The Storyteller

by Dave Grohl

  Much more than me, Kurt found this crossroads deeply troubling. The same guy who had exclaimed, “We want to be the biggest band in the world,” to a record company executive in a New York City high-rise office was now faced with the horrifying prospect of its coming true. Of course, we never actually expected the world to change for us (because we surely weren’t going to change for it), but each day it seemed more and more like it was. And that was overwhelming. Even the most stable can crumble under pressure like that.

  One problem was that we were now attracting the same people who used to kick our asses in high school for being different, who called us “faggots” and “queers” for the clothes we wore and the music we listened to. Our fanbase was changing to include macho monster-truck homophobes and meathead jocks whose worlds revolved around beer and football. We had always been the outcasts. We had always been the weirdos. We were not one of them. So, how could they become one of us?

  And then the video came out.

  September 29, only a few days after the release of our album, the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video was debuted on MTV’s 120 Minutes. A late-night program dedicated to alternative music, 120 Minutes was considered the springboard for many underground bands’ careers, showcasing some of our heroes, such as the Pixies, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., and Hüsker Dü. For a band like ours to be included in such lofty ranks was beyond huge. It was a turning point, not only personally but professionally, and to deny that we were delighted would be a lie. On a night off between our New York City and Pittsburgh shows, we all sat in our hotel rooms waiting for our video to be shown for the first time ever. Kurt and I shared a room on that tour, and I remember lying across from each other in our twin beds with the television on as videos from Morrissey, the Wonder Stuff, and Transvision Vamp played for what seemed like an eternity; the anticipation became painful with each passing second. The Damned, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nine Inch Nails, video after video, until . . . there we were! First, a short promo that we had shot backstage at the Reading Festival in England a month before, where we awkwardly said, “You’re watching 120 Minutes!” from the catering tent behind the stage, Kurt’s arm still wrapped in a sling from maniacally diving into my drum set that day. I screamed from my stiff Best Western bed and was simultaneously filled with both glee and the feeling of tripping on too much acid (not mutually exclusive). Holy shit! I thought. That’s what we look like? And then, without further ado, those familiar chords that had once echoed through our dingy little rehearsal space back in Tacoma rang through the tiny speakers of the Magnavox on the dresser. It was actually happening. I was watching MYSELF on MTV. Not Michael Jackson or the Cars. Not Madonna or Bruce Springsteen. No. It was Krist, Kurt, and me, playing a song we wrote in a fucking barn. Dalí’s melted clocks had nothing on this most surreal moment.

  We elatedly picked up the bedside phone and called room to room, shouting, “It’s on! It’s on right now!” like kids at a slumber party, the poor hotel operator pinging us back and forth, to busy signal after busy signal. Part disbelief, part celebration, part shock, this was a moment that I will never forget. From the dingy maroon carpet to the chipped wooden furniture, if I close my eyes today I can still vividly recall every detail, for this was an event that changed not only my life, but the world of music at that time.

  I credit this video for the tsunami that was soon to come. Inspired by Jonathan Kaplan’s 1979 film Over the Edge, starring Matt Dillon, the “Teen Spirit” video was a dark portrait of youthful rebellion, shot with actual fans from a show that we’d played the night before at the Roxy in Hollywood. With director Samuel Bayer, Kurt envisioned a high school pep rally turned riot, burning down the gymnasium in a blissful mosh pit of disaffected teens, tattooed cheerleaders, and young punks, leaving their angst and frustration behind in a smoldering pile of rubble and ash. THIS WAS A SENTIMENT THAT WE ALL OBVIOUSLY CONNECTED TO—BUT WE COULD NOT PREDICT THAT AN ENTIRE GENERATION WOULD FEEL THE SAME. At first, the clip was only played at night, as MTV deemed it too controversial for prime-time viewing, but before long, it made its way into the normal rotation. Once there, it spread like wildfire and proceeded to burn our whole world to the ground.

  Now Nirvana was well on its way to becoming a household name. In just a matter of weeks, the buzz surrounding the band had ramped up into a frenzy, all eyes focused on the blurry mystery that was three disheveled freaks in their early twenties, armed with songs that your cool aunt and uncle could sing along to. Surprisingly, the world within the safety of our smelly little rental van had actually changed very little: duffel bags and cassette tapes, fast-food containers and empty cigarette packets. Typical for a band like us. It was the world outside of our little bubble that was changing fast: autographs and radio interviews, venues bursting at the seams, and multiple near-riots. Just days before our show at Trees, we had to abandon the stage at our Mississippi Nights show in St. Louis after the crowd rushed the stage, prompted by Kurt’s frustrations with the local security’s being too rough with the fans, a common occurrence for venues unfamiliar with slam dancing and stage diving. It was absolute chaos. At the time, I was using a borrowed drum set from our opening band, Urge Overkill, since Kurt and I had smashed mine to splinters in Chicago. As the waves of kids climbed over the barrier onto the tiny stage, grabbing our equipment and screaming into the microphones, I retreated to Urge Overkill’s dressing room and gleefully explained, “There’s a fucking riot happening out there!” to which the drummer, Blackie, replied, “Shit! My drums!”

  By the time we reached Dallas, we had no idea anymore what to expect. But there was a particular electricity in the air that night, magnified by an unusually swampy humidity that further heightened the tension in the room, like a short fuse on a handmade bomb. As we stepped onstage to play, the crowd was already spilling over the floor monitors and onto Kurt’s and Krist’s guitar pedals, without the band’s even hitting a single note. Imagine being backed up against a wall by a mob of six hundred alcohol-fueled adrenaline junkies waiting to tear you and the entire place to shreds, multiply that by ten, and you’re getting close to what it felt like to be in Nirvana that night. To make things worse, we were plagued with technical difficulties right out of the gate. So, while we waited for our gear to work properly, we stood there snarkily playing a disastrous version of “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” as our guitar tech Nic Close frantically ran from one side of the stage to the other, doing his best to remedy this potentially hopeless situation. Finally realizing we just had to go for it, Kurt said a few words and we kicked into the first song, “Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam,” a cover from one of our favorite bands, the Vaselines, from Scotland.

  The place went bonkers, and the audience’s psychotic, raw energy grew exponentially minute by minute. By the time we got to the song “School,” six songs into the set, the waves of people spilling onto the stage had become so dangerous that Kurt couldn’t sing into the microphone anymore without its getting kicked in his face and smashing into his teeth. I could sense his irritation, and I knew all too well what followed when Kurt got irritated. SOMETHING WAS GETTING DESTROYED. Whether it would be his guitar, his amp, or my drums, I knew it was coming. The countdown began . . .

  Four songs later, after a noisy, technical-difficulty-riddled version of our otherwise gentle acoustic song “Polly,” Kurt snapped. Turning to his left, he took off his guitar and started smashing the monitor engineer’s soundboard to pieces, chopping at it over and over, sending buttons, knobs, and shrapnel flying across the stage. Kurt had had enough. Not just of this show, but of everything that had led us to this night. The weeks and weeks of intensified chaos had finally boiled over, and Kurt’s frustration was now being released in a furious display of violent rage. The crowd cheered, delighted, as if this were some form of entertainment. If they only knew. This was not an act. This was real.

  All bets were now off. As I sat behind my drums watching this series of anarchic events unfold before me, all I could think wa
s Where’s the fucking emergency exit? This is not something that runs through the minds of most performers, but then again, we weren’t like most performers. There was no playbook for what was happening to us. This was the Wild West, and the only way to survive was to follow the light at the end of each long, dark tunnel. As chaotic as my days in Scream had been, sleeping in squats, being chased by skinheads and junkies through dark alleyways, never knowing where my next meal would come from, it had nothing on the sheer size and magnitude of this. This was dangerous.

  Nevertheless, we soldiered on, continuing to play as the monitor engineer hilariously placed a wood pallet over his mixing desk for fear that another thrashing was inevitable. Nothing could save him now. This speeding train was already off the fucking rails, on a collision course with everyone and everything in its path. We kicked into another cover, Shocking Blue’s “Love Buzz” (the first Nirvana single), and the chaos continued. Body after body falling to the stage, the room growing hotter with every distorted chord, every inch of skin drenched with the condensation of six hundred strangers. After the second chorus of the song, Kurt dove into the audience, guitar in hand, and soloed while crowd-surfing atop the gyrating mass of greasy hair and tattooed limbs. As he fell back to the stage, flailing in a rapturous, spasmodic dance, he landed on a gigantic security guard who had been placed there to help keep the kids offstage. Trying his best to push Kurt off him, he used his brute force on Kurt’s small frame, and in a fight-or-flight moment of instant, defensive reaction, Kurt smashed the body of his guitar into the security guard’s head, tearing open his flesh, drawing streams of blood that immediately started pouring down his sinister Mohawk. Taken aback, he realized that he had been cut, and as Kurt stood up, the massive security guard punched him square in the jaw, sending Kurt straight down to the floor. Without hesitation, Krist and I threw down our instruments and intervened to save our friend as the song came to an abrupt, crashing halt. Krist tried to reason with the security guy, even removing his own shirt to help stop the bleeding as chants of “BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT!” rang through the club. Kurt wandered off to the other side of the stage in a daze as I made my way toward the exit, imagining that it was all over and done.

  It wasn’t.

  After some pleading from a club employee who feared an otherwise imminent riot, we decided to finish our set, stage still wet with blood. Kurt’s guitar was viciously out of tune from the wallop he had delivered to the security guy’s cranium, but hell, that had never stopped us. The dissonant, detuned sound almost accentuated the uneasy vibe in the room. Closing out the set with our fastest, most punk-rock-sounding song, “Territorial Pissings,” we finally put our instruments down and headed to the dressing room, somewhat traumatized by the evening’s bizarre turn of events. We were used to chaos and disorder, but this was something else. This was not fun. This was dark. At least it was over.

  Little did we know, the bloodied security guard and a gang of his misfit friends were outside waiting to kill us, swift retribution for the carnage we had unknowingly brought to town. They wanted blood in return. Someone caught wind of their plan as the hundreds of patrons filed out of the venue, and it was relayed to our crew, who then quickly passed it on to us as we sat upstairs recovering in pools of our own sweat. Monty realized that we were trapped, and it was now his job to figure out an escape plan. A cab was called to the back entrance, and we ran from our dressing room to the alleyway door like rats in a kitchen, Kurt in the lead, followed by Krist and then me. We waited for the sign, and as the door was flung open I watched Kurt duck into the back seat of the cab, then Krist. I suddenly heard someone scream, “That’s them!! Let’s get those motherfuckers!!” Sure enough, it was the security guy and his friends, charging down the alleyway toward the cab with fire in their eyes and murder on their minds. Someone slammed the car door shut before I could get in, and it sped away, chased into the night by the motley crew of bloodthirsty thugs, who apparently caught up with them in bumper-to-bumper Saturday night traffic on Elm Street and smashed the passenger window out with one swift punch. I wouldn’t know, because I was now left alone in the club with no way back to the hotel (I may or may not have gotten a ride back with a cute girl, getting into a car accident along the way).

  Courtesy of Charles Peterson

  We all somehow managed to survive another day, and our traveling circus rolled on to the next city. With twelve days left on the tour, there was still time for the wheels to fall off, but at least we were headed in the right direction: home.

  By the time we returned to Seattle for a final hometown show on Halloween, we were completely exhausted, both mentally and physically. We had left our mark and made it back with the scars to prove it. In just forty days, we had gone from three disheveled young men with nothing to lose to three disheveled young men with a gold record. Our worlds had now changed forever, and so had yours. And this was just the beginning.

  WE WERE SURROUNDED. AND THERE WAS NO WAY OUT.

  The Divide

  “Guess where we’re swimming today,” my good friend Bryan Brown excitedly said.

  From the deathly hot bedroom of Pete Stahl’s crowded, air conditioner–less house in the San Fernando Valley, I replied, “I dunno . . . where?”

  “The house where Sharon Tate was killed by the Manson family.”

  I held the phone in silence as I processed this morbid invitation for a moment, then replied, “Cielo Drive? Are you fucking serious?” I knew exactly where he was talking about, having been somewhat well versed in America’s most infamous and gruesome killing spree since I was a teenager immersed in the world of the macabre. I could picture the long, winding drive up the canyon hill to the gate, the driveway beside the house overlooking downtown Los Angeles, the walkway to the front door that was once desecrated with the word “PIG” written in blood, the living room where three innocent people met their horrible fate beside a fireplace under a small loft, and the kidney-shaped pool that separated the main house from the guesthouse where Abigail Folger stayed before she was ruthlessly slaughtered on the lawn. I could practically draw a blueprint of this crime scene in my head from the time I’d spent reading Helter Skelter and watching grainy documentaries of Charles Manson’s homeless hippie “family” on Spahn Ranch. This was almost too dark of a proposition to accept.

  “Let’s go.”

  1992 began with a crippling, well-deserved hangover as I woke up in a disheveled hotel room after celebrating New Year’s Eve with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and sixteen thousand other people at San Francisco’s Cow Palace the night before. Nirvana had finished off our tumultuous, landmark year with a short West Coast tour of arenas, all packed to the rafters with thousands of young punks, gathered to witness these three up-and-coming bands in what was quickly becoming a musical revolution. The audiences were growing exponentially, and looking out from the stage every night, it was clear that a radical cultural shift was imminent from the energy and aesthetic of the fans who sang along to every word with deafening volume. This was no longer just the sound of the underground or late-night college radio; this was a fucking battering ram to the gates that guarded mainstream popular culture, and our three bands were spearheading the takeover.

  Courtesy of the author’s personal archives

  Beyond the changing tides of the musical landscape, life from my tiny bedroom in West Seattle was in flux, with every day bringing a new, outrageous development in Nirvana’s chaotic little world. I held on for dear life as the rickety carnival ride that had once been our little group started spinning faster and faster and our unplanned bid to change the world intensified, but it was no use. At this point, it was out of our hands, and no matter how much we wanted to rein it in, there was no stopping it. The album that we had made in only twelve days at that dumpy old studio in Los Angeles named Sound City was now selling three hundred thousand copies a week. And the news that we had knocked Michael Jackson out of the No. 1 spot on the Billboard album charts came the same
day we were to play Saturday Night Live for the first time, January 11, 1992.

  This may have been the moment that I realized life would never be the same. Since I was a child, Saturday Night Live had been my favorite television show, hands down, and I would stay up in my pajamas to watch it every weekend, waiting to see my heroes of late-night TV. But I wasn’t just watching to see the comedic genius of Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Laraine Newman, Bill Murray, Steve Martin, and Andy Kaufman; I was particularly interested in the diverse range of musical guests they hosted every weekend. As a young musician this was my education, a master class in live performance by some of the world’s most cutting-edge artists. But if there was one performance that stood out from the rest and steered my life onto a new course, it was the B-52s performing their hit “Rock Lobster” in 1980.

  TO ME, THESE THREE MINUTES WEREN’T JUST A BAND PLAYING A SONG, THEY WERE A RALLYING CRY TO ALL PEOPLE SUFFOCATING IN CONVENTIONALITY, AFRAID TO LET THEIR FREAK FLAG FLY, WHO WANTED TO CELEBRATE ALL OF LIFE’S BEAUTIFUL ECCENTRICITIES. At ten years old, my thoughts weren’t quite this complex; I know that now. But even then I somehow felt empowered by their pride in their weirdness. As I watched them dance their mess around in a quirky, hyperactive blur, I knew I wanted to break out too. I no longer wanted to follow the norm. I wanted to break away from the pack like the B-52s and lead a life away from the flock. There is that golden moment in any child’s life when independence and identity intersect, steering you in your ultimate direction, and this was mine. I would be an outcast with a guitar who loved music and comedy. Go figure.