This Irish Hitchhiker Says He Inspired Dave Grohl to Form Foo Fighters.

During the promotional run for Dave Grohl’s 2021 book The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music, he recalled getting inspired to form the Foo Fighters after running into an Irish hitchhiker wearing a Kurt Cobain t-shirt. Now, that Irish hitchhiker has come forward with his side of the story.

In a video posted by his cousin Eoin Tighe on Twitter, Lorcan Dunne explains he recently realized the connection after watching a video of Grohl talking about getting lost in rural Ireland after Cobain died in 1994. Looking back, Dunne remembered going on a hitchhiking trip with friends and approaching a car ahead of his group.

Dunne said when he spotted Grohl (whom he didn’t recognize at first) in the passenger seat, he saw “this look of shock” at his “Nirvana t-shirt with Kurt Cobain on it.” For whatever reason, Dunne didn’t get a ride because the “car just tore off away,” but he obviously left an impression on Grohl. Naturally, “nobody” believed Dunne when he tried to tell his friends. Watch the clip below.

This all lines up with Grohl’s telling of the encounter, in which he remembered going on a “soul-searching” trip to The Ring of Kerry in Ireland, which he described as “the most remote place on Earth.”

You really feel like you’re at the end of the Earth,” Grohl explained. “I was driving around in my rental car on a country road and I saw this hitchhiker kid. And I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ll pick him up.’ And as I got closer to him, I saw that he had a Kurt Cobain t-shirt on.

Grohl continued, “It was Kurt’s face looking back at me in the middle of nowhere and I realized I can’t outrun this so I need to go home and fucking get back to work. And so I did.”

In the caption of Tighe’s post, he described Dunne as a “legend.” It’s hard to disagree.