This is a Call

by Paul Brannigan

  ‘Before Seattle I’d never been exposed to rock,’ True admitted in 2006. ‘Punk in 1977 had seen to that. It’s unlikely I would have been half as enthusiastic about Seattle and its music if I, like my American counterparts, had grown up on a diet of Led Zeppelin and hardcore. But I hadn’t, and neither had most of my British contemporaries. Reared on a constantly changing musical culture where the press determined that bands grew old very quickly, we were always on the lookout for the thrill of the new. Consequently I was able to write about what was essentially traditional rock music with real enthusiasm. The Sub Pop rock bands, both in spirit and in sound, were new to this naïve English boy.

  ‘Here were bands that achieved what I had thought hitherto impossible : they made metal sound cool. During the mid-eighties pop music was anti-guitar. Jon and Bruce’s stroke of marketing genius was to push rock ’n’ roll as rebellion – an ancient credo – while allowing people to listen to big dumb rock and retain their hipster credibility. Up until grunge, there had always been a line drawn between popular and underground music. Sub Pop confused that line once and for all.’

  True’s feature focused largely on Sub Pop’s big hitters Mudhoney and Tad, a monstrously heavy, elephantine riff machine fronted by the super-sized Tad Doyle. While in Seattle, he was also taken to see one of Sub Pop’s brightest new hopes, Aberdeen, Washington’s Nirvana, a ragged ‘power trio’ featuring vocalist/guitarist Kurdt Kobain (as Kurt Cobain was spelling his name at the time), bassist Chris (Krist) Novoselic and drummer Chad Channing.

  True had just made Nirvana’s début single Love Buzz/Big Cheese one of his Melody Maker Singles of the Week. He had hailed the band as ‘beauty incarnate’ playing ‘love songs for the psychotically disturbed’.

  Now featuring a second guitarist, Jason Everman, in their line-up, Nirvana played their first show as a quartet at the University of Washington’s HUB Ballroom on 25 February 1989. Seeing the band in the flesh for the first time, True was far from impressed. In his 2006 Nirvana biography Nirvana: The True Story, he described Nirvana as ‘another formless compendium of noise for noise’s sake’.

  ‘I loved their single,’ he wrote, ‘but what was this mess of noise and hair and alcohol-fuelled banter?’

  This, however, wasn’t the story that he told the readers of Melody Maker in March 1988.

  ‘Basically, this is the real thing,’ he enthused. ‘No rock star contrivance, no intellectual perspective, no master plan for world domination. You’re talking about four guys in their early twenties from rural Washington who wanna rock, who, if they weren’t doing this, would be working in a supermarket or lumber yard, or fixing cars. Kurdt Kobain is a great tunesmith, although still a relatively young songwriter. He wields a riff with passion.’

  The seeds of a new rock revolution had been sown.

  ‘Jumping the shark’ is what cultural commentators call the precise moment when an established brand or creative enterprise abandons its core premise and begins an irretrievable decline. For Scream, that moment comes with the penultimate track on 1988’s No More Censorship album. ‘Run to the Sun’ is a painfully sincere sub-U2, arena rock tune which even Pete Stahl’s heartfelt lyrics (‘I remember when we began / Getting together to make a band / Mixed-up teenagers, think you’re strong-minded men / We started playing to take a stand’) cannot redeem. The track was barely recognisable as a Scream song; moreover it was symptomatic of a broader malaise within the band at the time: for the first time in their career, Scream sounded like followers, not leaders.

  Neutered by a flat, featureless production job, No More Censorship isn’t a bad album … but it’s not within touching distance of greatness. While the title track and ‘Fucked Without a Kiss’, a graphic, unflinching tale of prison rape in a DC jail, are among the most compelling of Scream’s career, too much of the album is mannered and mediocre, bearing little of the muscular flexibility showcased on Live! At Van Hall. Hyped up as a record to propel Scream out of the underground, in reality No More Censorship sounded suspiciously like the work of a band running desperately low on inspiration.

  ‘Our idea of making this huge rock record didn’t really pan out,’ Grohl admitted, with some understatement.

  In 1989, less than a year after the release of No More Censorship, Scream were dropped by RAS Records. The album had sold around 10,000 copies, a decent return for an underground band, but far less than both the band and Gary Himelfarb had anticipated: by way of comparison, Dag Nasty’s 1988 album Field Day had shifted in excess of 30,000 copies while Hüsker Dü’s Candy Apple Grey album was heading north of 120,000 sales. Scream were in danger of looking like yesterday’s men.

  This was not the only problem facing the band in 1989: Skeeter Thompson’s drug use was also becoming an issue. As a collective, Scream had always been heavily into pot-smoking, but as their commitment to long tours intensified, so too did their drug use. More than one band member graduated from smoking pot to snorting powders. ‘Drugs entered the picture towards the end of the band,’ says Dave Grohl. ‘There was cocaine and shit going around. Still to this day I’ve never done coke, one of the reasons being that I saw how it fucked everybody’s lives up. I can’t touch that shit, because if I did I would surely go down in a ball of flames. I got sent to hospital after drinking coffee, so imagine what fucking crack cocaine would do to me! I’d have no teeth and I’d be sucking dicks in like a month.’

  During a 1989 tour of Europe, Skeeter Thompson disappeared, without a word to anyone. Efforts to track him down proved fruitless, so Pete Stahl promoted roadie Guy Pinhas to the vacant bass slot, and Scream completed their scheduled dates without him. When they returned to Virginia, they found Thompson waiting for them. The bassist blamed his absence upon ‘girlfriend problems’: his friends pried no further.

  ‘It wasn’t completely unusual for Skeeter to disappear in Europe,’ says Franz Stahl. ‘He was a handsome lad, and he had a special way with the ladies. In the States he’d be called a “nigger” and then he’d go to Europe and have all these white women just throwing themselves at him, and he took full advantage of that, like anybody would. It was like the Hendrix syndrome, and he dove headlong into it. He’d disappear for a bit and come back with a new suit of clothes, with some girl having bought him an all-new wardrobe. But this time his problems seemed to run deeper and he clearly needed space to get his life together.’

  With Thompson temporarily incapacitated, Scream were desperate to regain some momentum. DC punk veteran Ben Pape was swiftly recruited for their next US road trip. Remarkably, he too bailed out without warning, walking out mid-tour to join The Four Horsemen, a new hard rock band assembled by Slayer/Beastie Boys producer Rick Rubin. The band immediately flew out ex-Government Issue bassist J. Robbins to complete the tour, but morale was sinking: ‘I had a really good time with those guys, and it was super fun playing with Dave,’ recalls Robbins. ‘But even when I was in the band I was thinking, “Well, this is cool, but this isn’t Scream.”’

  ‘Maybe we weren’t perfectly content with the hand that had been dealt to us at that point, but we’d certainly accepted it as a reality,’ says Grohl. ‘Growing up the way we did in suburban Virginia I didn’t feel like I had many opportunities. I had surrendered to, and resigned myself to, the idea that I would live the rest of my life there, doing the things that most people there do: like masonry, which I’ve done, or working in Furniture Warehouse, which I’ve done, or roofing. I just figured, Isn’t the idea just to do what you love to do and be happy? Because how much do you need, really? I was playing music, and going on the road to Europe and not making any money but coming home and getting my job back, and then having enough money to buy weed and eat and then going on the road again. Then I’d sleep in the van and fucking jam with my buddies and come home and get another job. That was just how it worked. Skeeter sold weed, Pete worked at the Washington Post and Franz worked at a restaurant, so as much as we wanted to be a band that millions of people would appreciate, it just wasn’t in t
he fucking cards. Hüsker Dü were playing places that held 1,200 people, and we considered them to be like U2. That was huge. If we had any aspirations it was that, and at that point even that was an impossibility.’

  At a low ebb, the band returned to the basement of Scream House to demo some new material. Stung by the poor reception afforded to No More Censorship, and bitter about the ongoing problems shackling their progress, their anger and frustration manifested itself in songs darker, heavier and more aggressive than anything they had previously recorded. One track in particular, ‘Gods Look Down’, a seething, down-tuned dirge which sounded like the final anguished screams of a man drowning in quicksand, stood out. Originally demoed at Laundry Room Studios in 1988, this was Dave Grohl’s first-ever solo track.

  ‘Barrett Jones was in a band called Churn at the time and he’d sometimes ask me to come over and play drums on his demos,’ Grohl recalls. ‘So then I thought, Maybe I’ll ask if I can use the last bit of that reel and experiment, so I’d buy Barrett a little weed and he’d let me use the last bits of his tapes. I had a couple of riffs and I played them really quick, and then ran in and did the drum track and then the bass, and I listened to it and it sounded fucking great. And “Gods Look Down” was the first time I wrote a song, recorded it with vocals and had my own complete song.’

  ‘I was totally blown away by how good it was,’ says Barrett Jones. ‘He had the exact arrangement in his head and he did the whole thing in twenty minutes, first take with everything, no mistakes. He made it look so easy. It was pretty incredible to see.’

  Recorded in their darkest hour, Scream’s new basement demos were a revelation, the sound of a band with their backs against a wall, lashing out ferociously with everything at their disposal. As tapes of the demo began circulating on the underground, word began building that Scream had created their masterpiece. Pete Stahl was contacted by Glenn E. Friedman, the North Carolina-born, LA-raised photographer whose images of the nascent skateboarding, hardcore and hiphop scenes had superbly captured the anarchic energy inherent in America’s emergent youth culture: the photographer, who had previously helped broker LA skate-punks Suicidal Tendencies break into the mainstream, offered to help find Scream a new record deal. Through his work with the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC and Public Enemy, Friedman had become friends with Def Jam’s owners, producer Rick Rubin and New York hiphop entrepreneur Russell Simmons, and the trio were in talks about launching Friedman’s own imprint, to be called World Records. In the newly re-invigorated Scream, Friedman saw a credible marquee signing for his new enterprise.

  The quartet returned to Europe in spring 1990 with a renewed fire in their bellies. They played 23 shows in 24 days, cutting a second live album at the Oberhaus in Alzey, Germany, on 4 May for the German independent label Your Choice. Attendances were strong and the band departed for the USA in good spirits. Back on home soil, their optimism was soon cruelly dashed. Friedman’s label plans were on hold, and his A&R connections at major labels didn’t share his enthusiasm for Scream’s new demo. As an additional kick in the teeth, when Pete Stahl and Skeeter Thompson returned to DC they discovered that they had been evicted from their shared house. Scream’s future suddenly looked bleaker than ever.

  ‘Pete wound up staying in his van in front of my mother’s house while we figured out what to do next,’ says Grohl. ‘And our plan was, let’s just book a tour and get the fuck out of here. It was an escape, it was almost like we could survive on the road better than we could at home. But then we started that tour and shows were being cancelled all over the place. We were getting desperate.

  ‘If you read through my journals, you’d see the gradual decline in morale as that tour went on. The struggle was getting more and more difficult. And as I was getting older, even though I was only 21 years old, I was starting to question this as a life decision. I was like, “Do I really want to be homeless for the rest of my life?” There was one entry from New Orleans where I was stranded on a fucking kerb in the middle of fucking nowhere for hours, waiting for the guys to pick me up. I had no money and no food and no smokes … nothing. I was completely stranded with no lifeline at all, just a backpack and my journal. And so I dug the pen a little deeper that day and I wrote about all the things I was tired of. I was tired of having absolutely nothing; I was tired of being hungry, tired of being lost, and tired of being tired. I just wanted to go home and work at the Furniture Warehouse, and have somewhere to take a shower, and go to bed every night and be with my friends and my family. Because it had been three or four years from 18 to 21 of just loving every moment of playing, but getting tired of that struggle … and there being no other option.

  ‘When we got to LA, Skeeter disappeared. We woke up one morning and he wasn’t there. We had a gig that night at a club called The Gaslight and we waited and waited and thought, Okay, so when do we cancel it? By 7 p.m., when he hadn’t shown up, we cancelled. And then the next night we had a show booked in San Diego. So we waited and waited and we started calling everyone, like, “Have you seen Skeeter?” but no one had seen him. He had just disappeared. So that was it, we were stuck.’

  It soon became apparent that Thompson wasn’t coming back. Scream were now stranded, penniless and depressed on the West Coast, a broken band.

  ‘We were in LA for a month, with nothing,’ says Grohl. ‘We were sleeping on the floor of this really nice house rented out by three girls who were mud wrestlers at the Hollywood Tropicana. One of them was Pete and Franz’s sister Sabrina, a beautiful, sweet, good girl who happened to be making a lot of money mud-wrestling, to the dismay of her two older brothers, who just wanted her to change her life. But they were hardly in a position to start giving lectures. Every night these chicks would come home and dump out mountains of one dollar bills on the table and count them in front of us. They were nice girls, they took care of us and would take us out for Thai food, or let us ride their motorbikes, but still, we were living in poverty. And I thought, What, does it just end here? Now I’m gonna spend the rest of my life in Los Angeles? I had no way to get back home. I guess I could have called home and asked for the money for a Greyhound ticket, but I didn’t even know if my mom could do that. We were just lost.’

  While kicking his heels in Sabrina Stahl’s house on Satsuma Avenue, Grohl read in the LA Weekly that Melvins were coming to town. Scream and Melvins had recently played together at San Francisco’s I-Beam club, and the two bands were now firm friends, so Grohl placed a call to Buzz Osbourne to ask if he might be able to get a spot on their guest list for their upcoming LA show. Osbourne was surprised to hear that his friends were in Los Angeles, and asked Grohl what they were doing in the city. The drummer poured out the whole depressing tale.

  ‘And then Buzz said, “Have you heard of Nirvana?”’ Grohl recalls. ‘He said, “They’re looking for a drummer.” And he gave me Chris’s number.’

  Grohl had heard of Nirvana, indeed he owned the Aberdeen trio’s début album Bleach. But he knew nothing of the band beyond their music and their status as an underground buzz band: indeed, the previous month he had stood in the I-Beam’s dressing room with Cobain and Novoselic without recognising either man.

  ‘Someone told me who they were and I was thinking, What, that’s Nirvana? Are you kidding? Because on the cover of Bleach they looked like psycho lumberjacks. I was like, “What, that little dude and that big motherfucker? You’re kidding me.” I laughed, like, “No way.”

  ‘But I loved Bleach, I thought it was great. It had everything that I really loved about music. It had The Beatles influence on “About a Girl” and then songs like “Paper Cuts” and “Sifting” were heavy as balls. And “Negative Creep” was amazing. And girls liked Nirvana. I had a girlfriend that liked Nirvana and I was like, “You like a band that I like? Wow!” So I knew that Nirvana were successful in the underground scene and surely that was some motivation for me to call.

  ‘So then I talked to Chris and Kurt on the phone, but I didn’t tell Pete and Franz I was talkin
g to them. But when I first called, Chris said, “Oh man, Dan Peters from Mudhoney is our drummer now.” And I said, “Oh, well, if you come down here, call me up and let’s hang out … because I’m fucking stranded here!” And then he called back and said, “You know, actually let’s talk about this …”

  ‘Those guys liked Scream and they were bummed that we’d broken up, but they also loved Mudhoney, and they didn’t want to be responsible for breaking Mudhoney up. So then I got on the phone with Kurt and in talking to the two of them we realised, Wow, we kinda come from the same place. I love Neil Young and Public Enemy, I love Celtic Frost and The Beatles, and they were the same in that way. We all came from divorced families. We all discovered punk rock and grew up listening to Black Flag but we also loved John Fogerty. We were all little dirtbags who loved to play rock music. So it seemed like we might have a connection.

  ‘So then I was faced with this decision, maybe the hardest decision of my entire life. It was, do I leave Pete and Franz and move on and join another band, or do I stay in Los Angeles? Pete and Franz were my best friends. I looked up to Pete like he was my father, he taught me so much, and I respected him so much and we were so close. But to be honest I just didn’t want to stay in Los Angeles and suffer any more. And for me to do that would mean leaving Pete and Franz …’

  Agonising over his decision, Grohl picked up the phone and called Kathleen Place to ask his mother for her advice.

  ‘She loved Pete and Franz as much as I did, we were family,’ he says. ‘And she basically said, of course you need to do what you need to do, but you have to look out for yourself in this situation.’

  When he replaced the handset, Grohl made his decision.

  ‘I remember saying to Franz, “I’m going to go up there to try out.” And he said, “You ain’t coming back.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know if I have the gig.” And he shook his head and said, “You ain’t coming back.”