Dave Grohl has previously shared a story of how seeing a hitchhiker wearing a Kurt Cobain shirt while driving in Ireland was instrumental to the formation of Foo Fighters, and it appears the figure behind the wildly influential thumbs-up has been found.
Twitter user Eoin Tighe shared a video of his "legend of a cousin" Lorcan Dunne recalling a time he ran into Grohl on a rural road in Kerry while wearing a tie-dyed shirt with Cobain's face on it — cut together with Grohl's story of how seeing his late Nirvana bandmate's face "in the middle of nowhere" inspired him to return to music.
"So my cousin has just realized he was kind of important in the creation of the Foo Fighters. Fair play Lorcan!" Tighe wrote, sharing a photo of a young Dunne in the tie-dyed Cobain shirt. "The kid who made Dave Grohl get back to work."
In interviews and in his memoir, Dave Grohl: The Storyteller, the Foo Fighters frontman has shared that the aforementioned run-in was "the moment that changed everything," following Cobain's death.
"After Nirvana ended, I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to do. I didn't necessarily want to play music. I was young, I think I was 25 years old," Grohl told The Ryan Tubridy Show on RTÉ Radio 1 in a 2021 interview.
"I had been to Ireland before and made my way around the Ring of Kerry once before and so I rented a car and wound up driving. I flew over and I just started driving around, just trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life."
The Ring of Kerry is a 179-kilometre-long tourist route in southwestern Ireland. Along the road are all manner of attractions and lookouts with names like "Gap of Dunloe," "Bog Village," "Ladies View" and "Torc Waterfall." If one were looking to take a drive and clear their head, this feels like the place.
"And as I was coming around this country road, I saw a hitchhiker. And I said — you know he was young, it was sort of raining, maybe I'll pick him up," Grohl continued.
"And as I got closer, I noticed that he had a Kurt Cobain T-shirt on. And that was the moment that I realized, you know, I need to go home and figure this out. And that's when I started the Foo Fighters."
Grohl may need to return to the Ring of Kerry and keep his foot on the gas after joking that Taylor Swift doesn't perform live.