In the months following Kurt Cobain’s tragic death at 27, Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl thought he would never play music again—until a random hitchhiker convinced him otherwise. Whether it was divine intervention or a convenient coincidence, Grohl’s passing encounter with a stranger on a rainy day in Ireland encouraged him to keep making music.
Without it, the Foo Fighters might have never existed, and the rock and roll landscape would have been forever different.
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Dave Grohl and the Hitchhiker
We so often associate Kurt Cobain’s death with the impact it had on the 1990s rock scene, but the effect it had on those closest to him was immeasurable in comparison. For Dave Grohl, a multi-talented instrumentalist who had been devoting his life to music for years by that point, Cobain’s death made it too painful to continue pursuing his passions.
“I wasn’t sure what to do with my life,” Grohl recalled on a 2021 episode of the Graham Norton Show. “I couldn’t even listen to music, I didn’t want to turn on the radio, I put my instruments away. It hurt too much to listen to music. So, I thought, ‘I’m going to go to one of my favorite places in the world, one of the most remote areas I could find, just to go out and soul search. So, I went to the Ring of Kerry [in Ireland].”
Grohl said that as he was driving down a desolate road on a rainy day, he spotted a hitchhiker and decided he would pick him up. “As I got closer and closer, I saw he had a Kurt Cobain t-shirt on, and I thought, ‘Even in the most remote area I could possibly find, I can’t outrun this thing.’ And I thought, ‘Okay, I am going to go home, and I’m going to start over,’ and I started the Foo Fighters.”
The Stranger Got a Name Decades Later
Dave Grohl and the hitchhiker parted ways after that fateful day in Ireland, seemingly never to cross paths again. But in a turn of events that could only happen in the age of the internet and social media, the stranger that inadvertently prompted Grohl to start one of the most successful post-grunge bands of all time was eventually identified as Lorcan Dunne.
X, formerly known as Twitter, user Eoin Tighe shared a photograph of his cousin, Lorcan Dunne, in August 2024. From the gray Irish skies to the disposal camera image quality of the photograph, one needn’t even see Dunne’s shirt to believe he was the one Grohl spotted that day in the mid-1990s. But lo and behold, Dunne was wearing the shirt: a tie-dye, long-sleeve tee with Kurt Cobain’s face on it.
“So, my legend of a cousin Lorcan just realized he was kind of important to the creation of [the] Foo Fighters,” Tighe wrote. “He saw a video by Dave Grohl talking about why he got back to work after a visit to Ireland. Lorcan was out hitchhiking wearing his Nirvana top when Dave stopped.”
Years later, Grohl says he believes Cobain would be happy with how his former bandmate’s life turned out. “He’s always smiling in my dreams,” Grohl told WBUR in 2021. “So, I take that as a good sign.”
Photo by Matteo Scalet/Pacific Press/Shutterstock