The Storyteller

by Dave Grohl

  But the opportunity to play SNL came at a complicated time for Nirvana. We hadn’t seen each other since finishing that West Coast tour with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam, and in that time we’d all gone our separate ways, exhausted from the seventy-five shows that we had played up until that point. I had gone home to Virginia, Krist had returned to Seattle, and Kurt had gone down to his new home in Los Angeles. When we met in New York City for the show, a certain fatigue was present, most noticeably with Kurt, and what I hoped would be a triumphant reunion of the band, gathered to play the TV show that had changed my life, felt a bit . . . off. There were cracks beginning to form in our already shaky foundation, and a shaky foundation is not what you want when performing live on TV in front of millions of people waiting for their first glimpse of the band that came out of nowhere to topple the “King of Pop” from his throne.

  “Ladies and gentlemen . . . Nirvana.”

  Kurt started strumming the intro of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and despite the fact that I’d played it every night in packed theaters all over the world by then, my life flashed before my eyes. This was where the B-52s had stood. This was where Devo had stood. This was where Bowie had stood. This was where every living legend from Bob Dylan to Mick Jagger had stood to perform their songs for millions of young musicians like me, up way past their bedtime to see their heroes play the songs that shaped their lives. I wanted to faint. I wanted to puke. I wanted to hide. But I blasted that drum intro with all of my strength and . . . broke a stick.

  Fuck.

  I was now driving the song with one flat tire, coming in on three engines, one sandwich short of a picnic. I looked down at my lifelong friend Jimmy, who was acting as my drum tech for the show, and we locked eyes in horror. It was one thing for this to happen at a Scream show in front of seventy-five people; it was very different when the entire world was watching. Just keep playing, I told myself as I hit my drums with a lifetime’s worth of purpose. In a short break between drum fills, I grabbed another stick with lightning speed and finished off the song, surging with enough adrenaline to kill a horse, but with enough pride to last a lifetime, imagining that maybe our performance was a rallying cry to a whole new generation of kids suffocating in conventionality, afraid to let their freak flag fly, finally liberated to celebrate the beautiful eccentricities of life.

  Oh, and Weird Al called the dressing room that night to personally ask for permission to cover “Smells Like Teen Spirit” too. We had officially arrived.

  Having powered through Saturday Night Live, we went our separate ways again, reconvening two weeks later in Los Angeles to shoot the “Come As You Are” video before heading down to Australia and Japan for a three-and-a-half-week tour, another unimaginable experience to add to the list of things I never thought I would live to see. Upon arrival in L.A. on the first day of the video shoot, I realized that Kurt was unwell. He seemed frail and somewhat deflated, and by the look in his eyes it was clear that he had been getting high while away from the band.

  I was in Los Angeles staying with a friend in January 1991 when I first learned that Kurt was using heroin. I had never known anyone who used heroin before and knew very little about it, so I was shocked. I had joined the band only three months before and was living with Kurt in a tiny apartment, and perhaps naively, I didn’t peg him as someone who would do that sort of thing. To me, heroin was a dirty street drug, used only by prostitutes and junkies in dark alleyways downtown, not by gentle, kind, beloved artists with the world at their feet. I had read the mythological tales of legendary rock stars being strung out in countless rock biographies that almost glorified that behavior as some sort of badge of honor, but I never imagined it would become a part of my world. Washington, DC, was not necessarily a heroin town. Seattle, on the other hand, was a heroin capital.

  Kurt assured me that heroin wasn’t something that he did all the time, just that once. “I hate needles,” he said in an effort to reassure me that I hadn’t just given up my life and moved across the country to live with a complete stranger who’d turned out to be a junkie. And because I knew nothing about the drug, I believed him. There was no way he would be able to keep such a secret from me, anyway. Or so I thought.

  One night in Olympia while I was out drinking with friends, someone had pills. Some sort of prescription painkiller. “Take one with a few beers, and you’ll be super buzzed,” I was told. Even that made me nervous, so I stuck to just cocktails, but I watched Kurt take two or three with his drink. It scared me. I was always pretty timid when it came to taking anything for fear of the consequence of taking too much, but I knew friends back in Virginia who would always push the boundaries a little to see how far they could take it. I began to learn that Kurt was this way, in every way.

  I EVENTUALLY FELT THE SEPARATION. There were those who did and those who didn’t. And as our world expanded, that divide grew wider. Nirvana were three distinct individuals, each with his own idiosyncrasies and eccentricities that were responsible for the specific sound we made when we strapped on our instruments, but outside of the music, we lived our own lives, each very different from the others.

  As we filmed the video, Kurt’s fragility came as a shock to me, and I was not only concerned for his health but also concerned for the tour we were about to start, which would take us to the opposite side of the planet, far from the reach of the people we loved and needed the most. I couldn’t imagine how we would survive another dizzying schedule of show after show, airport after airport, hotel after hotel, especially given his condition, but we carried on. To this day, it is still hard for me to watch “Come As You Are” knowing the state that Kurt was in at the time. Although our images are blurred by camera effects and washed-out Super 8 film projected onto raw surfaces, I see a very clear picture of three people entering what would become a period of turbulence that we would feel for years.

  The warm sun of Australia’s summer and the even sunnier demeanor of our Aussie hosts was a welcome and much-needed break from the dark winter—in every sense—we had left behind at home. It was the absolute right place to be at the right time, and for a moment our wheels seemed to be back on track. I had been all over North America, all over Europe, but I had absolutely no idea what to expect from this side of the world, and I took to it like a fly to barbecue. We did it all: surfed Bondi Beach, snuggled koalas, camped with kangaroos, Jet Skied, bungee jumped, and even shared the stage with the Violent Femmes, perhaps the highlight of the whole trip. Kurt was still a bit fragile but seemed to be coming out of the fog as we tore through eight ripping shows in venues that were far too small for the band’s exploding popularity, something we were quickly getting used to. I started to have hope that we were going to make it. That Kurt was going to make it. By the time we headed to Japan, I thought perhaps we’d turned a corner.

  If Australia was another hemisphere, Japan was another fucking planet. Every single aspect of life was a huge culture shock. I felt like I was truly a million miles from home. And I loved it. We had never seen anything like Japan before, and they had never seen anything like us. At our first show in Osaka, we performed at a venue that seemed more like the Kennedy Center than the typical beer-stained, bleach-scrubbed dive bars we had cut our teeth in. Chandeliers hung from the ceilings over rows of beautiful velvet seats, and the stage was clean as a whistle, not a blemish to be found, something I found very strange. The audience were allowed to stand at their seats but not move from them, and the aisles were lined with what looked like military police in white gloves, ready to pounce if anyone so much as took a step from their assigned place. This made us play even harder that night, trying to provoke a riotous reaction by thrashing through the songs like never before, and as I looked out from behind my drum set, I could see the audience wanting to break out, scream, explode, let their own freak flags fly. Every few songs, a fan would finally lose it and begin running to the stage, only to be intercepted by a pair of white gloves and ejected from the show. It was us versus the
m, I thought. I played even harder.

  By the end of the night, we knew exactly what to do . . . smash the fuck out of our equipment (a signature move by now). As the audience looked on, Kurt, Krist, and I absolutely destroyed our gear, like three children having a tantrum after being told “No dessert” by Mom and Dad. Instead, we gave that crowd dessert. We left the stage in a pile of drums, toppled amplifiers, and screaming feedback, and I was approached by a young Japanese man who was shaking like a leaf, on the verge of tears. “Did you not like the drums???” he asked in a trembling whimper. “No, no, no . . . they were great!” I said, a bit confused. Most anywhere else in the world, this performance would have been considered triumphant! But we were in Japan, a country that is rooted in a culture of respect and civility, and ours was a brazen act of rebellion uncommon there. Plus, this dude was the Tama drums representative and was terrified that I didn’t like the set they had prepared for me, so I sat him down and explained that our rebellion had nothing to do with the beautiful drum set I was so honored to play; it was an act of celebration.

  Before heading home, we made one last stop in Hawaii for a show at a small club in Honolulu called Pink’s Garage, another venue that was far too small for the band, now at the peak of our popularity. Knowing that this show would be the end of our tour before a long break at home, I planned to stay for a week afterward, renting a ridiculous ocean-blue Mazda Miata convertible to buzz around from beach to beach like an annoying tourist (which I was), reaping the rewards of the most insane year of my entire life. Seeing this chapter of the band come to a close felt bittersweet, as I had almost fallen in love with the everyday chaos that surrounded us wherever we went. Plus, it felt good to go out on such a high. We had seen the cracks start to form, but we had patched them over just by playing our hearts out the way we had always done. Of course, I was also tired, so it was time to return, reset, and remind myself of the things that are the most important to survival: family, friends, and home. I needed to take a breath and actually figure out what had just happened to me.

  “Mr. Grohl, there’s a package for you.”

  As soon as we checked into our Honolulu hotel, the delightful woman at the front desk in the colorful tropical dress handed me a FedEx envelope, and I curiously tore into it, surprised that anyone one would send me anything on the road, much less locate my whereabouts as we zigzagged around the planet on our never-ending tour. A letter from my mother? A congratulatory note from my manager? A summons for petty crimes committed along the way? No. Even better.

  My first credit card.

  At twenty-three years old, I had never owned a credit card or an ATM card, or even had a bank account with more than a hundred dollars in it (thank you, Grandma), so this was a game changer. For the past four years, I had been surviving on measly per diems that would disappear by the end of each day, spent on cigarettes, junk food, and beer. This was too good to be true! Though the band had already sold well over a million records, I had yet to spend a penny of the money I had made, oblivious to how much that might be. I was about to find out.

  I looked to the left of the front desk and saw a gift shop. Itching to test this fresh slice of Monopoly money, I sprinted across the lobby, lei flapping in the wind, and went straight to the sunglasses rack, where I gleefully picked a pair of mirrored blue shades (to match the Miata, of course). I nervously took them to the cashier, and seconds felt like hours as she swiped the card and awaited approval, but as she tore the receipt from the cash register roll to hand to me for my signature, I felt a sea change. No more cans of cold beans. No more three-for-a-dollar corn dogs. No more “shit on a shingle” dinners. (Canned tuna, pepper, flour, and toast. Kurt’s specialty.) With new shades proudly resting on the bridge of my soon-to-be-sunburned nose, I looked across the parking lot to the Benihana restaurant down the street.

  Awwww shit, I thought. We’re gonna feast tonight . . .

  The rest, as they say, is history.

  Tan, fed, and happy, I flew straight back to Virginia after my week with Mr. Roarke and Tattoo on Fantasy Island, my first “vacation” since I was a kid, but with this newfound fiscal freedom came newfound responsibilities. The unimaginable had finally happened. I had money. After a lifetime of watching my mother juggle multiple jobs, count every penny, there could be comfort. Still unaware of the magnitude of what would come, I remained relatively frugal, as my father (who had gotten over the disowning) soon warned me, “You know this isn’t going to last, right? You need to treat every check like it’s the last one you will ever make.” This is, perhaps, the best piece of advice he or anyone has ever given me still to this day. Though that didn’t stop me from going straight to the motorcycle dealership and buying Jimmy and me matching Yamaha V-Maxes, it did instill a fear of bankruptcy right out of the gate, so in the grand scheme of things, my life stayed relatively the same.

  As was our norm, we scattered in our different directions. Krist headed back to Seattle and purchased a warm, comfortable home in the Green Lake area north of the city. Kurt went to Los Angeles and rented a nice little apartment in an old building in Hollywood. Since I was not yet ready to commit to living full-time in Seattle, I bought a house just blocks from the beach in Corolla, North Carolina. Only a few hours from Northern Virginia, the Outer Banks was the perfect place for me to invest in property, not only because of its raw natural beauty, with high dunes and wild horses running along the wide beaches, but also because of its proximity to home, meaning that I could share my rewards with my mother and sister.

  BUT “IDLE HANDS ARE THE DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND,” OR SO I’VE HEARD.

  As we all settled into our new lives, the divide appeared again. No longer crushed together in crowded vans or shared hotel rooms for months on end, we were now free to experience the lives we had always dreamed of, for better or worse. We had watched the world change around us, a blur of flashbulbs and near-riots at every turn, but with that hurricane of madness gone, we were now left to create our own realities, however we pleased. Being the faceless drummer of the band, I was lucky to walk through life practically unrecognized, rarely stopped in public, usually only to be asked, “Are you Dave Navarro?” It was almost as if I were on the outside looking in, watching this all happen to someone else from a distance, enjoying the benefits of “making it” without having to answer for it. That certainly could not be said for Kurt, whose face was now on the cover of every magazine, in every MTV News episode, his voice echoing from every FM radio station coast to coast, a life sentence that most are not prepared to navigate. We retreated to our corners, licked our wounds, and turned the page on the year that punk broke.

  With nothing but time to spare until Nirvana’s next tour, I bounced from surfing the warm waters of North Carolina, to revisiting my old DC haunts with lifelong friends, to recording my primitive songs in the basement with Barrett Jones in Seattle, to flying down to L.A. to reconnect with my old friends Pete and Franz from Scream, who had stayed there since the day I left to join Nirvana, starting new lives (and a new band, Wool) after the demise of Scream. What was meant to be a week on the floor of their little house in the Valley turned into at least a month, waking every morning in the scorching summer heat. Without air-conditioning, the house was a red-hot pizza oven by noon, so the only thing to do to escape the desert heat was to find a pool and spend the afternoon swimming in someone else’s oasis, and this was my buddy Bryan Brown’s specialty.

  As we drove up to the house on Cielo Drive, my anticipation was laced with trepidation, as I realized that the morbid fascination I’d once had with this house was now about to be met with the eerie reality of standing within its cursed walls. We rang the bell on the gate, pulled into the driveway, stepped out of the car, and there it was, exactly as it looked in every crime scene photo I had ever laid my young, curious eyes on. Chills ran down my spine. We walked to the front door—THAT front door—and knocked. We were led inside, but I needed no guide to show me the layout of this house; it was almost as if I had bee
n there before. I turned the corner into the living room and was hit with a shock wave of terror. The stone fireplace, the wooden beams, the small loft . . . it was all exactly the same as it had been that horrific night of August 9, 1969. Except for one thing: there was a large recording console in the middle of the room.

  Nine Inch Nails were making a record here.

  I didn’t know Nine Inch Nails personally but had seen them perform live. I was a fan of industrial music, with Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Current 93 all part of my teenage soundtrack. I’d enjoyed the first NIN album, Pretty Hate Machine, quite a lot. With the band’s aggressive electro-tension and dark lyrical themes, it only made sense that they would choose the Manson house to make their next album. As fucked up as it was, it was a perfect fit, and some of their most powerful songs were recorded there—“March of the Pigs,” “Hurt,” and “Closer.” I have always been a firm believer in the idea that the environment in which you record dictates the outcome of the music, and every time I hear one of these songs, I am convinced it’s true. There is a pain and desperation within these tracks that was surely infused by some kind of spiritual osmosis. Or Trent Reznor’s pain and desperation. I didn’t know him well, but I found him to be a brilliant artist and a kind man. Similar to another kind, brilliant artist that I knew, using his music to identify the demons that haunted his soul.

  After a while, the pervading vibe of the house certainly cast a pall over the energy of the environment, one that I could not connect or jibe with at all. I was all too familiar with the feeling of darkness, fragility, and pain, so I hit the pool, not only to escape the heat, but to wash myself of that feeling I felt standing in that living room.