For the rest of his life, North Delta-raised musician Darin Wall has a crazy story to tell about the time he was shot at a gig and then got to use Dave Grohl’s legendary “throne of rock” on stage while nursing his leg injury.
These days Wall lives in Seattle and plays bass in Greyhawk. On a September night in 2021, the metal band was in Boise, Idaho, where Wall took a stray bullet in his upper thigh after tackling a would-be shooter. Later, he was hailed as a hero for stopping what might have been a mass murder at the nightclub.
News headlines and Twitter posts caught the attention of Foo Fighters’ band management and singer/guitarist Grohl, who famously used a custom chair on a 2015 tour after breaking a leg during a show in Sweden.
With Greyhawk gigs on the calendar just weeks after Wall was shot, the hobbled bass player was loaned Grohl’s throne for a few shows including a triumphant one at Seattle’s El Corazon club, where King 5 news cameras showed up.
“It was a hot-button topic for a minute there,” Wall told me on the phone. “It’s still a big thing with people here wanting to ask me about it, and that’s fine. It’s a wacky story. It’s definitely become part of the lore of the band and part of my story, for sure. But I don’t know that it really helped our career that much as a band.”
Two years later the bullet is still lodged in Wall’s thigh, but he’s relatively OK other than some phantom pains.
“Doctors told me that I got really lucky,” Wall said. “I mean, no one who gets shot is lucky, but if you’re gonna get shot in the area where I got shot, it was lucky that I moved to my right pretty quickly when he pulled the trigger, and it didn’t hit anything vital. But it just missed everything — like, it’s less than half an inch for my femoral artery, and if he hit that I would have bled out in about 15 seconds.”
The shooter is now doing time for his crime, Wall said, and Greyhawk plays on.
He was just the third rocker to use the famous throne on stage, after Grohl and Axl Rose.
“It’s cool company to be in, for sure,” Wall marveled. “When they sent it to me, it was in a warehouse in California somewhere. And when I gave the throne back, they were playing a show here in Seattle, the first band to ever play Climate Pledge Arena. There were a lot of six-degrees-of-separation things because I was part of the team that designed all the fire safety equipment for that arena. So when I returned the throne I drove it there in a U-Haul truck. It was kind of cool to give it back in person rather getting a shipping company to come get it from my house. It was kind of a cool way to put a bow on everything.”
Greyhawk has played in Vancouver several times, most recently at a sold-out Fox Cabaret last spring. Look for the band to return in mid-November at the Astoria on East Hastings.
GEDDY LEE, AUTHOR
Speaking of rockin’ bass players, I’ve been a Rush fan since I first saw their Signals tour in 1982. So I’m really quite sad to miss Geddy Lee’s talk at The Centre in Vancouver on Nov. 23 due to a sporting excursion in Seattle — but shed no tears for me, because that trip promises to be awesome (Seahawks, Canucks, Apple Cup).
This fall the iconic Rush singer/bassist is doing a Live Nation-produced book tour timed with “My Effin’ Life,” which is about, you guessed it, his effin’ life in rock ‘n’ roll dating back to childhood in Toronto. Tickets are sold on rush.com (all ages, reserved seating).
The tour will see Mr. Lee read passages from the Harper Collins-published book (due out Nov. 14), and fans can ask him questions during a Q&A session moderated by a “special guest interviewer” to be named. No word if he’ll bring a bass and finger some notes (I doubt it).
“Writing this book has meant spending so much time living in the past,” Lee says in a news release. “I’ve never lived my life looking anywhere but forward, which is why I resisted doing this kind of thing for so long.”
Being in Rush all those years “felt like it was forever,” he adds. “There was always unfinished business: the next record, the next set design, the next tour. It’s been the theme of my life. But you need a lot more determination to proceed in the world of music without the comfort of your bandmates, and I can only hope that finishing this book will release me to return to what I do and love best.”
Lee isn’t the only rock star doing “talk” tours this fall. Police guitarist Andy Summers will be at Vancouver Playhouse on Thursday, Nov. 9 with The Cracked Lens + A Missing String, to feature stories from “One Train Later” and other books, photos and music on a tour presented by Modo Live.