I saw a video where Dave Grohl was talking about how he can’t read music. How does that work if he’s writing and performing songs?
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“Reading music” usually refers to sheet music, a specific system of writing down music but not the only one. In the genres of rock, folk, country, blues, and stuff like that, people who sing or play guitar, bass or drums rarely have to learn sheet music. Piano players and wind instrument players usually have to learn a bit of sheet music but it’s not strictly necessary.
I had to learn a bit of sheet music to play trumpet in school, but I played bass in the jazz band without learning how to read sheet music for it (I just improvised around the chord names) and I’ve never used sheet music for writing a rock song.
To learn a rock song on guitar, it’s often enough to look up a “chord chart”, which is just the lyrics of the song with the names of the chords written above them, and then if you want to sing it or figure out the melody/rhythm you just listen to the song and copy it by ear. An example: https://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/tab/foo-fighters/learn-to-fly-chords-1105893
There’s also “tablature”, which is a system of writing music specific to guitar and bass that’s very intuitive: the lines represent the strings and the numbers represent the frets you have to press down on. Example: https://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/tab/foo-fighters/learn-to-fly-tabs-45213
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