BEVERLY HILLS — When musician-songwriter Dave Grohl and the band Nirvana hit big with “Nevermind,” his father phoned him. “You know this isn’t going to last, right?” he told his son. “No, of course. Why would it? There’s no way this could ever last,” Grohl replied.

“Treat every check that you get like it’s the last one you’ll ever get,” his father counseled.

“That was 24 years ago,” recalls Grohl at a press gathering here. “So I’ve always kind of waited for this to end so that I can get on with real life for the last 24 years. And eventually I just sort of realized, like, ‘Wow! Well, I guess this IS my real life. This is a reality.’”

Grohl is taking that reality he experienced first with Scream, Nirvana and then the Foo Fighters, to HBO for a series he created on American music — where it comes from and what is unique about its origins.

The show, “Foo Fighters Sonic Highway,” premieres Friday. His idea was to create a new song in each city, inspired by the music that is endemic to that part of the country. Those songs will be part of the band’s new album.

“We could just go and make another record in a studio and hit the road and sell a bunch of T-shirts and turn on KROQ and hear another Foo Fighters song,” he says. “But where’s the fun in that?

“We’ve been a band for 20 years now. Let’s go to tiny studios all over the country, tell the story of music from that city and what is it about each one of these cities that influences the music that comes from there? Because there are real reasons, cultural influences from each one of these places. There’s a reason why jazz came from New Orleans. There’s a reason why country went to Nashville and why the blues went to Chicago. And I get to interview all of these people and talk to them about that. And it goes back 100 years.”

Grohl, 45, went to eight different locations including Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, Nashville, New Orleans, New York, Seattle and Washington, D.C. “As you’re seeing these people talk about these cities, you see our band in the studio writing and putting a song together. And on the very last day of the session, I take my transcripts with all the interviews, and I get a bottle of wine, and I sit in my hotel room. And I read through the transcripts and take words and ideas and thoughts, and I put them on this side of the page. And on this side of the page, I have the outline of the song,” he says.

“And I write the song from the episode. So the finale of each episode is a performance of the song, where you realize all of these lyrical references are from the show that you just watched. So that’s the challenge. It’s not like anything I’ve ever done. And it was so fun. I will never ever do it again. It was a pain in the a–.”

Grohl, who left school in his junior year of high school to join a band, is clearly in love with music of all kinds. “I don’t know if (the series is) reminding people of that simple pleasure of just playing music, or if it’s exposing or explaining that,” he says.

“I don’t want my kid to think the only way you can be a musician is if you stand in line at a song contest audition and then wind up having a bazillionaire tell you you’re not a good singer …

“That to me, that’s not what music’s about. I have kids, and when I listen to my kid practice the violin or the flute, it sounds like someone is strangling a cat. But she looks at me like, ‘Check this out. Did you see what I just did?’ She feels great. I’m like, ‘Absolutely!’” he says.

“I know we only have a short amount of time, but that’s a longer, bigger conversation that has a lot to do with why I do this … I would rather a kid pick up a guitar and learn three chords and become the Ramones, because they changed the world. So I think it’s important for people to realize that the simple pleasure of playing music is kind of the most important thing.”

One of the people he interviews is President Obama. “I wanted him to talk about America as a country, where you have the opportunity to start with nothing, like Buddy Guy, make your guitar from strings and wires in your screen porch and then become a blues legend that’s inducted into the Kennedy Center Honors, or be a high school dropout from Springfield, Virginia, that winds up in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or being a kid from Hawaii that winds up being the President.”