Dave Grohl stops by Annandale High School

From the left: Annandale High School safety and security specialist Chris Tippins, Dave Grohl, and Principal Tim Thomas.

Rocker Dave Grohl, Annandale High School’s most famous former student, returned to the school Dec. 11 for a film shoot. Grohl, the former Nirvana drummer and current frontman for the Foo Fighters, is making a documentary about his life that will include scenes from his old school and neighborhood.

AHS Principal Tim Thomas tweeted on Dec. 11: “Went outside to investigate a film crew on campus only to discover that it was Dave Grohl from @foofighters who went to AHS and whose mother was an English teacher at AHS. What a treat! Go Atoms!!”

Grohl was born in 1969, so he was most likely at Annandale High School around 1985-87. According to Thomas, he doesn’t appear in any AHS yearbooks. He previously went to Thomas Jefferson High School and Bishop Ireton High School and dropped out of AHS in the 11th grade.

By then he was part of the D.C. music scene and joined the band Scream as a drummer in 1986.

Thomas had no idea a rock legend was outside the school until he saw the camera crew, and “I walked out to see what’s going on,” he recalls. “Dave Grohl walked up and asked about the school and the football team.”

Thomas told him how Annandale is so much more diverse now. “That was about it,” he says. Grohl didn’t go inside, didn’t talk to any students, and didn’t give any details about the upcoming documentary.

Dave Grohl and Virginia Hanlon Grohl on the cover of her book, “From Cradle to Stage.”

“He was really nice and really genuine,” Thomas says. “He was interested in the state of affairs at Annandale.”

Thomas briefly said hello to Grohl’s mother, Virginia Hanlon Grohl, who was in the car.

Ms. Grohl taught English and public speaking for 35 years in Fairfax County schools, including Annandale, Fairfax, and Thomas Jefferson high schools. She joined other teachers in opposing the effort to transform TJ into a magnet school for science and technology.

Virginia Grohl talks about Dave in her book From Cradle to Stage, which recounts the experiences of other mothers who raised music stars, including Michael Stipe, Adam Levine, Amy Winehouse, Miranda Lambert, Kelly Clarkson, and Dr. Dre.

“There was always music in the house” when Dave and his older sister, Lisa, were growing up, she said on the Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU 88.5, broadcast on Oct. 11, 2017. Popular outings for the family included Wolf Trap and One Step Down, the legendary music venue in D.C.

As a kid, Dave was “super energized from the very beginning,” Virginia Grohl told Kojo. “He never walked; he ran. He was so much fun – just a really bright spirit.”

At that time, however, “schools had no place for the really creative kid, a kid with that kind of energy,” so he ended up going to three high schools, she says. “He was very popular. Kids and teachers liked him. He was not a disrupter but was not having a good time.”

Grohl joined Nirvana as a drummer in 1990 and, in 1991, its album Nevermind became a huge worldwide hit. Grohl, along with Nirvana bandmates Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic, were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014, 20 years after Cobain’s death.

Grohl formed the Foo Fighters in 1994. Four of its nine studio albums won Grammy Awards for Best Rock Album. According to Wikipedia, the band got its name from the UFOs reported by allied aircraft pilots in World War II, which were collectively known as “foo fighters.”

In addition to finding huge popularity with the Foo Fighters, Grohl appeared with many other bands, including Queens of the Stone Age and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.