Come As You Are

by Michael Azerrad

  “But then he took off.”

  Kurt had been looking for a dynamic and artistic girlfriend like Tobi. She had her own fanzine and was busy helping to start the Riot Grrl movement, a group of young women dedicated to promoting female empowerment through music, fanzines, and eventually, the national media, with her friend Kathleen Hanna. Through Tobi, Kurt began to investigate feminism and other social and political causes. “I thought I was in love again,” says Kurt, “and it was just wishful thinking.”

  A couple of months after the Smart sessions, Chris called up Butch Vig and asked him if he’d be interested in producing a major label record with them at some point. Vig said sure.

  Meanwhile, back at Sub Pop, Jonathan Poneman wanted another Nirvana single. “Dive,” the B-side, was culled from the Vig sessions. “Dive” reprised the best elements of Bleach—the grinding guitar sound, the high, desperate growling vocals, the deliciously leaden riff. It was pop music, but it was very, very heavy pop music. “Dive in me!” Kurt wailed. For the A-side, Kurt wanted to take advantage of the fact that Tad was in the studio with Jack Endino and record a song while Tad was on dinner break. Tad Doyle vehemently disliked the idea, but Endino managed to talk him into it. In one hour on July 11, 1990, they did the basics for “Sliver,” using Tad’s drums, bass, and guitar.

  “Sliver” featured drummer Dan Peters of Mudhoney, who were on hiatus while guitarist Steve Turner decided whether he wanted to pursue a graduate degree. The hand auditioned a couple of drummers before Peters, already a veteran of many Seattle bands, an affable fellow known for his fleet and powerful stickwork. He’d heard that Nirvana was looking for a drummer and bumped into Shelli at a bar and asked if she’d mention he was available.

  Anarchy reigned at the Motor Sports show. (© Charles Peterson)

  They started playing with Peters soon after. “It definitely felt good to play with someone who was rhythmically competent,” says Kurt. “But it wasn’t quite perfect.”

  For practice, Kurt came up to Seattle from Olympia and Chris came from Tacoma and they practiced in Peters’s truly grungy rehearsal room in an industrial building in south Seattle (First Avenue South and Spokane Street) known as the Dutchman, the very room where countless bands have rehearsed before and since, among them early bands such as Bundle of Hiss, Feast and Room Nine, as well as Screaming Trees, TAD, Love Battery, and Seven Year Bitch. If grunge had a birthplace, this was it. Rehearsals were brief and to the point, and little was said.

  As far as drums went, Kurt and Chris were of the “bigger is better” school, while Peters had a great-sounding but small drum kit that couldn’t keep up with the sonic onslaught. “I’d be in the practice space with them and the amplifier was turned up to ten,” says Peters. “They’d always be going, ‘I can’t hear that bass drum.’ Yeah, well, no shit you can’t hear the bass drum—I can’t even hear the bass drum!”

  Poster for the fateful Motor sports show.

  One day Kurt and Chris brought Peters a huge but dilapidated drum set to play. Particular about what he played, Peters would take only the bass drum. “If I knew that they were really that serious, I would have pursued another drum kit somehow,” says Peters. “But I wouldn’t play this big hunk of shit they wanted me to play.”

  Peters began to see the writing on the wall.

  Still, he did play on “Sliver,” a key track in the Nirvana repertoire. Like many of Kurt’s songs, “Sliver” seems to be autobiographical. It’s about a boy who is left with his grandparents for the evening while his mother goes out. He can’t eat, he doesn’t want to play, he just wants to go home. He falls asleep and wakes up in his mother’s arms. Even the cover of the single is a picture of a transparent man, as if to say that the song within enabled the listener to see right through Kurt.

  They had written it with Peters one day at practice. It came together within a matter of minutes, with Kurt coming up with the lyrics—in typical fashion—just before they recorded it. “The chemistry was definitely there with Danny, Chris, and I,” says Kurt. “We could have ended up writing some really good songs together.”

  It was a bit of an experiment. “I decided I wanted to write the most ridiculous pop song that I had ever written,” says Kurt. “It was like a statement in a way. I had to write a real pop song and release it on a single to prepare people for the next record. I wanted to write more songs like that.”

  Kurt was listening to a lot of pop-oriented music at that point, including the legendary Seattle garage band the Sonics and the Smithereens; he was also delving deep into the R.E.M. catalogue.

  It’s the most literal lyric Kurt has ever written. “For some reason, it’s one of the easiest songs for people to comprehend because it’s that way,” he says, implying that he doesn’t understand why people don’t grasp his more abstract songs just as easily. “That’s why I choose not to write that way. I don’t like things that are so obvious.”

  The only elusive aspect of the song is the title, which Kurt says he picked because “I had a feeling that if I called it ‘Sliver,’ most people would call it ‘Silver.’ ” Kurt is still very pleased with everything about the track. “It has a massive naïveté to it,” he says. “It was done so fast and raw and perfect that I don’t think we could capture that again if we decided to rerecord it. It’s just one of those recordings that happened and you can’t try to reproduce it.” It had that childlike quality that Kurt loved in the bands he heard on K Records, like Beat Happening and Young Marble Giants.

  Many, including Wendy, believe the song is autobiographical, but Kurt says he doesn’t recall being afraid of going to his grandparents’ house. He may be disingenuous here, because the real point of the song is the anguished cry as the child is reunited with his mother.

  The song also pointed toward a new songwriting direction. The song was grungy enough, but it was also very tightly composed, a very “pop” song, as opposed to the “rock” riff-oriented music the band had played thus far.

  (Tacked onto the end of the seven-inch version of “Sliver” is a hilarious snippet of conversation between Jonathan Poneman and a freshly awoken and very hung over Chris Novoselic. Chris recorded the exchange by accident on his answering machine one afternoon.)

  Nirvana at the Motor Sports show. Barely visible Is Danny Peters on drums. Note the undersized drum set. (© Charles Peterson)

  Peters played one gig with Nirvana, a September 22 show at the Motor Sports International and Garage, a former parking garage (now demolished) at Minor and Howell streets. Nirvana headlined over the Dwarves and their one-time mentors, the Melvins. With fifteen hundred customers, it was their biggest show in Seattle at that point. The band debuted several songs from the Vig demos, including “Pay to Play,” “Imodium,” and “In Bloom.” There was no stage security at all, 80 people would climb up and dive off, but not before accidentally marring almost every song by knocking over a mike or bumping into a musician. It was just nuts.

  In the audience was Dave Grohl.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “ARE YOU HUNGRY?” “YES.”

  David Eric Grohl was born on January 14, 1969, in Warren, Ohio, to James and Virginia Grohl. His father was then a journalist for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, his mother a high school English teacher. Dave has a sister, Lisa, three years older than he is. The Grohls left Columbus, Ohio, and moved to Springfield, Virginia, when Dave was three. When he was six, they divorced. “My mother and father were pretty much at other ends of the spectrum—he’s a real conservative, neat, Washington, D.C., kind of man and my mother’s more of a liberal, free-thinking, creative sort of person,” says Dave. He says the divorce didn’t affect him much, perhaps because he was so young at the time.

  Dave was raised by his mom, whom he adores. “She’s the most incredible woman in the world,” he says, obviously filled with pride. “She’s so great. She’s strong, independent, sweet, intelligent, funny, and she’s just the best.”

  Raising two kids on alimony payments and a sc
hoolteacher’s modest income was hard. “There were tough times when we’d eat peanut butter and pickle sandwiches for dinner,” Dave recalls.

  As a kid, Dave appeared professionally in a Washington theater company, but his main love was music. He formed a little duo with his buddy Larry called the H. G. Hancock Band when he was ten. They’d write songs and Dave would play a one-stringed guitar while Larry banged on pots and pans.

  Dave started playing guitar when he was twelve and took lessons for a couple of years. He’d write songs about his friends or his dog and play them into a boom box, then play the tape back over the stereo while he recorded the drum parts back onto the boom box.

  Eventually, he got sick of lessons and just played in neighborhood bands doing the typical Rolling Stones and Beatles covers. Dave hadn’t yet discovered punk rock, although he’d already gotten a taste of new wave from the same B-52’s appearance on “Saturday Night Live” that Kurt had seen. He had gone out and bought the requisite checkered Vans as well as records by the B-52’s and Devo, but nothing prepared him for the time he visited his cousin Tracy, who lived in Evanston, Illinois, in the summer of 1982, when Dave was thirteen.

  When Dave and his sister Lisa came to the door, Dave’s aunt called Tracy downstairs. “And Tracy starts coming down the stairs and she was totally punk,” says Dave. “Bondage pants and chains and crew cut and we were like ‘Wow! Tracy’s punk now!’ ” Tracy took Dave and Lisa to punk shows all that summer, seeing shows by bands like Naked Raygun, Rights of the Accused, Channel Three, and Violent Apathy. “From then on we were totally punk,” says Dave. “We went home and bought Maximumrocknroll and tried to figure it all out.”

  Punk agreed with Dave. He liked “just being a little punk shit running around town and being a little derelict,” he says. “I suppose that was half the attraction—being a slacker.” The other half was the extreme energy of the music. “I was super-hyperactive,” Dave says (although not hyper enough to get put on Ritalin).

  The solidly middle-class people of Springfield were more tolerant of punk rock than the folks in Aberdeen. Dave always had “good, cool” friends. He was popular enough to get elected vice president of his freshman class at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Virginia. Before he did the morning announcements every morning over the school intercom, he’d treat the whole school to a little blast of the Circle Jerks or Bad Brains.

  Like Chris and Kurt, Dave was a stoner in high school. “I smoked too much pot,” says Dave sadly. “That’s the only thing that I really kick myself for doing because it seriously burned me out—bad. From the time I was fifteen to twenty, I smoked four or five times a day and a lot. Every day of my life. You just get so burned out. You don’t feel burned out when you’re smoking it but once you stop you realize, ‘Oh, I lost something here.’ ”

  Pot began affecting his grades, so he and his mother decided that he would attend Bishop Ireton, a Catholic school. Meanwhile, he had decided that the drummer in his “bad punk” band, Freak Baby, was so lousy that he could play better. He’d sit down at the drums and bang around a little after practice, but most of his self-education on the drums came the classic way. In his bedroom, Dave would pull up a chair for a high-hat, a book for a snare, and his bed for tom-toms and play along to music by hardcore bands like Minor Threat, DRI, and Bad Brains.

  When they kicked out the bass player in Freak Baby, the drummer switched to bass and Dave switched to drums. They changed their name to Mission Impossible and played fast hardcore punk, so fast that they eventually changed their name to Fast, which broke up around 1986.

  Being a suburban stoner, it was only natural for Dave to get into Led Zeppelin. It was even more natural for him to start copping the classic licks of Led Zep drummer John Bonham. “I used to rip him off like crazy and then I figured out the weird stuttered kick drum in ‘Kashmir’ and that opened up a million new doors,” says Dave. “You take pieces from other drummers and like the drummer from the Bad Brains to John Bonham to the drummer from Devo and it eventually becomes this big mush and that’s me—just one big rip-off!”

  After Fast, Dave was in a band called Dain Bramage that mixed hardcore punk with the sounds of adventurous pre- and post-punk bands like Television and Mission of Burma. “Everybody just hated us,” says Dave. The dogmatic hardcore scene didn’t take too well to outside influences (except for reggae) and Dain Bramage couldn’t get many gigs because they weren’t on the DC-based indie Dischord label, which was cofounded by Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat (and later, Fugazi) and was then the only game in town for hardcore bands.

  As a joke, Dave originally put Bonham’s three-circle logo on the front of his bass drum; later on, he got the logo tattooed on his arm, then variations of it on his wrist and then his other arm. He’s also got a homemade tattoo of the Black Flag logo on his forearm that he made when he was thirteen.

  Dave had long admired a local D.C. hardcore band called Scream, who had already put out several records on Dischord, and then he saw an ad in the local music paper saying that Scream was looking for a drummer. “I thought I’d try out just to tell my friends that I jammed with Scream,” Dave says. He called, but the band never called him back because he was too young—and he had told them he was nineteen even though he was really sixteen. Finally, Dave wangled an audition, and after jamming a few times, Scream asked Dave to join the band. Dave said he was committed to Dain Bramage but a couple of months later he got back in touch with them and convinced them to take him on.

  Dave dropped out of high school late in his junior year. “I was seventeen and extremely anxious to see the world and play, so I did,” Dave says. “I’m totally glad I did it.” Dave plans to go to college some day, though.

  Much later, when Wendy Cobain met Virginia Grohl in New York for Nirvana’s “Saturday Night Live” appearance, they compared notes on their sons. “We were just amazed at how much these two kids are alike,” says Wendy. “They’re like twins that got separated somehow.”

  “I don’t see that at all,” Dave says at first, then he adds, “In some ways I can, because I remember the first time I went into the house where Kurt grew up and we went upstairs where his room was and there was stuff written on the walls—the brain with a little question mark—and I remember being stoned and drawing a little brain with a question mark in it in like seventh or eighth grade. When I saw that I thought it was kind of strange. And we’re both total slobs.”

  Dave was supposed to go to night school, but he spent the tuition money on pot instead. He rehearsed with Scream for six months and then the band went on a two-month U.S. tour in October of 1987.

  “Touring with Scream was so much fun—it was a lesson in life,” says Dave. “Learning to budget yourself on seven dollars a day. You had three meals—or two—and you have to somehow save up money or ask for the next three days’ per diem if you want to buy pot. You can’t buy cigarettes more than three times a week. If you do, you have to buy bargain brand. I’d never seen the country before and everything was just so fucking punk.”

  Dave became a big Melvins fan after seeing them open for hardcore bands in D.C. When he read in Maximumrocknroll that they had re-formed after a brief breakup, Scream was on tour in Memphis. Dave had bought an Elvis postcard and happened to get Elvis’s uncle Vester Presley to sign it. He sent it to the Melvins in San Francisco and asked if they’d come to Scream’s show there. The night before the gig, Dave found out that Scream and the Melvins were on the same bill. Dave befriended the Melvins and they swapped addresses and have corresponded ever since.

  Back in San Francisco for another tour, Dave went backstage after a Melvins gig, where Kurt and Chris were hanging out. They were in town to rehearse with Dale Crover for the 1990 West Coast tour with Sonic Youth. “I remember [Kurt] sitting in this chair looking pissed,” Dave recalls, while Chris was being exceptionally loud and boisterous. “Who is that guy?” Dave asked Osborne. He didn’t wind up speaking to either of them.

  During one of thei
r forays down to L.A. to meet the labels, Kurt and Chris stopped in San Francisco to hang out with the Melvins, who told them there was a great hardcore band playing at the I-Beam called Scream. They went and were promptly knocked out by their drummer. “God, what a great drummer,” Chris thought. “Wish he’d be in our band.”

  Dave recorded one studio and two live albums with Scream, who blossomed into one of America’s most explosive hardcore bands, and toured the U.S. and Europe until the middle of September 1990, when “girlfriend trouble” compelled bass player Skeeter to leave the tour suddenly. Stranded in Los Angeles with no money, Dave called his friend Buzz Osborne.

  Osborne knew Kurt and Chris loved Dave’s drumming and called Chris to tell him he’d given Dave his number. When Dave called, Chris was ecstatic, but he felt obligated to at least ask Dave a few questions before going any further. He was into the right bands and Chris invited him up to Seattle.

  Dave had heard Nirvana for the first time during one of Scream’s frequent European tours. “You look at the cover of Bleach,” he says, “and you just think they’re these big burly unshaven logger, drinking guys. They look kind of nasty on the front, almost like a metal band, but with this retarded weirdness about them.” He thought they sounded a bit like the Melvins, which was okay by him.

  Dave took apart his drums, fit all the pieces into one big cardboard box, and flew up to Seattle with only a bag of clothes. Kurt and Chris picked him up at Sea-Tac Airport and began the drive to Tacoma. To break the ice, Dave offered Kurt an apple. “No thanks,” Kurt replied. “It’ll make my teeth bleed.”