by Everett True
“Mission Impossible broke up and Dave joined Dain Bramage with my housemate and the same bass-player [Dave Smith],” reveals Barrett. The appallingly named Dain Bramage recorded one album, I Scream Not Coming Down for LA label Fartblossom. “I recorded a few demos with Dain Bramage in my new house. Bands would play and record in our living room.12 I had a little walk-in closet that was the control room. That’s where I did the first Pussy Galore records [Groovy Hate Fuck 13] and Flat Duo Jets.”14
“At that point we’d started taking acid and listening to Houses Of The Holy [Led Zeppelin’s righteous 1973 album, from which ‘Rain Song’ is taken] every day,” explains Dave. “Our singer/guitarist Reuben Radding introduced us to [singer with Seventies NYC art-punks Television] Tom Verlaine, the New York No Wave scene and the post-punk stuff like Mission Of Burma15 and R.E.M. We didn’t fit in with DC bands like Rites Of Spring, Embrace, Beefeater, the whole Revolution Summer thing16, because we were a rock band with a hardcore rhythm section. That’s when I got into the dynamic of a delicate melody over a thunderous rhythm section. Hüsker Dü was the band we got compared to the most.”
“Dave had a part-mullet when I first met him,” laughs Barrett, “with long hair at the back. The first time he ever picked up drumsticks, he was amazing. He was really rough, but he could play so loose. Dale Crover was Dave’s favourite drummer.”
Crover, and also Led Zeppelin’s wild man thumper John Bonham17: “I used to rip him off like crazy,” Grohl told Azerrad. Dave drew Bonham’s three-circle logo on his drum kit – later, he’d get variations of it tattooed on his arms. “I was just amazed by Bonham’s sense of feel,” Grohl says. “He’s still the best rock drummer in the world. He was such an inspiration. Before that, when I was 13, I gave myself a Black Flag tattoo, prison style, with a needle and pen ink.
“Most of the rock music I enjoyed was kind of aggressive, like early AC/DC,” Dave explains. “Really, my first punk rock moment was going to see [AC/DC’s] Let There Be Rock, the movie. It was the first time I’d felt that energy, like I just wanted to break something. Hardcore and punk rock and thrash metal was like a dream come true, taking all of that energy to an extreme. The thing I didn’t like about a lot of rock music was the superhuman pretension. I had a Kiss poster, but I didn’t think they were a ‘good’ band. I liked them as comic book characters. But I had an AC/DC poster, and when I looked up at [rhythm guitarist] Malcolm Young, I was like, I wanna be that guy, fucking jeans and a T-shirt, he hasn’t taken a shower all week, he’s drunk and he just plays music for the sake of it.”
Who cares if Nirvana could rock and wrote catchy refrains? Anyone can rock and write catchy refrains. Fuck. Give me five minutes and the fingerings to three chords, and I’ll write you a song to set the world ablaze. There’s nothing smart or clever about having the ability to plug your amplifier into the wall and flick the switch to ‘on’. The chords in ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, that famous guitar riff that helped launch a thousand MTV executives’ bank balances, are basically Boston’s ‘More Than A Feeling’ updated.
But the reinforcement of rock stereotypes wasn’t on Nirvana’s agenda, even if it did help shift the units. Nirvana had far more to offer the public than that. Nirvana played punk rock as preached by UK bands like The Raincoats and Slits and The Pastels, not the hardcore of Henry Rollins’ Black Flag and Minor Threat. At their finest, at Kurt’s finest, Nirvana’s music recalled the hurt, overly sensitive soul of punk outcasts like Half Japanese’s Jad Fair and Austin idiot savant poet/singer Daniel Johnston.
Nirvana’s soulful force came from the female side of Kurt’s nature – nourished and fed by Olympian people like Calvin Johnson and Bikini Kill and, yes, even Courtney Love. This wasn’t rock in the classic sense, far from it. Kurt might have loved the heavy metal riffs that helped free him from a life of small-town drudgery in Aberdeen but he was also aware that there was a better way than simply to emulate the people creating those riffs.
In 1986, Dave Grohl joined Scream. The band had started off on Dischord, but by the time Grohl joined, they’d moved to reggae label Ras, and recorded their fourth LP, the Bad Brains-influenced No More Censorship. Dave recorded two live albums, and one studio album with the hardcore outfit. “I did one American tour with them in October 1987 as soundman/ roadie,” states Barrett Jones. “It was really fun. Most of the shows were set up by kids, but the venues were pretty big, like 300–500. One show, at an old casket company in Texas, there was no PA. Some kid tried to bring his own PA – a little guitar amp and a mic. After the show, the promoter didn’t want to pay the band, and pulled a gun. Texas is crazy.”
“Scream are legendary,” explains Grohl. “Most of the DC hardcore scene came from DC and Maryland. In Virginia, you’re right there on the Mason/Dixon line. If you go south of DC, you’re considered to be in ‘the South’. Though I wasn’t raised a redneck, I grew up with duck-hunting and pick-up trucks. Virginians were considered a little more bum-fuck than others. The DC hardcore scene was almost impenetrable – it was hard to get into that scene as an outsider.
“But Scream were badass. The first time I saw them was in ’83; I was still a kid, and they were so fucking good. They played rock music, but they also played hardcore, influenced by Bad Brains. They’d slip into reggae. They were fucking musical. And they were from Virginia! When I learnt that, I almost lost my fucking mind. They were my idols.
“One day in ’86 I walked into our local music store in Fall’s Church, Virginia to buy some drumsticks, and on the bulletin board it said, ‘Scream: Looking for drummer, call Franz’. Ho-ly shit! I called Franz [ Stahl, guitars] up, lied about my age – I was 17 at the time and told him I was 22. He never called back. Eventually, I convinced him to let me audition. He asked me if I wanted to play some covers, some Zeppelin or AC/DC. I said, ‘No, let’s play some Scream.’ I’d seen these guys play a hundred times. We ran through their whole fucking catalogue, note for note. And they asked me to join. I freaked out, because this was a band that had toured Europe and the States several times. I’d never been past Ohio. I had to drop out of high school. It was a little nerve-wracking, but I did it.
“One of the reasons I fell in love with the scene,” Grohl continues, “was because it was such a strong community. It was totally independent: all fanzines and tape trading and independent booking agents, stuffing your own sleeves, making your own singles, screening your own T-shirts, stuffing your equipment in a van and sleeping on people’s floors, going to Europe and playing squats where you walk in with your equipment in your hand and they’re still trying to rig the equipment to the electricity from the building next door. And it was so great, because the motive was so pure. I didn’t even care if I ate. I just wanted to play.
“We had a rough ride in Scream, though. We toured America I don’t know how many fucking times. We stayed on the road, so we didn’t have to work at home. We’d never come home with any money, but while we were out there, we’d get somewhere to sleep, people would feed us, we’d maybe get a couple of beers at every show. And that was fine. But then things started happening in the band, where people would quit because they couldn’t take it any more, and then there’d be a replacement, and then they would come back, and then they’d quit again, and back and forth. Some people got fucked up on drugs. I started thinking working at the Furniture Warehouse wasn’t so bad. That maybe the seven dollar per diem wasn’t enough; you can only eat so much Taco Bell. I was smoking more and more cigarettes, and those aren’t cheap either. It all came to a head when we were in Los Angeles on our last tour in 1990, and our bass-player split without telling anyone.
“So I called Buzz from the Melvins and said, ‘Uh, Skeeter [Thompson, bass] quit again, we’re stuck here.’ He said, ‘What are you gonna do?’ I said, ‘I have no idea, nobody wants to release a record, and I don’t have any money.’ I was tiling floors in Costa Mesa coffee shops just to get enough to eat. And he said, ‘Have you ever heard of Nirvana? Those guys came to see you play at th
e I Beam in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, and they’re looking for a drummer, and they commented to me how impressed they were with your drumming. Maybe you should call them.’ ”
Dave had actually noticed Kurt and Krist after the Scream gig, but he didn’t say hi: “I was talking to Buzz and Dale in San Francisco,” Grohl told Vox journalist Shaun Phillips in 1992. “And there was this real huge, tall guy going, ‘ Wuh-uh, wuh-uh,’ waving his arms like Shaggy imitating Robbie The Robot. And there was another guy sitting in a corner like he was taking a shit.”
“Chris, who was 6' 8",” Grohl told Mojo journalist Stevie Chick in 2005, “was all over the room, drinking and laughing, and Kurt, who was 5' 5", was so quiet. [Dave still refers to his old bandmate by the name he first knew him, Chris – not Krist.] I remember asking someone, ‘Who are those guys? That’s Nirvana? You’re kidding me, no shit!’ ”
The three musicians nearly met again shortly afterwards, at a party in Olympia thrown by Slim Moon. “Scream was playing in town and they all came to my party,” Slim recalls. Neither Slim nor Kurt thought too much of Scream as people, especially when Dave started making fun of Tobi Vail who was playing on stage that night. Dave disparagingly refers to her performance in Come As You Are as that “sad little girl with the bad fucking songs”.18
“They were real rocker dudes,” Kurt stated bluntly. “I hated them. I thought they were assholes.” Matters weren’t improved when Dave tried to get his Primus19 tape played.
“So I waited, held on to the phone number,” continues Dave. “I felt lost enough as it is, and I’d never imagined moving away from Virginia. After a few more days of starving I thought, what the fuck. I called Chris, and said hello. I asked if they were looking for a drummer, and they said they’d already asked Dan Peters to join. But they said they’d give me a call when they came into town, we’d have some drinks and it would be fun. And that was it.
“They called back that night and said, maybe it’s a good idea that you come up and play. I spoke to them a few times, and we talked about music. They both knew and liked Scream. We had a lot in common. We loved everything from Neil Young to Public Enemy, from Black Flag to Black Sabbath. Right off the bat, we seemed compatible. So I went to the record store and bought a copy of Bleach, and played it 10 times, and went to U-Haul and bought a big fucking cardboard box. I dismantled my drum kit and telescoped them into a shell, threw my duffle bag in it and duct taped it up, and flew up to Seattle.
“I didn’t know what to expect. I only knew Nirvana from the cover of Bleach, and they looked like these dirty fucking biker children. I didn’t expect them to be as sweet as they were. I’d been to Seattle about two months before I joined Nirvana. My mother was considering retiring and she wanted a report as to its suitability. After I got there I called her and said, ‘Seattle’s a beautiful city with good people, great food, mountains and oceans.’ At that time it hadn’t become the most overcrowded city in America. It was progressive, liberal. I loved Seattle, but I didn’t know anyone there. So I showed up with my one box, and Chris and Kurt greeted me at the airport.”
Trying to be friendly, Dave offered Kurt an apple. “No thanks,” Kurt said. “It’ll make my teeth bleed.”
“We jumped into their old van,” Dave continues, “went up to Chris’ house and I started living there.”
“[Back in DC] my landlady found out about the studio in the house, and flipped out,” Barrett Jones recalls. “She showed up one night when I was practising with a band and went, ‘ AAAAAHHH!’ Gave me two weeks to get out of there. That exact same time, Scream fell apart in LA. I was trying to get Dave to come back so we could do our band [Churn] for real and he mentioned this band in Seattle, Nirvana. He said he was going to blow them away. I knew it would happen. I mean, you can’t deny his drumming.”
“So I moved to Tacoma and lived there for a month and a half with Chris, and then I moved down to Olympia with Kurt,” adds Dave. “We lived in this tiny apartment that was just fucking demolished, an absolute fucking dumpster, and I was on a sleeping schedule where I would go to sleep about 6.30 in the morning – the sun never really rises there in the winter months anyway – and wake up maybe around 4.30 in the afternoon, just as the sun was going down.
“We were doing a lot of rehearsing in this barn out in Tacoma [Nirvana’s new rehearsal space with brown shag carpet and a massive PA that hissed], and we had no television. It was just a small stack of albums, a four-track, cigarette butts and corndog sticks everywhere. There were nights where it was so quiet, and Kurt was in his bedroom writing lyrics or journals or poetry or whatever, and my home was the couch, which was about four and a half feet long – I’m six feet tall – it was just a fucking nightmare!”
Dave’s first show with Nirvana was at the North Shore Surf Club in Olympia on October 11, 1990. The show sold out with just one day’s warning. “The Surf Club was a large, empty bar that held probably 300 people,” remembers Slim Moon. “The kids were going crazy for Nirvana. Something happened once Dave Grohl joined. Suddenly, they seemed much bigger.”
The power blew twice during the opening cover of The Vaselines’ ‘Son Of A Gun’, and Dave was drumming so hard that he broke a snare drum – which Kurt picked up and took to the front of the stage, thereby announcing the arrival of the band’s new, and final, drummer.
“If he ever leaves the band, we’re breaking up,” said Krist.
Still, Grohl’s inclusion had been last minute – so last minute that when the band arrived in London for the start of a week-long UK tour with L7, their tour manager Alex Macleod was expecting to see Dan Peters walk through customs, as his name was listed on the itinerary. He wasn’t a fan of Grohl’s, having already met Scream. “ Fuck,” thought Dave, when he saw Alex waiting at the gate. “ Fuck,” thought Alex. Another Peel Session was recorded the day Nirvana arrived, four cover versions: The Wipers’ ‘D-7’, Devo’s ‘Turnaround’ and The Vaselines’ ‘Molly’s Lips’ and ‘Son Of A Gun’. The tour was sold out – drawing around 600 people every night, and, at London’s Astoria on October 24, over twice that.
“That tour was when I first met Dave,” comments Craig Montgomery. “It was like a big breath of fresh air. He was young and fun and funny. He gave them the sound that took them over the top. And his ability to harmonise with Kurt’s vocals really improved the live show. He sounded and looked much more solid.”
“Dave was a really nice geeky kid, larger than life,” says Anton Brookes. “He had a mass of hair with dreadlocks. He had shorts cut down from combat trousers, with long johns underneath. His hands would be moving, doing impressions, taking the piss out of everyone. He was always smiling, very cuddly. He fitted in straight away. They became a rock band when Dave joined. He unified with Kurt and Krist – because for a long time it had just been those two, all the line down from school. He was the final piece in the jigsaw. Not only was he a powerhouse, he gave Nirvana a different dimension.”
“I remember Kurt was so fucking psyched about Dave,” says Janet Billig. L7 were a hard-rocking all-female band from LA, sometimes erroneously lumped in with Riot Grrrl – much to their anger, as they viewed it as exclusionary and patronising, although that was better than being called foxcore, a term invented by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore to describe bands like Babes In Toyland, L7, NYC’s trash-loving Lunachicks, Dickless and Hole.
“Nirvana and L7 were always hanging out in the same dressing room, getting drunk and doing crazy things,” recalls Craig. “Playing pranks on each other and the venue, and throwing food. Someone punched a hole in a door, or pushed out a panel, and everyone stuck their heads through it and screamed at each other. There was a lot of videotaping going on, people acting out of their heads . . . it really did feel like being at the centre of the universe.”
For entertainment, Nirvana had a video recorder with two tapes, Monty Python and This Is Spinal Tap, mandatory viewing for any touring rock band.
“Kurt had to conserve his voice,” Craig explains. �
�If he sang too many days in a row he would start being worried about his voice. He never went for singing lessons, not that I know of. I don’t think you could sing properly, the way he sang. It ripped his vocal cords to shreds. He was always taking some kind of cough syrup. He was always sick.
“They were still doing their own soundchecks,” the soundman adds. “Kurt needed a lot of vocal monitor and it was hard to get enough of him because of how loud they played. The only way to really test it was to do it with him. If you didn’t get it checked, then there were going to be feedback problems. That was a continual worry for us.”
“Kurt and Krist came over to the house one evening for tea,” recalls Anton Brookes. “Kurt had crazy-coloured his hair blue, and was sat there like he’d gone to meet his girlfriend’s parents for the first time, strait-laced, very polite. My roommates were all like, ‘Oh my God! It’s Kurt Cobain!’ They wanted to go in, say hello and get autographs, but they were too scared. If they’d had mobile phones they’d have been taking pictures, sending messages saying, ‘You won’t believe who’s here.’ Nirvana weren’t big yet, but already everyone was going round saying, ‘This is the band that’s going to make it.’ ”
It was while the band was in Edinburgh that Kurt met one of his musical heroes, Eugene Kelly of The Vaselines.
“I just have a feeling that they [Eugene and Frances McKee, the two members of The Vaselines] had a really cool relationship,” he told me in 1992. “I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I think it’s amazing when a couple can get together and write some of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard. It’s like they’re sharing their life with people. Eugene and Frances are the [Seventies husband and wife US pop music duo] Captain & Tennille of the underground.”
“I was asked to re-form The Vaselines for a Nirvana gig at Carlton Studios,” Kelly told Q magazine.20 “I knew they were covering ‘Molly’s Lips’, but I was intrigued to find out why they were so keen on us, because we were incredibly obscure. We didn’t know what they’d sound like. When we arrived, their agent approached me and goes, ‘Do you want to meet Kurt?’ He said that Kurt was nervous about meeting me!”