Foo Fighters

by Mick Wall

  But Dale was a Melvins man through and through and as soon as the dates were done he went back to them. Instead, Kurt and Krist had ushered Danny in. He’d been playing with Mudhoney, a Seattle band building its own formidable local reputation, and with its own self-titled Sub Pop album, released some months before. But Nirvana were the ones with the growing rep who had already spurned the chance to do another album for Sub Pop, in favour of doing a major label deal, which everyone on the scene in Seattle now knew was just around the corner, and Peters had understandably seen the chance to join them as his shot at potential stardom.

  There was something else about Nirvana, too, which made them different to Mudhoney, or indeed any other Seattle band at the time. As Anton Brookes recalls: ‘I remember Jonathan Poneman, the co-owner of Sub Pop, telling me that if Mudhoney and Nirvana were to play on the same night in Seattle, at that time [before Nevermind], Mudhoney would probably get the bigger audience but Nirvana would get the bigger percentage of girls going to their show. From an early stage, Nirvana appealed to everyone across the board. Their music was like almost asexual.’

  When Nirvana came up with ‘Sliver’ the first time they went into a recording studio with Danny, Kurt was convinced. ‘The chemistry was definitely there with Danny, Chris and I,’ he would tell Michael Azerrad. ‘We could have ended up writing some really good songs together.’ But for Kurt, a perfectionist, despite his apparent lack of self-worth, ‘It wasn’t quite perfect.’

  Could Dave Grohl do any better? It would be awkward finding out, but Kurt was determined to try. At the time, Nirvana were practising in Danny’s own small rehearsal space, nicknamed the Dutchman, on a rundown industrial estate in South Seattle. A lot of nascent Seattle bands ended up rehearsing there. It was barebones but it was cheap. You went in, did your thing, left again. Only this time when Nirvana went in it was without Danny.

  Dave had to keep his mouth shut, though, until the band had got round to telling Danny. As it happened, a writer and photographer from Sounds magazine in London had just arrived to do what became Nirvana’s first magazine cover story. A barbecue was organised at Krist and Shelli’s place, at which was all of Nirvana – that is, the Nirvana with Danny Peters still in it – along with a new face who was introduced to the Sounds team as the band’s new gear humper, driver and helper out: Dave. When the story later appeared in Sounds, it showed the Cobain–Novoselic–Peters line-up together on the cover, pictured at the barbecue.

  By then, though, Kurt had already made an appearance on the local Olympia college radio station, KAOS 89.3, giving news of the band’s latest recruit. Interviewed by the DJ Calvin Johnson, Kurt announced that Nirvana had a new drummer. He said he considered Dave a ‘baby Dale Crover’, who Dave was ‘almost as good as’ – the highest possible compliment in Kurt’s book. They also dug it that Dave could sing, giving Nirvana the opportunity for vocal harmonies on stage for the first time – something Kurt was keen to explore, given the more poppy kinds of songs he was now writing. Only snag, he confessed on air: he and Krist hadn’t actually told Danny Peters yet. Danny was ‘a beautiful guy and such a beautiful drummer’, Kurt said, sounding sad. ‘But you can’t pass up an opportunity to play with the drummer of our dreams, which is Dave.’ It felt to Kurt, he added, that they’d been searching for Dave ‘for like two years’.

  Years later, Danny would insist his initial reaction to the news had been one of relief. Rehearsals with Nirvana had been ‘sullen, tense’ affairs, he said. Still, he could not disguise his understandable bitterness at the underhand way in which Kurt and Krist had dealt with the situation, allowing him to be photographed and interviewed for the Sounds story while, unbeknownst to him, his replacement stood just feet away.

  ‘If they were honest with me and upfront with me,’ Danny told the British writer Keith Cameron, ‘I would have totally accepted it, but the way they went about it bummed me out, because they didn’t have the balls to tell me. The last thing I wanted to do was look like a chump, and I looked like a chump.’ This profound lack of good manners, of abdicating responsibility for their actions, no matter how much they might hurt others, characterised Kurt’s way of dealing with things more as time went on. Then it became something Dave also struggled with in the Foos.

  Initially, Dave had moved into the spare room at the small apartment Krist shared with his girlfriend, Shelli. Once he was a confirmed member of the band, though, Kurt invited him to move into his tiny shithole in Olympia. A one-bedroom apartment in which Dave slept on a small couch, his long legs dangling over the side. If sleeping on floors and in vans with the Scream guys had at least been fun, this was more like penury. ‘Oh my God! That place was trashed,’ laughed Krist Novoselic. Among other things, Kurt had ‘defaced the hallway with pornographic cartoons’. He also kept toy dolls, which he enjoyed decapitating and painting Alice Cooper eyes and gluing human hair onto, then hanging them, limbless, from his window. Kurt saw it as part of his art. Some nights he would sit there in his filthy room with a little rubber monkey that he called Chim Chim perched on his shoulder. Kurt’s gotta monkey on his back – geddit?

  ‘The walls were just a montage of pictures, painting, statues, toys moulded into other things,’ says Brookes. ‘It was almost like walking into a cross between David Bowie’s mind and Hannibal Lecter’s flat. There’s all these things on the walls. A lot of rock’n’roll stuff but a lot of just weird stuff too. You’d think, okay, step back a little bit from this…’

  Dave’s memories, though, centred more on the times when the two barely spoke, the days and nights that flitted by when, like vampires, they would crash out at dawn and not rise again until sundown; the boredom and mounting anxiety; the sheer bafflement and peculiarity. ‘I don’t think Kurt really spoke to Dave,’ says Brookes. ‘Kurt was quite insular, kept himself to himself quite a lot. On the other hand,’ he insists, ‘Kurt could be the life and soul of the party, very outgoing, very funny, very witty, very sarcastic, very humorous.’ You could have fooled Dave. ‘At the same time you could have really deep, philosophical conversations with Kurt too.’ Or you could just get stoned and sit around watching TV. It was all as one to Kurt.

  What neither Kurt nor Krist knew yet was that Dave now remembered them from times before. There had been a Scream gig in Olympia some months ago. One of the local scenesters, named Slim Moon, who would later go on to form the highly regarded independent label Kill Rock Stars, invited the guys back to his pad for an after-show party. Among the typically Olympian Boho gathering there – which Dave described to Michael Azerrad disdainfully as ‘total Olympia hot chocolate drinking Hello Kitty people’ – was Kurt Cobain.

  When one of the young women – a dark, imp-faced creature named Tobi Vail, later a founding member and guitarist of the self-styled ‘riot grrrl’ outfit Bikini Kill – presumptuously turned off the stereo, sat in the middle of the room, and began playing and singing some of her own songs, Dave and the Scream guys were silently appalled by what Grohl recalled as ‘total bad teen suicide’ music. He still didn’t put the two together though until he recounted the story to Kurt late one night during one of their stunted small-hours conversations, and Kurt replied, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s my girlfriend.’

  Dave hadn’t even realised Kurt had a girlfriend until that moment. When Dave then started dating Tobi’s friend Kathleen Hanna, who was about to become the singer in Bikini Kill, the four of them actually double-dated for a while. Strangely jolly occasions in which Dave and Kurt got to drunkenly talk about their favourite punk records while the girls feigned interest. Tobi and Kathleen had plans of their own. The boys were cute but then so were lots of other Olympia art-throbs. When, a few weeks later, Kurt announced that he and Tobi had broken up – that he had been looking for commitment but that Tobi, even younger than Kurt, most emphatically had not – the morose singer lapsed into a silence that went on for weeks. Dave began to question his own sanity. Was this normal? Was he the weird one, maybe, for thinking this was strange behaviour? No. Ku
rt the outsider was really just a homebody, a lonely boy in search of a mother figure. When Kurt finally spoke again, on the way home from rehearsal one night, Dave was like, ‘Thank God!’

  Dave’s first show as Nirvana’s drummer came at the North Shore Surf Club, a few blocks over from where he and Kurt lived in Olympia, on 11 October 1990. Tickets for the show had sold out the day they went on sale. Dave was so elated he phoned his mother and sister to tell them. When he hit his snare drum so hard he broke it, midway through the set, he feared getting ‘the face’ from Kurt. But the singer instead held up the broken drum and announced nonchalantly to the crowd: ‘We have a new drummer who’s very good.’

  The second show the new line-up did together was a week later, again in Olympia: a short set at a dorm party at Evergreen State College. Five days after that they were in London, staying at the Dalmacia Hotel, decidedly downmarket digs in grimy Shepherd’s Bush Road, Hammersmith, whose principal attraction was that they sold cheap triple rooms, which made it perfect for hard-up visiting bands like Nirvana.

  Dave, though, loved it. Having got used to touring Europe with Scream, who could not afford to stay in hotels at all, this seemed like the height of luxury to the wide-eyed 21-year-old drummer, who discovered the joys of English breakfast tea, until he drank so much of it in one day he ‘thought I was gonna have a heart attack’. Not that they were in London for long. Six shows in seven days meant they hardly had time to sleep. ‘The first time we came to England, I thought it was great,’ said Dave. ‘We were playing places that held a thousand people, staying in nice hotels. When I was in Scream, we were living off five dollars a day, sleeping in the van, on floors. So to be playing in bigger places, having my own bed and being able to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day was a big deal to me.’

  It was also Dave’s first opportunity to gauge just how popular Nirvana were outside the US. As Brookes says, ‘They may have been big in Seattle but everywhere else in America they were playing some nights to twenty people. In the UK, though, they already had the music press behind them and were getting played on the John Peel show. Among that sort of student audience there was a real buzz about them.’

  Sizing up the band’s new recruit, Anton says he was astounded at just how good a drummer Grohl was. ‘Dave came in and solidified Nirvana’s sound. He brought it together and he added to it. He made it a lot tighter and stronger and gave Kurt a platform to build his songs upon.’ Anybody else, he thinks, ‘would have struggled but here you’ve got two punk rock kids from Seattle who don’t have a pot to piss in, just have a load of great songs. One good thing about Dave – and I think he learned that from moving between different bands – he just came in and adapted and got on with it.

  ‘The first time I met Dave I just liked him straight away. He was such a nice, kooky guy. He was funny. He was constantly just bouncing off the walls, just full of personality. But, more than anything, anybody who saw him drum and saw the change in Nirvana – he took Nirvana to a different level … he completed that circle and gave it something that it didn’t have before. And that allowed Kurt to stretch his talent. Kurt and Krist were joined at the hip. They had their ups and downs but they were like brothers. Krist could read Kurt better than anybody. They’d spent so much time together over the years. They’d forged Nirvana out of the fires – the furnaces – of Aberdeen. Dave comes along and he’s served his apprenticeship too.’

  Headlining at the Astoria, in London, before a crowd swollen with music critics, other bands, tastemakers and music biz power brokers, for the first time Dave truly got what Nirvana were about, might yet become. The last time they had played there, ten months before, third on the bill to Mudhoney and Tad, Nirvana had been the epitome of punk rock alliteration; juddering rhythms and acned vocals; noise and incoherence; above all, angst-ridden authenticity. Now, with Dave in the band, and Kurt’s new songs leaning over backwards towards a new kind of punk-pop sensibility, more Buzzcocks than Stooges, catchy as a meat hook yet light as laughing gas, it was clear the band had risen to a new plateau in their musical journey, away from the stunted growth of Bleach-era material like ‘School’ and ‘Negative Creep’ and up into the clouds with songs like ‘In Bloom’, ‘Lithium’ and ‘Breed’ – all songs that would appear a year later on the breakthrough Nevermind album.

  ‘The Astoria gig virtually sold out just on word of mouth,’ Keith Cameron recalled. ‘No record to promote and the place was rammed. You knew something was happening. People were saying, “You know, one day, they might be as big as Sonic Youth.”’ Anton Brookes remembers Kurt telling him after the show that Nirvana were now writing ‘pop songs – and these songs were going to be Top 10 songs. Back then, our idea of the Top 10 was being as big as Sonic Youth or the Pixies, or getting a gig at Brixton Academy and maybe selling it out. I didn’t realise he meant it literally.’

  Kurt, though, had much bigger plans than that. Six months, earlier, while Chad Channing was still their drummer, the band had spent a couple of days in Smart Studios, the Madison, Wisconsin, home of the producer Butch Vig. Little known outside underground circles, Kurt was a fan of Vig’s work on the 1989 album Twelve Point Buck by psycho-noise-rock outfit Killdozer. Speaking on the phone to Vig for the first time ahead of the sessions, he told him: ‘We want to sound as heavy as that record.’ Butch promised him he would try to do just that.

  It was at Vig’s Smart Studio that they laid down six rough, early versions of tracks, including ‘Lithium’, ‘Breed’, and ‘In Bloom’. The idea was to go in and bash out a follow-up album to Bleach, to be released again on Sub Pop. But when Kurt realised the potential of what he had, he began to backpedal. He didn’t want the next Nirvana album to be on Sub Pop, he’d now decided. He complained that Sub Pop had not distributed Bleach well, that they had not given proper accounts to the band for its sales. In love with the idea of releasing his records independently, he had never stopped to consider the business realities of working with a small homespun label. He may have romanticised the idea of working with a little label, but his dreams had always been so much bigger than that.

  When Sub Pop presented the band with a new, 30-page contract, Kurt was infused with anxiety, barely able to breathe. The money on offer, had he signed, though still modest, would have been sorely welcome. Kurt had recently applied for a job at a dog kennels, scooping up poop and hosing down dog piss – but didn’t get it. He had also tried pawning some of the band’s gear. Yet still he resisted the temptation to sign the Sub Pop contract. He knew what he had, in his new songs, was worth more than that, was good enough to tempt a major label, and he coveted that opportunity, even as he maintained the facade of not wanting to ‘sell out’. As Nirvana’s biographer Charles Cross later commented: ‘I think he wanted a career in music, and he wanted to be successful. But … had to figure out a way to both be successful and have it appear that it happened by accident.’

  Meanwhile, as the summer wore on and bootleg copies of the demos began leaking out, the underground was abuzz with stories of how good the tracks were, how Nirvana were ones to watch. Desperate to set himself apart from the undergrowth of Sub Pop bands, Kurt turned to Susan Silver, manager of fellow Seattle leading lights Soundgarden. Silver took one look at the contract and told Kurt and Krist they badly needed to see a lawyer, and suggested some names for them in Los Angeles, but still they struggled to get meetings with most of them.

  When Nirvana toured briefly with Sonic Youth that summer, their leader, Thurston Moore, an early advocate for the band, strongly advised them to sign with their own management team, Gold Mountain, who would provide them with all the muscle they needed to be taken seriously in the dog-eat-dog environs of the LA rock biz. Thurston told Kurt he should also think seriously about signing Nirvana to Sonic Youth’s label, DGC – the shiny new independent wing of the giant LA-based Geffen Records label. Sub Pop, meanwhile, were using Nirvana’s growing reputation, and tapes of their Smart Studios demos, to try and parlay their own distribution deal with a
major label.

  By the time Dave Grohl joined Nirvana, things were getting so complicated Kurt said he felt his head was going to burst. The stress had given him stomach ulcers, he said, the pain had become intolerable. He quit booze in an effort to fight his constant indigestion but when that didn’t work he turned to less prosaic panaceas – first prescription painkillers like Percodan, then permanent killers like heroin.

  Kurt told Krist he’d done it, as though describing a social experiment: a one-off exploration into what lay behind the locked basement door your parents told you never to open. Krist freaked out but knew enough not to make a big deal of it in front of Kurt. When Dave returned from a short trip to LA in November, Kurt told him too. Dave was appalled, yet tried to keep a straight face, play it cool. Like Krist, he’d learned by then that the worse thing you could do was tell Kurt he was wrong about something. What, Dave asked, was it like then? ‘It sucked,’ Kurt told him earnestly. ‘It makes you feel gross and bad.’ Yet when questioned about it by other, less important friends, Kurt defended his ‘experiments’, claiming the smack made him more sociable, better to be around. Just better.