by Mick Wall
The irony was that just as Scream were shape-shifting into something which anticipated the darker corners that rock would start to explore more fully in the Nineties, it was becoming harder to get anyone to take them seriously. When, in the late summer of 1990, Scream set out on their fifth American tour since Dave had joined the band, they did so still believing they were just one lucky shot away from stardom. Dave, though, was already having other ideas about where he went next. In the gaps between Scream tours he and a friend, Barrett Jones, had spent time together at the Laundry Room Studio, where Jones was helping another local act, named Churn, make a demo.
Barrett was a talented singer-guitarist in his own right, and owned his own four-track recording set-up. He was happy to show Dave how to make his own rough demos, laying down the drums on one track, the bass and guitar on two other separate tracks, leaving the vocals for the fourth. Dave later recalled how Barrett had helped him lay down three tracks in one quick-fire session, Dave hurrying over the guitar and vocal parts lest anyone should actually come in and see him play-acting at being a frontman. ‘These were no epic masterpieces,’ he insisted, ‘just a test to see if I could do this sort of thing on my own.’ Pleased with results, he said it was ‘the beginning of a beautiful relationship’ between the two men. One that would have lasting repercussions neither man could possibly have foreseen.
So confident was Dave in what he’d accomplished on his own, he persuaded the band to record one of his demo tracks, ‘Gods Looked Down’, on Fumble. He also talked them into allowing him to sing it, though the results would not be heard until 1993, when Fumble was belatedly released, long after Scream had disbanded, but in the wake of Dave’s newfound fame in Nirvana. Interestingly, the end result, with its Zep-like, boy-gone-wrong riff and contrastingly wide-eyed, faux-naïf vocal, sounds somewhat like how one imagines a cross between Nirvana and the Foo Fighters might sound.
Clearly, Dave was already thinking several steps ahead. Not just musically. When a local music biz figure named Glen E. Friedman decided to try and shop around for a new deal for Scream, based on the tapes of what became the Fumble album, later claiming to have sunk $10,000 of his own money into doing so, Dave was the one who stayed on his case, phoning him every few days, keeping the pot boiling, pushing hard to see what progress Friedman was making. ‘Dave called me more than the other guys, and we became good friends,’ Friedman would tell the Australian writer Jeff Apter in 2005. ‘Everyone wanted it, but Dave really wanted it.’
Wanting it and getting it, however – at least with Scream – were proving to be two very different things. When, in the late summer of 1990, Skeeter bailed again, leaving the band stranded penniless in Los Angeles, it looked like the game was finally up, says Franz. ‘Skeeter spins out of control and that’s it. We’re tired of trying to keep pulling it back together again. Just feeling like: what the fuck? Everybody had kind of had enough of it. Whether we would get back together later, at that point it was just like, forget it, whatever.’
Crashing at the Laurel Canyon house of Sabrina Stahl – elder sister to Pete and Franz – they phoned Friedman to beg for money but that wasn’t the would-be entrepreneur’s way. He wasn’t in it to give them money, he was in it to find them a deal and make money. Clueless as to what to do next, still unwilling to give up on their dream, the Stahl brothers holed up at their sister’s place and waited to see what happened. Dave, meanwhile, though he didn’t make a big deal of it, had already decided he’d had enough. He kicked back at Sabrina’s pad too for a while, which she shared with a couple of female mud wrestlers from the infamous Hollywood Tropicana, then found himself a cash-money gig working for a guy he’d met named Lumpy, who was building a coffee shop in nearby Costa Mesa. Dave still pitched in whenever he could, asking around if anyone knew of a half-decent bassist willing to hook up with the increasingly desperate Scream, but mainly he was thinking about his own future.
When he heard that the Melvins, fellow-traveller punk-metallists from Washington state, were coming through town, he phoned their leader, the singer-guitarist Buzz Osbourne, and asked if he could be put on the guest list. They had met some time before, when Scream had shared the bill with the Melvins at a show in San Francisco. Dave looked up to the band, especially their brilliant drummer, Dale Crover, and respected their opinion. Inquiring whether he knew of any bassists who might be willing to team up with Scream, Dave was disappointed but not surprised when Buzz said he did not. His ears pricked up again though when Buzz added that there was a band he knew, from Aberdeen, who he believed might be looking for a drummer. How serious was Dave about sticking it out with Scream anyway? Could he use another gig, maybe?
Dave decided he could. These guys from Aberdeen, asked Dave, did they have a name? Yeah. Nirvana. Buzz added that the Nirvana guys – Kurt the singer and guitarist and Krist the bassist – had already seen Dave play when they came along – at Buzz’s suggestion – to a gig at San Francisco’s I-Beam club some weeks before. ‘I called Buzz and he said that Kurt and Krist had seen a Scream show in San Francisco and they really liked my drumming.’
Dave was intrigued but not yet sold. He knew there was a growing buzz about Nirvana on the underground hardcore scene and that they were working out of Washington state, and he recalled he’d probably checked out their only album, Bleach, recorded for just $600 (about £400) and released on Seattle’s burgeoning indie label Sub Pop, somewhere along the line. But he hadn’t been impressed enough by it to know whether he actually liked it. ‘I thought it was pretty cool,’ he did his best to enthuse, years later, not wanting to be a jerk, but conceded that he ‘wasn’t the biggest fan in the world’. The pedestrian drums were hardly likely to impress someone of Dave’s bottled-lightning ability. The actual songs, though, they had something. ‘I thought some of their songs were really great and some of Kurt’s lyrics were really hilarious,’ he said later, not entirely convincingly.
What mattered was that their album had come out on Sub Pop, the most happening new label in Washington state, and now, rumour had it, they were on the verge of signing a major label deal, though with which label exactly no one knew yet, least of all Kurt and Krist. There was just that feeling about them and Dave picked up on it instantly. They were also about to take off for a British tour, their second trip to London, the one place he had never been with Scream. Dave didn’t need to know any more than that. He was also impressed when Buzz told him that the Melvins’ drummer, Dale Crover, had played with the band for a while, too. Wow. If they were good enough for Dale …
Dave wrote down the number Buzz gave him but when he called that night and got Krist on the phone, the bassist, though friendly, told him it was too late, they had just hired Danny Peters from another local Seattle act, named Mudhoney. Too bad, man. But maybe Dave could come along and say hi when Nirvana were next in LA. Yeah, man, maybe …
Dave put down the phone, utterly deflated, and went back to watching TV with his mud-wrestling new girlfriends. Then out of the blue, a few hours later, Krist phoned him back. Dave was still smiling in astonishment as he recalled the moment a few years later. ‘He said, “You know what, maybe you should come up here.”’
‘I wasn’t surprised,’ says Franz now. ‘The nucleus of Scream were three guys that went to school together, lived close together. Dave was a little outside that circle, for obvious reasons: his age, his neighbourhood. So he probably always felt a little outside of the circle. And him being his age he’s like, “I wanna keep playing. I gotta find something.”’ When Dave told Franz and Pete he was going up to Seattle ‘to jam’ with Nirvana, but that he didn’t know if anything would come of it, that he would likely be back on Sabrina’s couch the next day, Franz just nodded. ‘He wasn’t sure how it was gonna work out. But I did. For some reason, I knew: he’s not coming back. Regardless of what happened to the band, I knew he wasn’t coming back. I felt it.’
Dave was on the next flight up to Seattle, where Nirvana were doing a show they had invited him to come a
long to, then worried about what he was going to tell the Stahl brothers if Nirvana did offer him the gig. Franz and Pete were the ones that had taken a chance on him when he was just a kid: the guitarist who had shown him how to really play that thing and the singer who had become like a father figure to him out on the road, the guys who’d always had his back, lost somewhere between Amsterdam and Nowheresville.
But Dave didn’t do what-ifs. He just went with his gut. It was a habit that would prove invaluable over time, but right now he just had a sick feeling inside. ‘It was the toughest decision I ever had to make,’ he said. Nevertheless, the decision made, he then moved quickly to implement it before he could change his mind. ‘I got the hell out of LA,’ he later recalled, feeling no pain, ‘and there was no looking back.’
4. The Three Fires
Dave Grohl might have thought he knew what he was doing when he arrived to see Nirvana play at the Motor Sports International and Garage, in downtown Seattle, but he had no fucking idea what he was about to let himself in for. Caught completely off-guard by the size of the dank but spacious venue, which held over 1500 people – and by how insanely crowded the place was – he was also perplexed to witness how well Danny Peters played: powerful but percussive, inventive and sly. What did they need Dave for if they already had someone as good as Danny? It made no sense. For Dave, nothing in Nirvana ever would.
It was 22 September 1990, a warm Saturday night, and Nirvana were headlining over the Dwarves and the Melvins. It was easily their biggest gig yet, but Dave didn’t know that. He just assumed it must be like that at all Nirvana’s gigs now. ‘When I flew up to Seattle I’d never seen them play before. We went down to the show and there were 2000 people there. It was amazing, because they weren’t punk rock kids. Kurt would say, “This next song is called ‘About a Girl’”, and the place would just freak out.’
The other thing Dave didn’t know was that Peters was just the latest in a long line of drummers that had passed through Nirvana in the three years they had been going. Danny was actually their fifth, but despite playing on their new single, ‘Sliver’, a track the drummer would also be given credit for helping inspire, in the spontaneous burst of energy that birthed it, Kurt had decided he wanted to try Dave out too. He didn’t like the Scream guys, called them assholes, but after he and Krist had caught their gig in San Francisco earlier that summer, he had come away impressed by the loud sound of their young drummer. Dave didn’t just play with a bigger kit – something Kurt had fixed on as an essential component in the new, more all-embracing direction he wanted to take Nirvana in – he played bigger.
And there was something else. Kurt was also a drummer. He could really play and knew exactly what he was looking for now. Someone like Dale Crover, ideally, who had drummed with Nirvana briefly, before returning to the Melvins. As a teenager, Dale had been in an Iron Maiden covers band, where he’d learned how to kick the shit out of his drums. Buzz Osbourne had talent-spotted him at 17 and invited him into the Melvins. The following year, Dale also got together with an 18-year-old Kurt Cobain to play bass and drums in a housecat outfit Kurt dubbed Fecal Matter, where they recorded a rough demo together with the entirely Cobain-esque title of Illiteracy Will Prevail, from which at least two tracks would later be reworked into early Nirvana songs. Nothing happened with the demo – few people saw any future for a band called Fecal Matter and the tape, made at Kurt’s aunt’s Seattle home, using her four-track tape-recorder, remained buried until after Nirvana became so famous people were eager to listen to anything Kurt had ever had the slightest thing to do with.
Instead, it was the Melvins who forged ahead, at least to begin with, releasing their first EP, Six Songs, in 1986 and their debut album, Gluey Porch Treatments, the following year. Kurt was such a fan he would hang out at their rehearsals, crouched behind Dale’s drums.
‘I met [Kurt] only a few weeks after I met [the Melvins],’ Dale later recalled. ‘Buzz said that I needed to meet this dude … They had a lengthy conversation on the bus regarding music. That weekend [Buzz] took Kurt to see Black Flag in Seattle. And that’s how we hit it off. “You like this kind of music?” “Yeah!” I’d go hang at his place and he played me demos of his songs.’ It was then, said Dale, that Kurt first started writing songs influenced by bands like Black Flag and the Butthole Surfers. Dark, twisted, propulsive music that put off more people than it attracted, but which Kurt found his own connection to, could identify with, like all the other outcasts.
Kurt called on his pal again not long after he and Krist Novoselic formed Nirvana, when Dale agreed to play on their now legendary, much-bootlegged first demo, in January 1988; a mini-masterpiece, nine of whose ten tracks would eventually be released in re-recorded or other form, including three on Bleach: ‘Floyd the Barber’, ‘Paper Cuts’ and ‘Downer’ – the latter originally found in primitive form on the Fecal Matter demo.
Dave would learn all this, piecemeal, over the coming months, as he tried to find his own place in the band. The bond between Kurt and Krist was clear. They both came from Aberdeen, Washington, a squat little logging town a hundred miles southwest of Seattle. The son of Croatian immigrants, Krsto and Maria Novoselic´, Krist had actually grown up in a Croatian neighbourhood of San Pedro, California. The family had moved north to Aberdeen when he was 14, and his mother opened a hairdresser’s there: Maria’s Hair Design.
‘The thing about Krist,’ says Anton Brookes, ‘is that Krist is one of the most easy-going people you’re going to meet. Just so laidback, so down to earth, enjoys a drink, likes a laugh. He was like the ambassador of Nirvana. He took the pressure off Kurt. Krist is very outgoing and he makes people feel at ease with them, even though he’s this big lumbering six-foot-seven hulk of a man.’
Kurt Donald Cobain had been born in Hoquiam, on the outskirts of Seattle, in February 1967, the only son of Don, a garage mechanic, and Wendy, a secretary. The family moved to Aberdeen when Kurt was still a baby and these days everyone said the boy grew up in a settled, happy, typically American blue-collar household. That all changed, however, when Kurt was eight and his parents divorced. Kurt stayed with his mother, but when Wendy took up with a ‘paranoid schizophrenic’ (Wendy’s own words) who seemed to resent having Kurt around, he turned inward, famously pinning a poem on his bedroom wall that read: ‘I hate mom, I hate dad. Dad hates mom, mom hates dad.’ Another concluded: ‘I hate myself and want to die.’ A wincingly horrible line he would later turn into a song – and a wincingly horrible prophesy.
Kurt told his friend Dylan Carlson that his mother’s new boyfriend was a ‘mean, huge wife-beater’, and that he had decided to go and live with his father – which he did, until he was 11, and his father found his own new love, whom Kurt could not connect with either. Thus began a period of years during which the teenaged Kurt was shuffled from relative to relative, various aunts and uncles stepping in to offer him a home, but never for very long. At one point, Kurt lived under a bridge; at another juncture, he stayed for months at the home of a school friend, in a sleeping bag on the floor of the lounge.
Oversensitive, unsure of his sexuality, so thin he took to wearing extra layers of clothes just to make him look bulkier, he was quick-witted and sharp when you got him talking, but so withdrawn and socially inept he spent most of the time in silence, glowering out from beneath his dirty-blond fringe. Beaten and bullied by the redneck school jocks, barely tolerated by the school geeks and potheads, the only thing Kurt had going for him was his music. He still had the Mickey Mouse drum kit his mother had given him when he was four, and the bass his aunt Mary had given him for his seventh birthday. And he would carry these things around wherever he went. When his Uncle Larry gave him a cheap electric Lindell guitar for his fourteenth birthday his future was set. You didn’t have to be the popular kid to write your own music and poetry. These were the tools of the loner and Kurt held tight to them like amulets.
If his trip with Buzz and Dale in 1984 to see Black Flag proved to be his musical e
piphany, as he got older Kurt would also turn his cold blue gaze towards painting, drawing, collages, sculptures. He liked to come up with Francis Bacon-esque grotesques, figurative abstracts, disturbing, at their best, that is to say, at their beautiful worst. When VCRs came in, he would tape TV shows, not to view, but to scramble together, scenes of one slashed together with scenes, half-views, from others. And he liked to read. He loved Samuel Beckett and William S. Burroughs because they wrote as he wished he could paint, with their entrails, their innards exposed. And he was addicted to Charles Bukowski, because in his stories of outsiders wandering aimlessly across America’s terrifying streets he thought he saw himself.
As Kurt got older, he would later say, ‘I felt more and more alienated – I couldn’t find friends whom I felt compatible with at all. Everyone was eventually going to become a logger, and I knew I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be some kind of artist.’
His other big escape was pot, which he’d been smoking since he was 14. But in Aberdeen, a town as depressed as its bleak year-round weather, that was not unusual. Krist later expounded the theory that the very history of Aberdeen – dating back to its earliest incarnation as a well-known whorehouse for sailors and frontiersmen – had left the current-day residents ‘a little ashamed of our roots’. That and the high rate of unemployment, out-of-control alcoholism and a suicide rate more than twice the already high state average. Aberdeen was the kind of place, Kurt recalled, where people owned guns they couldn’t afford to load and guitars they couldn’t afford not to pawn. When he and Krist first began forming bands together, the idea was simple: to get the fuck out of town as fast as they could. For which they would have to get good at their instruments. So they did.
By the time Dave Grohl joined them in this quest, his mission was clear, at least musically. Starting with his discovery of what all his predecessors in Nirvana had quickly learned: Kurt loved Dale Crover’s playing. So much so, said Danny Peters, that ‘if you’re playing drums behind Kurt you’re filling Dale Crover’s shoes.’ When the drummer who had played on Bleach, Chad Channing, left the band after repeated bad scenes out on the road – Kurt throwing bottles at the wall behind where he was playing; pouring a jug of water over his head onstage; continually trashing his drums – Kurt had once again turned to Dale to come and fill in temporarily during a short but important summer tour: seven shows in August opening for Sonic Youth. Kurt was deeply respectful of Dale’s place on the stage, as if trying to seduce the drummer into staying on when the tour was over.
