What goes on tour stays on tour – in other words it doesn’t really count. That’s the cardinal rock’n’roll maxim that drives the canniest wives to watch from the wings when their men are on stage.
The enticements of a tour are too frequent, the culture so debauched that all but the most monastic men are tempted to stray.
But Foo Fighters singer Dave Grohl, the former drummer in Nirvana, was meant to be one of the good guys, routinely described as the nicest man in rock, married to ex-model and producer Jordyn Blum for 21 years.
Which is why news that he got another woman pregnant has shocked so many. Certainly Grohl’s bombshell statement on Tuesday night – timed perhaps to be overshadowed by the crucial Trump-Harris televised debate – has many fans agog.
It ran: ‘I’ve recently become the father of a new baby daughter, born outside of my marriage. I plan to be a loving and supportive parent to her. I love my wife and my children, and I am doing everything I can to regain their trust and earn their forgiveness.
Grohl performs with the Foo Fighters at Denmark’s Roskilde Festival in July
The Foo Fighters star and wife Jordyn Blum arrive at The 2012 MusiCares Person of The Year Gala at the Los Angeles Convention Centre in 2012
‘We’re grateful for your consideration toward all the children involved, as we move forward together.’
But will Blum, 48, find it in her heart to ‘move forward together’ with the man she wed in 2003? It would take superhuman forbearance, even though she knew she had married a man who had lived the rockstar lifestyle to the full, womanising and all.
Over the past two decades, she and Grohl forged a beautiful family unit with daughters Violet, 18, Harper, 15, and Ophelia, ten, which appeared to be enviably strong and ‘normal’.
Home was a mansion in Encino, LA, with a pool, recording studio, basketball court and mini golf in the garden.
By celebrity standards it was all quite understated, which seems to have been deliberate. For Grohl, the godfather of grunge from his days in Nirvana, had become very domestic-focused in middle-age.
He said he liked to slow cook on the BBQ while working on music in the studio. ‘There’s something to be said for recording studios that smell like your mother’s Sunday roast – it puts everyone at ease.’
There was also a big holiday home in Hawaii – but life was deliberately unflashy, given his £250million fortune. He once said he woke every day, chose jeans and a flannel shirt from his collection of around 30 of each, and would make breakfast and help get his daughters ready for school.
The highlight of the day was when they all got back home, and he would take them horse-riding or watch TV with them. ‘When you have kids, you see life through different eyes. You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate,’ he said.
His late mother called him a ‘Superdad’. He said that being a father had simply changed him.
Dave Grohl attends Wimbledon with his stony-faced wife, Jordyn Blum, in July
Dave has been married to model Jordyn Blum – his second wife – for 21 years
He certainly seemed a different man. In 2004 a visitor to his recording studio (at that point not at his home) found that the wifi password was ‘pussy’ and there was a large poster of British pin-up Kelly Brook on the wall. Grohl also talked of having to get rid of the band’s porn mags before singer Norah Jones saw them, which may have been a joke.
Jordyn Blum was familiar with this side of him. She is not his first wife, and before they were an item he had a reputation as a ladies’ man. He was married in 1994 – the year Nirvana bandmate Kurt Cobain took his own life – to photographer Jennifer Leigh Youngblood. They split three years later. He reflected in 1999: ‘I was 25, my wife was even younger. We weren’t ready to get married.’ He then dated Louise Post from the band Veruca Salt – who accused him of cheating on her with actress Winona Ryder and dozens of other women.
Another girlfriend was US snowboarder Tina Basich, who had to telephone him over and over for five weeks until he took her call and admitted he had moved on. She said: ‘I was really in love with him. Break-ups suck. Rockstar break-ups suck the worst. All I got was a five-minute phone call after five weeks of me calling and trying to get ahold of him because I just had to know if these rumours were true.’
The rumours may have concerned actress Kari Wuhrer, his next girlfriend. She was followed by the band Hole’s Melissa Auf der Maur who he dated until 2001. No wonder his late mother said: ‘I did worry about women. My biggest fear was that Madonna would snatch him up.’
In addition, he was openly appreciative of the groupie scene when on tour. In a 2002 interview – given after he started dating Blum – he said: ‘Groupies come to the back. They know what they want; they know what the band wants. It just happens. It’s that easy.’
Dave appears to be listening out for his unborn daughter with wife Jordyn Blum at the 2006 Grammys
In another interview he said: ‘There’s a difference between true love and a crush, lust and a one-night stand… I do like a good tryst, though.’
So where does Blum fit into this? She fell into his life in 2001, in the middle of this hedonistic period, and they started dating seriously the following year.
The initial encounter was in 2001 at the Sunset Marquis Whiskey Bar in West Hollywood. Grohl was drinking with his Foo Fighters’ bandmate Taylor Hawkins. He said: ‘Taylor was the looker. Some bombshell comes up and starts talking to Taylor.
‘I’ve got trainers on, no socks, dirty shorts and a dirty T-shirt. She waved her friend Jordyn over. I was like, ‘Oh my God. Not a chance!’ So I’m just having some drinks and acting like a jackass. And by the end of the night I was p***ed and I’m staring at her going, ‘You’re my future ex-wife’.
‘So she gave me her number: ‘Jordyn, your future ex-wife’.’
But Grohl ‘wasn’t ready for a serious relationship’ and ‘stopped calling’. Everything changed when Hawkins was hospitalised in a coma after a heroin overdose in August 2001. (He died of a heart attack in March 2022 while Foo Fighters – whose hit Everlong has become a popular wedding song – were touring.)
Grohl said: ‘I was sitting watching the snooker and this commercial comes on for chewing gum – this girl walking through the subway pickpocketing people. All of a sudden I think, ‘That’s that girl Jordyn, that’s that chick!’ And over the course of the next few days I start having these dreams about that life that I’d been thinking about, settling-down dreams.
‘I thought, ‘I’m not waiting one more minute, because life’s too f***ing short, man. It’s too delicate’. The day we got home I called her up and she said, ‘Wow, I never thought I’d hear from you again’. So I took her to a restaurant… and that was that.’
Until this week’s extraordinary admission. Perhaps signs that something was amiss were there this summer when Grohl was uncharacteristically grouchy while at Wimbledon with a stony-faced Blum. Maybe the looming disaster was the reason he took crabby, poorly judged swipes at Taylor Swift days later by questioning whether she and her band played live during the Eras tour. That outburst was out of character for a man who has friends across the globe in all genres and parts of the music industry.
The Grohls last year before Dave’s shocking confession. From left are Harper, Jordyn, Dave, Ophelia and Violet at the Grammys in Los Angeles, California.
Dave Grohl back in 1993 when he was drummer for Nirvana, with bandmates the late Kurt Cobain and Chris Novoselic
Most put his tetchiness down to him trying to recover his equilibrium after the death of his best friend Hawkins. It was followed a few months later by the death of his mother, Virginia, who was, as he often said, the most important person in the world to him.
Friends believe that for Grohl to have done something so ‘uncharacteristic’, so ‘tacky’ as to get a girl pregnant was because he was in the grip of that double grief.
It remains to be seen whether his wife will be as sympathetic – or whether the jokey prediction that she will one day become his ex-wife may yet come true.