We all know that Dave Grohl is a man of many talents—singer, guitarist, drummer, bandleader, rock demon, published storyteller, documentarian, etc.—but his knack for “party engineering” is what powered a recent charity auction via celebrated photographer Danny Clinch‘s Transparent Clinch Gallery.
On Wednesday, a pair of Sharpie diagrams drawn on on the back of “Prohibited Items” signs backstage at Asbury Park, NJ’s Sea.Hear.Now festival in 2023—one showing how to build a beer bong and one illustrating how to sneak hash into a venue in a cassette tape—sold for a combined $14,152.
As Clinch explained on the auction website, “Every year at Sea.Hear.Now, we collect art from musicians who are playing the festival to showcase and sell in our Transparent Clinch Gallery Pop Up Art Tent in order to raise money for local charities. This year, I asked Dave Grohl to create some art for our cause. Dave was immediately excited about the opportunity and started throwing out some creative ideas. As the festival grew closer, I would text Dave to remind him that we would need to collect the art soon. Being one of the busiest people that I know, he arrived at the festival with a Sharpie and ready to make art.
“As we were looking for some poster board for his art,” Clinch continued, “a runner came back with some ‘Prohibited Items’ corro board signage from the festival fences. Dave Grohl loved this and began creating these one of a kind drawings moments before taking the stage in front of 30,000 people at Sea.Hear.Now 2023 in Asbury Park. Now that you’ve seen the drawings, it only makes the story and the art more ironic and iconic.” Each winning bid will also receive a Danny Clinch-signed 11×14 fine art print of Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters set at Sea.Hear.Now 2023 captured moments after he made the diagrams backstage.
In a video of Grohl drawing his “DIY Beer Bong” schematics, the Foo Fighters frontman explains that he used to send runners to Home Depot to acquire the necessary parts and screw them together backstage before shows. Watch Dave Grohl create his D.I.Y. beer bong diagram on the back of the festival’s contraband list below.
Dave Grohl Diagrams Makeshift Beer Bong
[Video: Transparent Clinch Gallery]
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Grohl’s knack for getting the pre-show party started has been well-documented over the years. As he explained of his nightly regimen during a 2018 radio interview, “An hour and a half before the gig, I take three Advil. An hour before the gig, I have a Coors Light. About 50 minutes before the gig, I hit my first Jägermeister, finish the Coors Light, get another Coors Light going.”
“Now there’s a bunch of people around,” he continued, “so I’m throwing shots at everybody and I’m taking shots with everyone in the room. The next Coors Light is down, I get a cold one. Now it’s about maybe 20 minutes before going on. I’ve had three or four shots of Jäger and three Coors Lights. They sort of clear the room and we get 15 minutes to ourselves. So then, it’s all of us [in the band] and I feel guilty because I’m the only one who’s been doing the shots of the Jag, so I start feeding shots of Jag to the rest of the band who are all drinking white wine and champagne and whatever. So I’m pounding them with Jag but I have to take [the shots] with them so now I’m five or six shots in. It’s like, it’s time to walk to the stage so I crack another beer just to have a cold one as I walk up and I pick up the bottle and drink the last inch of the Jag! Then we play for three hours, in which I’m also drinking Jäger onstage [laughs].”
Foo Fighters are due to kick off their 2024 tour schedule with a run of January shows in New Zealand before returning to the States for a long list of gigs in May, June, July, and August. For a complete listing of confirmed 2024 Foo Fighters tour dates, head here.