by Everett True
Kurt used the opportunity to announce the identity of Nirvana’s new drummer: “He’s a baby Dale Crover,” Kurt told the handful of Calvinists16 listening. “His name is Dave Grohl and he plays almost as good as Dale. And with a few years’ practice, he may even give him a run for his money.”
Addenda 1: Sonic Youth
Kurt idolised Sonic Youth – how did he act when he met you? Were Nirvana nervous about opening for you on the West Coast?
Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth guitarist): “Kurt was shy. He was obviously pleased to be opening for us, but he was ‘cool’. It was more fraternal and peer-like than anything else. Our fans reacted very positively to Nirvana from the very first.”
Sonic Youth were signed to Gold Mountain management and DGC. Nirvana later signed with both companies. Did Sonic Youth recommend Nirvana to both companies? Did you have any idea of how popular Nirvana were going to be?
Lee: “It was hard to predict the level of popularity they would achieve – I don’t think anyone saw that coming. They saw us in a relatively good situation with both DGC and Gold Mountain – and that was the most important recommendation to them, coming upon all this ‘big business’ stuff as suddenly as they were. I’d say Dave and Krist were probably more business-minded than Kurt, but I’d never discount him having had strong opinions about all their dealings.”
How did you yourself view Nirvana?
Lee: “I thought they were incredibly exciting and, like everyone else, relished their great combination of raw power energy and pop Beatlesesque sensibility.”
Where do you see Sonic Youth’s influence on Nirvana and the ‘Seattle scene’? Did you feel you had certain aspects in common with Nirvana and bands like Mudhoney?
Lee: “If anything, our influence on them, and the Seattle scene, was less musically than about how a band survives in the climate that existed then – few labels, little money, little or no press recognition. What we took from those Pacific Northwest bands – and others like [raw and bluesy Ann Arbor garage-punk band] The Laughing Hyenas, [innovative, metallic Milwaukee band] Die Kreuzen, Dinosaur Jr, etc – was a more ‘ rockist’ approach to the music, which we had all grown up on but which got subsumed in the nature of the NYC music scene, which was at least as interested in experiment and boundary-pushing as it was in blasts of rock’n’roll nostalgia. The ‘grunge movement’ opened us back up to all the things we loved about such ferocious thrashing music. We were energised by it – and had to compete with it live, which meant raising our music to that task.”
Addenda 2: managers
“Kurt asked me to manage Nirvana,” reveals Candice Pedersen. “We had talked about it before I went to San Francisco in 1990. I think I would have been good at it, but I liked what I was doing at K.”
What were they looking for in a manager?
“They were looking for someone who was pragmatic, and who liked them,” Pedersen replies. “One of the reasons Kurt and I got along well is that America wants to think there aren’t class differences, but there are. And I have life experiences that I shared with Kurt. We just understood each other better. Also, I was fun, and I was sober: that had to help.
“We’re all blue collar and below, and that wasn’t the case for some of the other people we interacted with. I had quite a long argument with Ian MacKaye about this because he was saying it shouldn’t be about money. People who grow up with money always say that because they have safety nets. We don’t have safety nets. I don’t even know why I thought I could go to college, nobody in my family ever had. I didn’t have a dime, my parents didn’t have a dime and they actively discouraged me. Both Kurt and me grew up in really white trash ways. My family wasn’t quite so trailer trashy because we were hicks. Ian will say how they played word games at the dinner table, or Calvin will talk about how they read certain books, but we ate macaroni and cheese out of the pan. Also, I wasn’t the kind of person any of them were going to be attracted to, so there wasn’t going to be any confusion in that regard.
“It wasn’t like it was well thought out. It wasn’t like the band sat down and built up a business plan and realised where they needed to plug in a manager.”
NOTES
1 Impossibly beautiful Michelle is the female Mamas And The Papas singer who wasn’t Mama Cass (and also was mother to one of the dreadful whimsical Nineties female trio Wilson Phillips).
2 Dylan Carlson, Tobi and Kurt also grouped together for a Gang Of Four-inspired project featuring Tobi on guitar and vocals, Dylan on bass and Kurt on drums.
3 Yoko Ono’s body of experimental Seventies work remains unsurpassed – look no further than the flipside of ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ for proof of her extraordinarily moving muse.
4 Athens, Georgia band best known for their monster 1989 hit ‘Love Shack’ – The B-52’s matched Sixties pop ephemera to a dance floor beat and stacked beehive wigs.
5 For the longest time, The Breeders’ singer Kim Deal was my definition of rock. She was casual about her genius it was genius. The Breeders’ first album, the sparse, Steve Albini-produced Pod, appeared in 1990 while Deal’s main band, the Pixies, were turning into a lame surf rock parody of themselves.
6 Tobi now sings with righteous Riot Grrrl band Spider And The Webs.
7 Huggy Bear were the British boy/girl counterparts to Bikini Kill – the link came about after I passed along a copy of Bikini Kill’s Revolution Girl Style Now cassette and fanzine to Huggy members Jon and Jo.
8 Reference to Dave Markey’s excellent Sonic Youth tour video documentary, 1991: The Year Punk Broke – its title itself a reference to the success of Nirvana. Markey was also the man behind Desperate Teenage Lovedolls .
9 In other words, Nirvana’s third and final album was an exorcism and cry of frustration, partway inspired by success. John Lennon’s ‘Cold Turkey’ is, famously, a reference to the state junkies experience trying to kick heroin.
10 Perhaps a little harsh – as promotion was something that Sub Pop clearly excelled at.
11 Someone should get that man some royalties!
12 John later became manager of The Beastie Boys. Charles Peterson tells a great story about how I once managed to browbeat Silva into clearing a space at the side of the stage during a major Beasties festival appearance for Charles, and Charles alone.
13 In this capacity Danny Goldberg learned the trade from Zeppelin’s pugnacious manager Peter Grant who was both feared and respected in equal measure.
14 Rickie Lee Jones is a left wing singer-songwriter best known for the excellent, playful 1979 hit ‘Chuck E’s In Love’. Went on to host a talk show on Olympia’s KAOS radio station.
15 In using recorded conversation, Nirvana – probably unintentionally – paid tribute to Soundgarden, who used a similar device on the outro to their version of ‘Sub Pop Rock City’ on Sub Pop 200.
16 ‘Calvinist’ was a derogatory term devised by either Kurt or Courtney Love to describe all those who’d fallen under the charismatic K records’ founder’s influence: certainly, Calvin Johnson can inspire almost religious devotion. “The Calvinists are a handful of Olympia residents between the ages of 16 and 50 who wear Leave It To Beaver hats and sweaters, worship Calvin and follow him around,” Kurt told me sarcastically in 1992. “They leave him gifts, and they have Calvin altars, and candles and effigies of Calvin. There’s some weird sex thing going on.”
CHAPTER 12
Monster Of Rock
It surprises me that lesser critics are taken in by the seeming slothfulness of bands like Nirvana and Teenage Fanclub 1 and mistake it for some kind of attitude problem, or laziness. Sure, that on its own isn’t an excuse for anything, but both bands have so many fucking tunes lurking underneath their outer shell it’s damn near impossible not to trip over them as they flood out the speakers.
Take ‘Sliver’, for example. Sure, the vocals are lazily throat splitting, the guitars belligerently grungy, the bass up and out of the place . . . but check the melodies, damn fools, check the melod
ies. The only reason this isn’t Single Of The Week is because three even mightier singles were released this week.2
Got it?
(Author’s review of ‘Sliver’, Melody Maker, December 1, 1990)
DAVE Grohl was born in Warren, Ohio on January 14, 1969.
Dave’s father James worked for the Scripps-Howard newspaper franchise. His mother Virginia was a high school English teacher. Dad was an accomplished flautist. Mom had been in singing groups when she was a teen. When he was three, Dave’s family – including sister Lisa, three years older – moved to Springfield, North Virginia, a middle-class suburb of the resolutely working-class US capital, Washington, DC, just six miles up the Interstate 95. His parents divorced when he was six, and his mother was left to raise the two kids on her own, schooling them in her liberal world view. Great store was placed on creativity.
“When I was about two years old,” Dave recalls, “my parents took me to the Ohio State Fair. My father had a press pass, so we got to sit in the press pit, and I watched The Jackson Five.” The drummer laughs. “I have no recollection of it at all.”
When Dave was 11, he formed a duo with his friend Larry Hinkle. Larry would bang kitchenware together while Dave strummed a one-string guitar, recording songs about friends or his dog on a Fairfax County public-issue cassette player. For Christmas 1981, Dave was given a Sixties Silvertone guitar with an inbuilt amp – to be replaced by a black Gibson Les Paul later that spring.
“I played with neighbourhood friends,” Grohl says. “I was jamming in garages and basements, playing blues songs and Stones songs, simple shit. And I’d play guitar alone in my room along to this Beatles anthology book my mother gave me for Christmas.” He even took lessons for a year or so, before deciding – like Krist and Kurt before him – they didn’t really teach him anything about the music itself.
“I was told to [take lessons], because everyone was so sick of hearing ‘Smoke On The Water’,” he comments wryly.
Dave started playing drums from an early age, but he didn’t own a drum kit until he was 17, by which point he’d already been playing drums in bands for three or four years. “The house I grew up in was small,” he says, “and I couldn’t fit a drum set in it. I’d much rather wait until the drummer in my band went home after practice and I’d sit down and play the drums.
“I didn’t really notice the drums until I heard Edgar Winter’s [1973 number one bluesy instrumental hit] ‘Frankenstein’,” Grohl continues. “Up until that point I’d just listen to whatever my parents or my sister were listening to, which was mainly pop music and things like West Side Story, Carly Simon3 and The Beatles. But when I heard ‘Frankenstein’, I thought, ‘Wow, these musicians are really playing, everything about this song stands out, the riffs, the keyboards, the drums,’ and as it was an instrumental, it was all about music.
“That summer, one of my cousins gave me Rush’s 2112.4 I didn’t know how, but when I listened to 2112, I could tell what each piece of the drum kit was doing. I knew this sound was a hi-hat, and this was a ride cymbal, and this was the crash, and these were the small toms, and these were the large toms. I learned about drums through that record: setting my pillows up on my bed and on the floor, and beating along with these big fucking marching sticks I stole from a friend.”
It was through another cousin – Tracey Bradford from Evanston, Illinois – that Dave was introduced to punk in the summer of ’82. It happened on a family visit. “ Tracey was two or three years older than me,” Dave explained in a biography for his post-Nirvana band, Foo Fighters. “We showed up at the door, and my aunt called her downstairs. But this wasn’t the Tracey I had grown to love. This was punk rock Tracey. Bondage pants, spiked hair, chains, the whole nine yards. It was the most fucking awesome thing I’d ever seen. Those few weeks in Evanston changed my life forever.
“From then on, we were totally punk,” he told Michael Azerrad. “We went home and bought [Xeroxed punk bible] Maximumrocknroll and tried to figure it all out.”
Through Tracey, Dave discovered an entire underground network of punk bands, records and magazines – a far remove from his only other previous experience of the genre, The B-52’s on Saturday Night Live, and Devo’s first album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! It was the difference between punk rock and hardcore, fashion over a blueprint for living.
“Before Tracey, the only punk rockers I’d seen were on Quincy,” Grohl says, referring to the primetime US TV show centred round LA County Medical Examiner Dr Quincy. Dave must have his dates mixed up somehow, because the one-off Quincy episode that ‘examined’ the LA punk subculture came out in December ’82. It was essentially a cheesy TV rip-off of Penelope Spheeris’ Decline Of Western Civilization punk documentary released the previous year.
“Pat Smear [Germs guitarist] did a lot of those type of shows,” laughs Dave, “because the punk rock kids in LA, once they realised they could get extra work for money, fucking went for it. I think Courtney [Love] did some too. I think that’s how Pat and Courtney met. But that was all I knew about punk rock. When I found out that some of the most legendary hardcore bands were right in my backyard, I flipped out. It took me a while to work out how to find that scene, because it wasn’t in nightclubs, it was in community centres and Knights Of Columbus halls.”5
There were many similarities and connections between the hardcore punks of DC – led by the influential ‘straight edge’ practitioner, Minor Threat/ Fugazi singer Ian MacKaye and his Dischord label – and the punk rock librarians of Olympia. Both sets of musicians were principled and motivated, saw music as a natural extension of their day-to-day lives and vice versa. Both sets eschewed rock’s more libidinous excesses and believed in the idea of creating their own culture separate to that of their parents, and the mainstream. The main difference was that while Olympia was rooted in a more liberal, female culture, DC was much more male – apart from the occasional DIY entrepreneur, such as Simple Machines’ founder Jenny Toomey.6
“I didn’t grow up going to rock concerts,” Dave explains. “The first live performance of a band on stage that I saw was Naked Raygun7 back in 1982, in a place called the Cubby Bear in Chicago. I was 13. That was the first show, and I loved it, the intimacy of it, that it seemed so simple, and human and exciting. I talked to the singer and I jumped on someone’s head and I felt completely at ease with the band and the audience. It was just a bunch of people having a good time.
“Then I got into punk and hardcore, and that’s how I learned how to play drums, from listening to Bad Brains8 and Minor Threat and nomeansno, mostly all punk rock bands.
“The first time I went to a ‘big’ concert, was the fucking Monsters of Rock at a stadium in DC,” Dave grimaces. “It was Kingdom Come, Metallica, Dokken, Scorpions and Van Halen. And it seemed so unreal to me. This was five or six years after the Naked Raygun gig, five years of going to see Corrosion Of Conformity9, Bad Brains, MDC, all smaller club gigs, DC hardcore bands, punk bands, metal bands like Trouble and Slayer – a ‘big’ show to me was 2,500 people. And then seeing this stadium gig, it was taking four seconds for the sound of the snare drum to hit me . . . It made no sense at all.”
Ironically enough, this arena rock is the music that Grohl now so successfully plunders in Foo Fighters. Whereas Nirvana always were uneasy playing venues over a certain capacity, Foo Fighters right from the off embraced the corporate, the ‘lighters and the King Dome’.
Be that as it may, the young Grohl was well suited to punk: a bratty, hyperactive kid, he started running round town, and smoking dope – “Like a little punk shit,” he smiles. Indeed, Dave once estimated that between the ages of 15 and 20 he smoked dope four or five times a day, every single day.
“I’d sit there with a bong in my hand and listen to [Led Zeppelin’s] ‘Rain Song’, figuring out the song structure,” he says. “We’d congregate at my friend Barrett [ Jones]’s house, and rehearse our band every Friday. Play music and sell pot to one another. But I was a weird, intellectu
al kind of stoner because I was still vice president of my freshman class.” Dave attended Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Virginia – where his mother taught, and his sister was a senior. Laidback, fun loving, up for the craic, Dave has always been popular.
“Dave was the most hyperactive kid you’ve ever met,” comments Barrett. “Bouncing off the walls, really skinny. Total maniac. He was always breaking stuff of mine. The first time I saw him sleeping, I was amazed.”
In the summer of 1984, Dave joined local punks Freak Baby as their guitarist: “Nobody knew who we were,” he laughs. “We had a demo tape we sold at a local [punk] record store [Smash]. We’d play shows every now and then.” The demo was recorded at Barrett Jones’ original Laundry Room studios, in Barrett’s parents’ house in Arlington. The main control room was in the actual laundry room, while the band played live in Barrett’s bedroom, seven feet away.
“The next band was called Mission Impossible,” continues Grohl. Mission Impossible played supercharged hardcore: all pent-up teen energy and a welter of drums. “We even did the theme music, it was fucking ridiculous. I was about 15. Dave Smith, our drummer, wasn’t so good – so he gave me the sticks, we did a little switcheroo and I started playing the drums.
His new band gathered quite a few plaudits: Ian MacKaye publicly declared his love for them, they supported Trouble Funk10 at a high school prom, even released a split single with local heroes Lunchmeat11, distributed by Dischord.