metaphysical oomph.

I did have that dream, though, just as I had once compared Dave Grohl’s scream to a scream from on high. In 2003, I was very much back into the Foo Fighters. I saw them live for the first time that July and never before and only at one show since (at my second but not last Foos show, in 2005) had I heard the scream live, violent and pained, but also pure, cathartic, and surprisingly enough in tune. It’s an affront Grohl could summon almost at will, but if so, it was also a fiction that spoke the truth.

I first heard “Monkey Wrench” when the Foo Fighters were on Letterman, in May of 1997. I hadn’t seen it the night it aired but my buddy Joe did, and mentioned that Grohl had cut his hair and grown a goatee, oddly enough. I watched the tape when I got home and saw not only Grohl’s new iteration but heard that strange measure of silence after the opening riff, and also that yell after the bridge. I remember liking it well enough, but it’s one of the songs on this list that didn’t immediately gain its truest significance, which was more or less opening and closing the door on that girl I hope not to summon by mentioning a third time, that first girlfriend o’mine, Godiva.

The door opened one night over that first Christmas break – the same break with “Everything In Its Right Place” – when we visited a mutual friend’s dorm room for a party. Someone put on “Monkey Wrench,” and I liked that fine as it was. But then I watched as Godiva mouthed every word of that shouted verse I hadn’t yet learned, looking up and away as I looked at her, self-conscious but proud as she would always be. The scream at its culmination gave voice to the love and awe I felt for this girl, who in this and other measures far outranked any other girl I’d ever met. The standards were unique to us but she met and exceeded them, and that was that.

The door closed one night two years later. We’d split up, and had spoken a bit over the following week, one of those times for the last time. Those screamed-spoken words became my mantra and that song and that album became for me the breakup album it was for Dave Grohl. His was a divorce and mine wasn’t, but for me at that time nothing, not even poetry, could have put more directly how much I wanted to believe that I was then free, and that beyond being the fresh emotion of the time, that that would sooner than later be a good thing.

1. Green Day, “Basket Case”
2. Melissa Etheridge, “I’m The Only One”
3. Weezer, “Buddy Holly”
4. The Offspring, “Come Out and Play”
5. Bush, “Machinehead”
6. Foo Fighters, “Monkey Wrench”
7. Muse, “Unintended”
8. Radiohead, “Everything In Its Right Place”
9. Stage, “Live Happy, Live With Anorexia”
10. Ludo, “Save Our City”
Dan’s Definitive Top Ten 2010: Introduction