Dave Grohl cooks for homeless
Credit - The Hope Mission/TMZ
Credit - The Hope Mission/TMZ
Credit - The Hope Mission/TMZ
Dave Grohl cooks BBQ for 450 homeless people: yet another example of the Foo Fighter musician’s altruism.
Usually when Foo Fighters’ frontman Dave Grohl is seen with drumsticks in his hand, it’s from old pics of his previous life as the drummer in Nirvana, or when he’s pounding the skins while doing a guest slot at a gig or festival. However, last week in Los Angeles, Grohl spent the best part of a day probably handling drumsticks of a different kind – chicken drumsticks.
The rock star had turned up at The Hope Mission at midnight on Wednesday 22 February before spending the next 16 hours preparing and cooking ribs, pork, brisket, cabbage, coleslaw and beans for the homeless shelter’s 450 guests and 50 staffers.
Groh is a long-time barbecue aficionado, with his own unofficial one-man catering nonprofit, Backbeat BBQ. Not content with cooking backstage at Foo Fighters’ gigs and hosting barbecue parties for up to 75 people at his home, in recent years Grohl has been using his culinary prowess to help others. Following the 2018 California wildfires, he arranged cookouts for those displaced by the tragedy, as well as whipping up BBQ for the firefighters who were working around the clock. That’s when his idea for Backbeat BBQ was born.
“I didn’t want to open a restaurant, but I did want to pull up at a Slayer show or a Harley dealership or a church or the LA Food Bank benefit and cook,” he told US food magazine Bon Appétit in 2019. “It’s kinda cool that I’m able to do that – and it’s f***-ing fun!”
Grohl first became hooked on barbecue when gorging on succulent pulled pork while living at a beach house in North Carolina (one of the main barbecue zones in the US) in 1992. However, it wasn’t until he broke his leg during a concert in 2015, that Grohl’s part-time hobby turned into something more serious.
“When I got off tour, I had nothing to do but mess around with a Big Green Egg [US barbecue cooker] that our bassist Nate got me,” he told Bon Appétit. “I went on YouTube and watched some guy. The first thing I tried was ribs because that’s what’s on the Chili’s commercials. I got the dry rub, hit them with smoke, and served them to my kids. They loved it. Everyone only got like two ribs so I said, ‘I'm doing this again tomorrow!’ I was hooked.”
His barbecue cookouts aren’t the first time Grohl has given something back or raised attention to important causes. In summer 2021, the Foo Fighters famously trolled the homophobic Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas by driving past their protestors dressed in 1970s’ jump-suits and performing a cover of The Bee Gees’ You Should Be Dancing. In 2020, he surprised a trauma nurse recovering from Covid by serenading him with a solo version of the Foo Fighters’ song Everlong. Meanwhile, in 2016, he wrote a letter to Cornwall Council asking them to relax local noise restrictions so that an unsigned teenage band could rehearse.
As for Backbeat BBQ, nobody knows when it might emerge again, but one thing’s certain: Grohl certainly enjoys cooking it.
“The process of making music is a lot like cooking for a crowd: You create a recipe as you would a song,” he said. “You prepare a meal as you would record in a studio. And you serve it as you would perform live. When people come back for seconds, well, that’s your encore.”