by Mick Wall
In the case of Kurt Cobain though, unlike those other mythological rock stars, his death was a deliberate, pre-planned, suicide – the saddest, most tragic, most unforgivable kind of death, and the hardest to understand. Hence, to a large extent, the endless crazy stories that swirl around it to this day. Hence, too, the feelings of anger and betrayal that, in 1994, bedevilled those closest to Kurt in his lifetime, whom he’d now abandoned without even a goodbye.
That last year, says Charles Cross, ‘there were times where the joy was gone. Then there were other times, even in the last few months of Nirvana’s career, where there was an incredible amount of joy. I mean everybody loved In Utero. Dave loved it. He loved to play those songs. They were much more emotionally rewarding for him to play, the In Utero songs, than the Nevermind songs had been. Some of which, you know, the story that Dave told me repeatedly, on Nevermind there are some of those songs where he felt – I don’t want to say fraudulent, but he was playing parts that Chad Channing had created.
‘But there’s a point where once the band became sort of Kurt’s dictatorship, after the publishing deals were renegotiated and it was clear that it was gonna be Kurt calling all the shots, Dave shifted in the band. Both financially, emotionally, and I think things shifted in their friendship. They still had a friendship. They still had a kinship but, you know, Kurt at that point was a train wreck headed towards a wall and nobody could stop him, whether you were his band mate or his friend. Whatever role Dave had, whatever role Krist Novoselic had, which was always far deeper and a longer connection to Kurt, nobody could stop it.
‘So, yeah, that last year was hell for everybody. The relationships were already frayed … [When Kurt died] essentially Nirvana was inches away from being broken up anyway. If Kurt would have lived or not, Nirvana was in all likelihood over. What the band had been was already lost. Even before Kurt died, the Nirvana that people knew and loved on Nevermind was already gone. And Dave sort of knew that and in some sense that’s the beginning of Dave’s solo [career].’
Even before Kurt had died, says Anton, ‘The general feeling was that Nirvana had burnt out … It seemed like every other month or week there was a new “Kurt’s dead” rumour. I remember [the day Kurt died] all too well – it was a Friday afternoon, I was sat in the office and it just became a flood of calls. In your heart of hearts you’re still clinging on to that hope that everything will be fine, it’s just another false alarm. And then their tour manager called me up to say: “He’s dead.”’
Chrissy Shannon, who the same week had left behind the publicity department at DGC to work in A&R, was still tracked down by several journalists looking for a quote. ‘One of them asked me how I felt about it and I couldn’t believe they were asking us such stupid shit … I was devastated and, to make it worse, people kept printing that he couldn’t handle the fame and I had done my best to get him there, so I actually felt really guilty for a while!
‘Was he murdered? I don’t think so. I think he was miserable and in a lot of pain and tied to a crazy woman and he took what he thought would be the fastest route out. I know he loved Frances and I have a sad feeling that due to his bleak outlook on the world and his addiction he felt like he could only be a bad dad. But, who knows, I’ve also read that he had contacted a divorce lawyer and had been talking to Michael Stipe about working on something together in the future…’
No one would ever really know. Not even the other members of Nirvana. Krist was so devastated, not just by the suicide, but by the whole journey to the end of night, that he would never work full-time in a band again. According to Pat Smear, ‘Kurt passed on and my life went back to how it was. I went inward and was a hermit for a while. I didn’t play at all until Dave [Grohl] came by – he was in LA – and dropped off a tape. It was the Foo Fighters album. It was the first thing that got me interested in music again.’
But that was months later and in the immediate ghastly aftermath of Kurt’s death, Dave found himself in a place he’d never been before: a strange, shadow world where for a long time ‘nothing made sense’. Nor would it ever again. Not when he would look back on his time in Nirvana. It’s the main reason why he was not prepared to indulge in those games of ‘what if?’ that journalists are so fond of. Dave didn’t know why Kurt killed himself any more than you did, not really. Dave didn’t know what would have become of Nirvana had Kurt not blown his brains out, other than to recall how the band had in reality already fallen apart long before Kurt took it upon himself to make it official. Like the rest of us, Dave could only guess. The only thing he knew for sure when it happened was that he had been out on his own for a long time before that. That, really, his plans had never changed. Would never change. Another Dave – Bowie – had once famously sung of kicking it in the head when he was 25. But that was never this Dave’s trip. He still saw a future for himself. Of course he did. Why wouldn’t he? Unlike Kurt, who always agonised over silly shit like what the cool punk crowd made of his rock star success, Dave embraced it. As he laughingly told Rolling Stone, ‘I was lucky, because I went back to Washington, DC, and had all my heroes tell me they were proud that I became a fucking corporate rock star! That weight was lifted from my shoulders, right out of the game. I never worried about that.’
Dave now strove hard to put as much distance between himself and the tragic mess of Kurt’s life and disgusting death as he could. He refused to visit the funeral home where Kurt’s body lay prior to his cremation, and made plans instead to escape home to Virginia, and so-called normality. His two and a half years being the drummer in Nirvana had been the longest, hardest, most extraordinary and rewarding of his life. But now Kurt was dead, the dream was over, only the nightmare remained. What was he to do?
The morning after Kurt’s funeral, Dave would later recall, ‘I woke up and I thought, “Holy shit, he’s gone and I’m still here. I get to wake up and he’s gone.” And then my life completely changed for ever.’ As if to reaffirm his own contract with life, to show to himself how much he still wanted to live, Dave married his long-term girlfriend, Jennifer Youngblood.
He wondered if he should reactivate his long-ago teenage dream of becoming a simple session musician, a hired gun paid top dollar to come in and do his sweet thing. And, at first, that’s what he seemed to be gravitating towards. Having played drums on the soundtrack to a new Beatles-related movie, Backbeat, which was released with unerring inappropriateness – at least for Dave – the week following Kurt’s suicide, later that year he agreed to act as Tom Petty’s drummer for an appearance on Saturday Night Live. It was no secret that Petty was so impressed – and Dave so at ease with the rest of the band, so different to the febrile atmosphere surrounding Nirvana even at the best of times – that an invitation to sign on full-time was issued and contemplated for several days. Before Dave finally said no. Then wondered what the hell he’d done.
‘It turned out that [Tom] and the other guys in the band were really big Nirvana fans,’ Dave remembered. ‘So then I was worried that maybe they had watched MTV Unplugged and they didn’t know that I actually played really loud. I agreed to do it, of course, because Tom Petty is an incredible guy, and spent a week with them rehearsing and played on the television show. Within that week and a half, they had managed to make me feel like I was part of the band. And it was the first time I had that feeling since Nirvana. It was just awesome, to have friends you can play music with, to be happy with, you know, to go with to the bar and talk and then go back and play some more. It was just amazing. I was really this close to doing it.’
There was also talk around the same time of Dave joining Pearl Jam. Dave bridled at the rumours but never actually denied them. Same deal with more loose talk about a collaboration between Dave and former Misfits frontman Glen Danzig, replacing Chuck Biscuits, whom, ironically, Dave had revered as a young drummer. Ultimately, said Dave, ‘I didn’t want to be a drummer for hire at twenty-five. By the time I was forty I would’ve been on the Jay Leno show. I was really torn.’
But Dave was already looking beyond that, having his own big ideas. ‘It was play drums with Tom or do something I had never done before. I thought I might as well try something new while I’m young.’
That something new would entail going back and redoing something old. Back in 1990, not long after he’d joined Nirvana, Dave had hooked up again with his friend Barrett Jones to record – ‘for fun!’ – a six-track demo in Barrett’s eight-track studio. These were tracks all written solely by Dave, with Dave playing all the instruments – including the original version of ‘Just Another Story about Skeeter Thompson’. The following summer, he went into WGNS Studios and recorded four more tracks. Again, ostensibly ‘for fun’, though it’s impossible now not to look back on these sessions as Dave’s way of doing something on his own without the extra pressure of thinking they might be of any use to Nirvana.
When the combined cassette tape found its way into the hands of fellow Washington-based indie rocker and arts activist Jenny Toomey, she suggested releasing it on her own small independent label, Simple Machines. By now, Nirvana had hit the big time and Dave agreed on the proviso it only came out as a cassette tape, and absolutely not under his own name, but that of Late!, a name chosen, he said, ‘because I’m an idiot and I thought it would be funny to say to everybody, “Sorry, we’re Late!”’ Titled Pocketwatch, what’s most striking about these tracks now is both the similarity to Nirvana – the signature downtuned guitars and rocket-fuelled drums and deadpan vocals on rockers like ‘Petrol CB’, as well as the same lo-fi, cigarette-lit ballads on tracks like ‘Friend of a Friend’ – and the future echo of how the Foo Fighters would sound, on slightly more sophisticated, melodic rockers like ‘Throwing Needles’.
‘I always tried to keep them sort of a secret,’ Dave would later explain. ‘I wouldn’t give people tapes. I always freaked out about that. I have the stupidest voice. I was totally embarrassed and scared that anyone would hear them. I just wanted to see how poppy or how noisy a song I could write. It was always just for fun. You could do anything you wanted.’ It stopped being ‘just for fun’, though, the day Kurt walked in on Dave at their shared Olympia apartment and caught him noodling around on a tape recorder with the vocals to another track destined for the Pocketwatch tape called ‘Colour Pictures of a Marigold’. ‘We sat there and played it a few times,’ Dave said. ‘I would do the high harmony, he would do the low harmony. It’s funny writing songs with other people – sitting face to face with someone, that’s another trip. I don’t know if he had ever done that either. It was like an uncomfortable blind date. “Oh, you sing too? Let’s harmonise together.”’
When Steve Albini also later heard the tape, he suggested they include ‘Marigold’, as the new Nirvana take was to be known, on the In Utero album. ‘I was terrified!’ laughed Dave. ‘No, no, wait! It was that famous joke: What’s the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band? “Hey, I wrote a song.”’
In the event, Nirvana would place the track on the B-side of the ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ single. ‘To be fair, “Marigold” is quite a throwaway song compared to a lot of the songs Dave has written now,’ Anton points out. ‘It didn’t really give much indication to his prowess as a songwriter.’ What is less well-known, according to Anton, was that both Kurt and Krist were aware that Dave had ‘written some other songs, which Kurt was gonna use on the next Nirvana album. Kurt wasn’t that keen on some of the lyrics. But he liked the songs. And I think that was part of Dave’s learning curve, as a lyricist. He had been behind the master’, and that informed everything he did next ‘as a musician, as a songwriter, as a lyricist and as a performer’.
In fact, some years after Kurt had died, Dave finally fessed up to the fact that he had played Kurt a handful of his own songs, two of which would actually end up on what became the first Foo Fighters album. Speaking on the Howard Stern Show in New York, he said: ‘I played him tapes of stuff and there were a few songs that Kurt liked a lot and wanted to turn into Nirvana songs but for some reason never did. The song “Alone + Easy Target”, Kurt really liked that song a lot. He liked the chorus a lot and I think he wanted to make the chorus into something.’ Hardly surprising, as the chorus sounds like a typical Nirvana move. ‘And then there’s a song called “Exhausted”, that apparently – he actually never said it to me – but he liked the song a lot. He just wanted to write his own lyrics to it. I think he was afraid to ask me if we could do the song but with his lyrics. Which I would have said, shit, sure. Fine. That would be great.’ Dave didn’t push it, though, because how could he when he was in a band with Kurt Cobain, now being hailed as being up there as a revolutionary songwriter alongside John Lennon and Bob Dylan. Nor did Dave exactly broadcast the fact that he was now writing his own songs outside of Nirvana, ‘because I was nervous about it’.
Charles Cross reveals, however, that the band, minus Kurt, actually rehearsed a selection of original Grohl material, at the final Nirvana recording session, in Seattle’s modest Robert Lang Studios, in January 1994, where the last known Nirvana track, ‘You Know You’re Right’, was also demoed. ‘I think there’s a seminal turning point here for Dave,’ he says now. ‘Nirvana has three days, four days, five days of sessions booked. Where they’re gonna begin working on new material. And Kurt does not show for the entire first day. So you have Novoselic, you have Grohl. I think Pat Smear was there. You have these guys just sitting around basically doing nothing. And they worked through some of Dave’s stuff. So that’s when Dave first worked on some of his material.
‘Then of course Robert Lang’s is where Dave [later on] does almost all of the recording of the first couple of [Foo Fighters] records … So that was really a huge turning point. Suddenly Kurt not showing up, Dave is both probably rethinking his career but they’re also just trying to fill time. And Dave began a friendship, a kinship, with Robert Lang, who ran that studio and out of that we get the first two Foo Fighters records, mixed and recorded.
‘If Kurt would have shown up and Nirvana would have continued, maybe it would have gone the other way. Maybe Dave’s solo project would have never have been released. Or maybe it would have been released on a tiny indie label, which was part of his concept for him putting it out. I very vividly remember him telling me he wanted to put it out as a cassette-only release on a tiny punk label. Then Kurt dies and suddenly the whole landscape changes.’
Pat Smear, who more than anybody in Nirvana would play a significant role in helping Dave find his next level as a songwriter also later recalled how, ‘There was one day, after a Nirvana practice, before we’d begun the In Utero tour, where we were sat in Dave’s car, and he played me some of his solo stuff. I guess they were early demos for what would be that first Foo Fighters album, but I can’t be sure. But they blew me away. These were amazing songs, and I remember saying to him, “Man, you should be doing these properly.”’
First though, says Anton, would come a great deal of soul searching. Dave knew it would not simply be a case of just carrying on as though nothing had happened. ‘Look at Krist, God bless him,’ sighs Anton. ‘Krist has never recovered from what happened to Nirvana. When [Kurt] died a big part of Krist died. And Dave could have gone the same way. But even though Dave was close to Kurt he wasn’t as close as Krist. They had grown up together. The three of them were brothers, to an extent. But Kurt and Krist were almost like twins.’
By the late summer of 1994, however, Dave Grohl had made up his mind. ‘Whatever he did next, he knew he was never gonna win,’ says Anton. ‘He knew because of the cult surrounding Kurt there would be people who said, “How dare Dave get on with his life and try and salvage something from the train wreck which was Nirvana.” But when Nirvana went down, Dave retrieved the black box and got on with his life. He licked his wounds and just got on with it. Every so often we’d just look at each other and go, “What the fuck happened?” Even now, you know? None of us really understand what happened and how it happened and how Kurt is dead and he’s not with us. Al
l Dave knew was that, really, he had no choice, he had to carry on.’
9. Grunge Ringo
In the depths of his depression, Dave received a postcard from the members of another Seattle band. One named 7 Year Bitch, not nearly as famous as Nirvana but who had, nevertheless, faced a similar experience when their 24-year-old guitarist and co-founder, Stephanie Sargent, died of a heroin overdose in June 1992. ‘Basically, it said, “We know what you’re going through, we went through it too, we know that you’re feeling like you never want to play music again, but that will change.” And it did,’ he recalled in a moving 1995 interview with the foremost Australian DJ and music journalist, Richard Kingsmill. ‘I’m for ever in debt to them for that,’ said Dave. ‘I’ve been touring in bands since I was seventeen years old and there is not much else that I know as well as playing music. It’s like kicking a nasty habit. I just don’t think I would be able to do it. And that is when I realised there is no way I am going to be able to stop doing what I’ve done for ten years. I can’t stop … plus I knew it was good for me to keep going, just to keep moving.’
It was on his honeymoon with Jenny in Dublin that Dave bought the mini electric guitar that he wrote ‘This is a Call’ and ‘Wattershed’ on, both destined to become cornerstone tracks on the first Foo Fighters album, and both so good even Dave recognised it. This was the next important step towards finding a future he could truly see for himself. Looking back, he admitted he had fallen ‘immediately in a depression’ when Kurt killed himself. He saw it as the end of his career, something he was never going to be able to come back from. To battle those feelings he agreed to see a therapist, which ‘was good’, he said. But he still ‘didn’t know if I ever wanted to play drums again. Just sitting down at the drum set just reminded me of Kurt, reminded me of Nirvana and it was just sad…’ Writing those two new songs in Ireland appeared to him to be a sign – of life after death; of renewal. Above all, of being given a fighting chance to somehow survive what seemed until then utterly impossible.
