This is a Call

by Paul Brannigan

  In August 1990, at Thurston Moore’s invitation, the band were invited to open a clutch of West Coast dates for Sonic Youth. Moore, his partner Kim Gordon and Dinosaur Jr’s J. Mascis had caught a Nirvana show in New Jersey the previous summer, and had been blown away by the band’s brutish power. Having acquired a dubbed copy of Nirvana’s Smart Studios cassette, he was now talking the band up to everyone he knew. For Cobain, the opportunity to support the revered New York noiseniks was too good to pass up, irrespective of the fact that his band once again had no drummer. With Dan Peters committed to a European festival tour with Mudhoney, Cobain turned to his old friend Dale Crover for help once more.

  Two days before the tour was due to start at Bogart’s in Long Beach, California, Cobain, Novoselic and Craig Montgomery drove down to San Francisco to meet up with Crover at Buzz Osbourne’s house. It was then that Osbourne suggested the party should head over to the I-Beam to watch his friends in Scream.

  Cobain took some persuading. Together with his next-door neighbour Slim Moon, the owner of Olympia’s Kill Rock Stars record label, the singer had gone to see the band from Bailey’s Crossroads play Tacoma’s Community World Theater back in October 1987, during Dave Grohl’s first tour with the Stahl brothers. Expecting a set of righteous punk rock, Cobain was horrified to discover that Scream’s live show was now largely built around the kind of strutting hard rock he himself was trying to disown.

  ‘Kurt hated it,’ remembers Slim Moon, still a respected figure in Olympia’s tight-knit and fiercely independent musical community. ‘He kept saying, “It sucks when good bands turn into Van Halen.” For some reason he was particularly annoyed that they were playing guitar solos on Telecasters. He talked about how much he hated it for the whole drive home.’

  Back in San Francisco, Cobain agreed to go to the I-Beam to keep the peace. This time he didn’t notice what guitars Franz Stahl was playing, or that Pete Stahl dressed more like Sammy Hagar than Ian MacKaye. This time his focus was solely upon Scream’s powerhouse drummer.

  ‘I was standing with Kurt and Chris,’ recalls former Nirvana soundman Craig Montgomery, ‘and Kurt said, “That’s the kind of drummer we need.” Dave had an energy that was hard to miss and Kurt and Chris were pretty blown away by his playing. He seemed like a good fit for what they were doing.’

  Six weeks later Dave Grohl packed his drums into a large cardboard box and boarded a flight bound for Seattle.

  Grohl arrived in Seattle on the afternoon of Friday 21 September 1990. Cobain and Chris Novoselic were at the city’s Sea-Tac airport to greet him. As Novoselic nudged his Volkswagen van out of the airport for the 29-kilometre drive to his home in Tacoma, where Grohl was due to crash for his first few weeks in Washington, the drummer offered Cobain an apple to break the ice.

  ‘No thanks,’ said Cobain. ‘It’ll make my teeth bleed.’

  The rest of the journey was conducted in silence.

  The following evening Nirvana were billed to play an all-ages show with local punks Derelict, Dwarves and Melvins at Seattle’s 1,500-capacity Motor Sports International Garage. The gig was a huge deal for the band: it was by far their biggest hometown headline show to date, and Sub Pop had flown journalist Keith Cameron and photographer Ian Tilton from Sounds magazine across from London to write a cover story on the group ahead of their first full UK headline tour in October. With Mudhoney on hiatus while guitarist Steve Turner finished college, Cobain had asked Dan Peters to play drums for the evening. That afternoon Cobain informed Grohl that he wouldn’t really be able to speak to him, or introduce him to friends, at the show, as the sudden appearance of an unknown drummer at the gig might set tongues wagging among local scenesters. A bemused Grohl duly watched the show from the crowd, soaking in the atmosphere. He was astonished to see that every other kid in the room seemed to be wearing one of Nirvana’s new Fudge Packin’ Crack Smokin’ Satan Worshippin’ Motherfuckers T-shirts.

  While standing in the crowd, Grohl was recognised by 20-year-old Greg Anderson, a local metalhead who’d caught a Scream show in Olympia just a few weeks previously. The pair struck up a conversation about old school heavy metal while waiting for Melvins to take the stage. Anderson, who had played alongside future Foo Fighter Nate Mendel in local punk acts and now runs heavyweight US metal imprint Southern Lord in addition to playing guitar in a host of experimental/ stoner/doom bands – including the Pete Stahl-fronted Goatsnake – recalls that Grohl was rather more enthused about seeing Buzz Osbourne’s band than his prospective new employers.

  The following day the Novoselics threw a barbecue at their house for the visiting British journalists, and the drummer sat quietly in the background chowing down on surf and turf as Cobain, Novoselic and Peters outlined their future plans to Keith Cameron. The next day he joined Cobain and Novoselic at the Dutchman, the grubby Seattle rehearsal room where the pair had written ‘Sliver’ with Peters just a few months earlier, and auditioned for a vacancy Peters understandably thought had already been filled. Before the trio had finished running through their opening number, Cobain and Novoselic knew that they’d got their man.

  The following day Kurt Cobain dropped in unannounced to Calvin Johnson’s KAOS radio show to play an impromptu four-song acoustic session. During the show he casually informed Johnson that Nirvana had a new drummer, nothing less than ‘the drummer of our dreams’.

  ‘His name is Dave and he’s a baby Dale Crover,’ he enthused. ‘He plays almost as good as Dale. And within a few years’ practice he may even give him a run for his money.’

  ‘This new kid on the block can’t dance as good as your MTV favorites but he beats the drums like he’s beating the shit out of their heads!’ Cobain wrote in an excitable Sub Pop press release. ‘His name is Dave Grohl. Dave is formerly of the Washington D. band Scream. He passed thru the gruelling Nirvana initiation ritual with flying colors and is now an important cornerstone in the Nirvana institution.’

  Dan Peters missed Cobain’s surprise announcement on KAOS. So when Nirvana’s frontman called him the following day, Peters assumed Cobain wanted to talk about the band’s imminent UK tour. Instead, he was sheepishly informed that the band had recruited a new permanent drummer. Communication had never been one of Cobain’s strong points, as Grohl himself had immediately discovered.

  ‘I don’t remember them saying, “You’re in the band,”’ he admitted years later. ‘We just continued.’

  Nirvana’s new drummer played his first gig with the band at the North Shore Surf Club in Olympia on 11 October 1990. The 300-capacity club had sold out within a day of the tickets going on sale, a feat which so impressed Grohl that he felt compelled to phone home to share the news with his mother.

  ‘The venue was down the street from where Kurt and I lived,’ he recalled in 2005. ‘We soundchecked and I went to get something to eat. When I got back there was a line around the block. I called my mother and said, “Mother, there’s at least 200 people in line!” I was amazed. With Scream the band usually outnumbered the audience.’

  The show was sweaty, frenzied and intense. Grohl had to start the set’s opening number, a cover of the Vaselines’ ‘Son of a Gun’, no less than three times, as the band kept blowing the power in the tiny venue. A few songs later the bare-chested drummer put his sticks right through his snare drum skin: Cobain held the broken drum aloft like a war trophy to the cheering crowd. Grohl had officially arrived.

  ‘I felt I had something to prove,’ he later recalled. ‘I knew we sounded good as a band. And we were fucking good that night. Absolutely, I was nervous. I didn’t know anyone – no one in the audience, no one in the band. I was completely on my own. That was the only thing that mattered, that hour on stage. That’s what I was focused on.’

  ‘Grohl was simply a monster,’ says Charles R. Cross. ‘Chad Channing is often underrated; he was a great drummer for the early van-touring Nirvana because he was an affable guy, a talented drummer and he played the punk-era songs of Nirvana as well as anyone. Howeve
r, with Dave Grohl Nirvana became a very different beast. He powered Nirvana’s shows and made them spectacular events. It was Grohl who turned Nirvana into the powerhouse it became.’

  ‘His contribution transformed us into a force of nature,’ said Novoselic. ‘Nirvana was now a beast that walked the earth.’

  Lounge act

  I didn’t really think that much of ‘Teen Spirit’ at first. I thought it was just another one of the jams that we were doing: we had so many jams like that, that we’d record onto a boombox tape and then lose the cassette and lose the song forever. But ‘Teen Spirit’ was one we kept coming back to …

  Dave Grohl

  In the darkness, no one could see the tears streaming down Dave Grohl’s face. It was the evening of 20 October 1990, and Grohl and Kurt Cobain had sneaked into London’s Brixton Academy to catch the final show of Boston alt. rock alchemists Pixies’ sold-out UK tour. Having stepped off an 11-hour trans-Atlantic flight that same afternoon, Grohl was jetlagged and a little spaced out, but as he looked around the cavernous converted theatre and saw the sheer exhilaration etched on the faces of 4,500 sweat-drenched indie-rock fans screaming Black Francis’s surrealist lyrics about ‘slicing up eyeballs’ back at the stage, the euphoria of the evening overcame him and he cried tears of pure joy. That a band this wired, this warped, this utterly uncompromising could connect on such a visceral, human level in a room this size so far from home seemed to Grohl truly transcendent. Just like the B-52s’ appearance on Saturday Night Live a decade previously, it represented a small, but significant, victory for the outsiders, for the freaks. One day, Grohl thought as he blinked back the tears, I want to be up on that stage.

  Nirvana had stages of their own to conquer in the week ahead, in Birmingham, Leeds, Edinburgh, Nottingham, Norwich and London, where the 2,000-capacity Astoria theatre had sold out one month in advance of their arrival. There was a tangible street-level buzz around the band, and Kurt Cobain sensed it. With Grohl behind him, though, he knew his band was ready. For the very first time, Nirvana had a swagger in their step.

  A surprise awaited Grohl in Birmingham on the opening night of the tour. Nirvana’s support band, all-girl rockers L7, were already inside Goldwyn’s Suite when the headliner’s van pulled up outside, and Grohl heard his name being called as soon as he stepped into the venue. L7 bassist Jennifer Finch had booked Scream on a Bad Religion bill in Los Angeles some months previously, and she recognised their former drummer immediately. Before the night was over the pair were making out like teenagers.

  Though the past four years of his life had largely been spent cooped up in foul-smelling tour vans with punk rock lifers for company, finding girlfriends was rarely a problem for Grohl. Holding onto them was a little trickier. His first love, at age 13, was Sandy Moran, the most ‘gorgeous, angelic’ girl in the seventh grade at Oliver Wendell Holmes Middle School. The pair dated for two whole weeks – ‘We’d meet at her locker after every period and give each other hickeys,’ Grohl would later recall – before the feather-haired heartbreaker told her infatuated boyfriend that she didn’t want to get tied down, and dumped him. The following year, aged 14, he lost his virginity to a high school female basketball player two years his senior at a house party; when he returned to school the next week he discovered that his partner had quit school and moved from the area. At 16 he fell ‘hopelessly in love’ with a girl named Wendy, only to see her move to Arizona with her family just weeks after the pair started dating. Looking back, Grohl admits he used to fall in love much too easily. But he had never met a girl like Jennifer Finch.

  A street-smart, ballsy, tomboy-cute 24-year-old, Finch had started playing guitar at age 10 and saw the Ramones as her first punk rock show aged 11. By 14 she was living on the streets of Los Angeles, shooting up drugs during the day and shooting hardcore bands for fanzines at night. She was, in short, the most punk rock girl Dave Grohl had ever met. The pair were inseparable for the remainder of the tour.

  ‘We started dating from the second we met,’ recalls Finch, now working in website development and online marketing in her native Los Angeles. ‘Dave was very cute, very kind and a very sweet person. He was shy and very charismatic, but humble too. I liked him from the start.’

  Blessed with a sassy new girlfriend and a white-hot new band, memories of the misery of Scream’s final tour faded quickly for Grohl. Nirvana’s ten days in the UK were a blur of gigs, press interviews, practical jokes, food fights and passionate drunken fumblings. The trio cut a four-track radio session for long-time supporter John Peel at the BBC’s Maida Vale studios, found themselves courted by major label A&R men and stood for that photo session with the NME’s Martyn Goodacre. Unable to keep a smile off his face the whole time he was in the UK, the excitable young drummer charmed everyone he met.

  ‘The band took a definite step up when Dave joined,’ Nirvana PR Anton Brookes told me in 2010. ‘He took it beyond a level, it became ferocious. He just gave it that extra dimension. Nirvana became a serious contender.

  ‘Kurt had sent me over a tape, recorded over a copy of Bleach, which had “In Bloom” and “Sliver” and “Dive” on it and a few other tracks that went on Nevermind, works in progress. And I remember thinking, “Wow, these are going to be massive, they’re going to be able to sell out Brixton Academy!” Kurt told me that he had other songs that were going to be Top Ten singles. He totally believed it. He knew it.’

  ‘We’re changing a little bit,’ Cobain admitted to Keith Cameron in his Sounds interview. ‘The Bleach album is pretty different to what we’re doing right now. We figured we may as well get on the radio and make a little bit of money at it.

  ‘I don’t wanna have any other kind of job, I can’t work among people. I may as well try and make a career out of this. All my life my dream has been to be a big rock star – just may as well abuse it while you can.’

  When Nirvana returned from the UK Dave Grohl moved in with Cobain at 114 North Pear Street in Olympia. He was quite unprepared for the squalor in which his friend lived: 114 North Pear Street made the scuzzy European squats where Grohl had laid his head during his days with Scream look like palatial Georgetown townhouses. The kitchen was filthy, covered in mould and littered with half-eaten corn-dogs, beer cans and putrefying take-away food. There was only one tiny bedroom, which Cobain had painted black. The living room was cramped and foul-smelling, the TV was broken, and the floor was barely visible beneath the detritus of Cobain’s bachelor life. Half of the room was taken up by Cobain’s stinking turtle aquarium, the other half by a couch which doubled as a spare bed. This was to be Dave Grohl’s home for the next eight months.

  ‘Kurt was an artist,’ says Grohl, ‘and as much as he was a brilliant songwriter, that passion and creativity made its way out of every pore of his body. The apartment we lived in was an experiment: you walked in and there was sculptures and paintings, there were turtles and medical books and Leonard Cohen records, it was chaos. But it was, like, “This is Kurt.”’

  Though he was new in town, Grohl had some familiarity with the neighbourhood in which Cobain lived. Four or five months before moving to Olympia, he had attended a party at the home of Cobain’s next-door neighbour Slim Moon with his bandmates from Scream. It was not a night that held fond memories for the drummer.

  ‘We’d played in some little art gallery space,’ Grohl recalls, ‘and after we played, Slim said, “There’s a party over at my apartment, you guys should come.” So we were like, “Cool! A party? Let’s go get some beer and we’ll come to this party.” But our idea of a party was perhaps different from theirs …

  ‘So we show up, the Scream guys, with a couple of racks of beer and it was Olympia, so the “party” was like kids in poodle skirts listening to Joni Mitchell. That shit was dead. And it was like “What the fuck?” And then a girl came out and played guitar and played a song that was kinda alright, but it wasn’t good. And once that was over we were like “Fuck this!”’

  Grohl went out to Scream’s
tour van, grabbed a cassette of the Frizzle Fry album by Frank Zappa-inspired San Francisco funk-rockers Primus, and cranked it up on Moon’s stereo. His host and fellow partygoers could scarcely have been more mortified had he walked back into the apartment naked, crushing beer cans against his skull and helicoptering his penis.

  ‘So I put on the Primus tape and suddenly I’m the epitome of uncool,’ Grohl remembers. ‘And I’m like, “What, I’m not the cool guy? You all are fucking nerds! Let’s jam and get wasted!”

  ‘That scene … Oh my God, they might as well have been fucking Mormons! As with most everything else in Olympia it felt like everyone was in a suspended reality that they were still 13 years old, that uncomfortable sexual tension of being that old, just past puberty. Everyone was so uncomfortable and nerdy, it just seemed odd. I told this story to Kurt the first time we spoke on the phone. I said, “Yeah, some girl came out and played some really lousy song and she wasn’t any good …” and he was like, “Yeah, that was my girlfriend, Tobi …” I was like, “Fuck, I’m not getting this gig.”’

  Tobi Vail, Cobain’s girlfriend, was a key player in Olympia’s proudly anti-corporate indie-rock scene. The drummer in Calvin Johnson’s minimalist, lo-fi rock band The Go Team, in 1990 she formed the fiercely confrontational feminist-punk band Bikini Kill with singer Kathleen Hanna, and coined the phrase ‘Riot Girl’ as a badge of identity for a movement of politically aware female activists starting their own fanzines, bands, record labels and galleries under the DIY punk umbrella. Alongside Calvin Johnson, his K Records co-owner Candace Pederson and a host of other young artists, musicians, activists and creatives, Vail lived at the Martin Building, Olympia’s answer to Dischord House, and the hub of the Olympia scene.