This is a Call

by Paul Brannigan

  ‘I had advance tapes of Nevermind,’ says Anton Brookes, ‘and it was bizarre, because whenever I went out to a gig I’d just get mobbed by people coming up to me going, “Oh, have you got a tape of that Nirvana album?” There was such a buzz about it. People would stop me in the streets sometimes and go, “Oh my God, so-and-so played me the Nirvana album, it’s incredible.” On the street everybody was talking about it.’

  ‘I first heard Nevermind on a cassette that had the first song slightly clipped,’ says Charles R. Cross. ‘I honestly think I made one hundred dubs of it and those dubs went out to probably thousands: years later I would talk to people who also had ended up with a dub of a tape with the clip. Nevermind was more than a huge leap forward: in many ways it didn’t even sound like the same band that made Bleach. Sonically it was a world apart. But it was the songs – ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, ‘Come As You Are’, ‘Something in the Way’ – that made it. One can’t say enough about what a solid album it is. It may be the single last album that appealed to multiple genre lovers, and that everyone had in their collection. There hasn’t been anything like it since.’

  ‘I had a cassette copy of Nevermind because friends that booked them during the Bleach era were sent the advanced cassette of the album months before it came out,’ Dave Grohl’s future girfriend Melissa Auf der Maur, then a 19-year-old art student in her native Montreal, remembered in an interview for Taking Punk to the Masses. ‘I put that thing on my tape player in my apartment and I cried. I invited every single person over and said, “Listen to this. The world is changed” … I was like, “Nobody is going to listen to anything but this record, because now the world has changed.”’

  ‘When you heard the first notes of the Nirvana record you just knew, you could just tell, that it was absolutely going to change something,’ says Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard, who had helped kickstart the ‘Seattle Sound’ with Green River. ‘It was so obvious that it was the perfect balance of totally straight rock blues and punk rock. And sonically it had nothing to do with Mötley Crüe, which was so refreshing: as much as I loved the first Mötley Crüe record, I was ready for something new.’

  Early reviews of Nevermind were overwhelmingly positive. In his 9/10 NME review, writer (and future broadcaster) Steve Lamacq called it ‘a record for people who like Metallica, but can’t stomach their lack of melody’ and predicted the album would ‘stand up as a new reference point for the future post-hardcore generation’. Kerrang!’s Gordon Goldstein (aka former hardcore promoter/fanzine writer Mike Gitter) awarded the album a maximum KKKKK rating and hailed it as ‘a brutally frank record with a wounded soul’; Rolling Stone was more cautious, bestowing just three stars out of a possible five on the record (though a revisionist tweak on the magazine’s website now suggests Nevermind was granted four stars), but reviewer Ira Robbins recognised the album as a landmark release for the American rock underground.

  Geffen pressed up 46,251 copies of the album in the US and 6,000 copies in the UK and hoped for the best. In truth, their focus was elsewhere: that same week Guns N’ Roses’ epic Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II albums débuted at numbers two and one respectively on the Billboard 200 with first week sales of 685,000 for the first volume and 770,000 for volume two. Compared to the nation’s favourite hard rock band, Nirvana were very much a cult concern.

  On the morning of 24 September, as part of their promotional campaign for the record, Dave Grohl, Chris Novoselic and Mark Kates visited Newbury Comics, Boston’s hippest independent record shop. They didn’t see a single person pick up a copy of the new Nirvana album. ‘We were expecting to see a line around the block, but there wasn’t,’ admits Kates. ‘There was no vibe whatsoever.’ The following morning the band and crew rose early, climbed into their trusty Dodge van and set out for Providence, Rhode Island to resume their tour at Club Babyhead. Among the touring party the vibe was very much business as usual.

  ‘The tour started in Toronto at the Opera House and it seemed like a fairly typical Nirvana gig,’ says Grohl. ‘There were maybe 500 or 600 people there. And to me you have to remember that was like making it – going from the 32 people who would usually come to see Scream in every city to like 500 people, I considered that to be the greatest success of my entire life. The capacities of a lot of the gigs that we were playing were low – we played a place in Portland, Maine or maybe Vermont where the legal capacity was 67, like a tiny little living room of a place, and it was chaotic. But when the video hit MTV it made a big difference.’

  On 30 September MTV introduced the ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ video as a ‘World Premiere’ on its flagship ‘alternative’ show 120 Minutes. Two weeks later the video was moved into the channel’s ‘Buzz Bin’ slot, intended to showcase new talent: artists selected for the ‘Buzz Bin’ could expect to have their video aired between 12 and 30 times a day. With ‘Teen Spirit’ also riding high on the Billboard Alternative, Modern Rock and Top 40 charts, it was becoming increasingly difficult to avoid the Seattle trio.

  ‘It didn’t matter what time of day or night you turned on MTV, “Teen Spirit” was on,’ recalls Anton Brookes. ‘You’d walk down the street and you’d hear it on the radio. You’d walk into a shop or bar and it would be blaring out. Everywhere you went it was there. It was surreal.’

  As Vice-President of his freshman class at Thomas Jefferson High, Grohl would introduce morning classes by playing Black Flag and Bad Brains over the school intercom.

  Grohl (black shirt) and Larry Hinkle (yellow shirt) make a stand for personal freedom in their lacrosse team photo. ‘Dave told us he couldn’t come to every practice as he had a band,’ recalls coach Donald Butcher.

  Grohl (in Necros T-shirt) at Lake Braddock Community Center, shot for the insert of the Mission Impossible/Lünchmeat Thanks EP.

  With Reuben Radding and Dave Smith in Dain Bramage. ‘Playing with Dave Grohl was like having your ass lifted in the air as if by magic,’ says Radding.

  Post-gig beers for the Scream team in Holland, spring 1988.

  Keeping a low profile behind Kurt Cobain at Krist Novoselic’s house in Tacoma, Washington, 23 September 1990.

  Repping Led Zeppelin in London, October 1990.

  Recording a VPRO radio session at NOB Audio in Hilversum, Holland, 25 November 1991.

  Grohl and Krist Novoselic take a break from Nirvana’s ‘tornado of insanity’ in 1992.

  Nirvana in Belfast, 22 June 1992. The following day Cobain was rushed to the city’s Royal Victoria Hospital with a ‘weeping ulcer’.

  Nirvana at Seattle’s Edgewater Hotel, August 1993, during the promo tour for the ln Utero album.

  Foo Fighters’ first ever headline club show, at the Satyricon in Portland, Oregon, 3 March 1995.

  At Robert Lang Studios in Shoreline, Seattle, 26 January 1996. (Left to right) Nate Mendel, William Goldsmith, Dave Grohl, Barrett Jones, Robert Lang, Pat Smear.

  Writing the set-list for the final show of the Foo Fighters album tour, 19 July 1996, at the Phoenix Festival at Long Marston Airfield, Stratford-upon-Avon.

  Looking suave on the ‘Monkey Wrench’ video shoot at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, March 1997.

  Meeting Grohl backstage at London’s Brixton Academy, 23 November 1997.

  Skin and Bones: Foo Fighters in the hot tub at the U2-owned Clarence Hotel, Dublin, July 2002.

  Handsome Devil: Grohl invokes The Great Horned Beast for Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny.

  Laying down apocalyptic thunder in LA for the Killing Joke album.

  With QOTSA’s Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri at the Troubadour, Los Angeles.

  In corpse paint for Kerrang! magazine, London, November 2003.

  Up close and personal with wife Jordyn at the 2006 Grammy Awards after-party at the Roosevelt Hotel, Los Angeles.

  Bonded by Blood: With lifelong friend Jimmy Swanson at The Forum, Inglewood, California, 6 March 2008.

  Rock God: Grohl onstage at Wembley Stadium, London, June 2008.
<
br />   Family Man: Getting down at the Yo Gabba Gabba! Live! There’s a Party in My City! event in Los Angeles, 27 November 2010.

  Foo Fighters with Waisting Light producer Butch Vig in Dave Grohl’s garage in Encino, California, 17 November 2010.

  ‘I’d graduated from college and I was at home vacuuming and I heard this riff and I’m like, “I fucking love this!”’ recalls Grohl’s childhood friend Tracey Bradford. ‘I turned off the vacuum cleaner and turned around to the television to watch MTV and I see this long-haired guy playing the drums with a Scream T-shirt on. And I’m like, “It’s fucking David Grohl! Oh my God!”’

  ‘My band Kyuss was on tour,’ recalls Queens of the Stone Age / Them Crooked Vultures frontman Josh Homme, ‘and I remember seeing the video on MTV at 3 a.m. in a hotel room. I was saying, “Man, this is so good, everyone should be into this music but they’re not going to be, it’s not going to get played because it’s too good.” About a week later I realised how wrong I was …’

  ‘The video was probably the key element in that song becoming a hit,’ says Dave Grohl. ‘People heard the song on the radio and they thought, “This is great,” but when kids saw the video on MTV they thought, “This is cool. These guys are kinda ugly and they’re tearing up their fucking high school.” We were touring and we’d go back to the hotel and turn on the TV and see our video and go, “That’s so funny, we’re on TV, and we’ve just played the 9:30 Club!” or whatever. And then with the video came more people and the clubs got bigger and bigger.

  ‘The only indication that our world was turning upside down would be when you’d get to the venue. That’s when it would be, “Holy shit, these people are fucking nuts.” You’d show up to a 500-capacity gig and there were 500 extra people there. We were still in our little bubble – we were in our van, the three of us, Chris’s wife Shelli, our monitor guy Miles [Kennedy], and Monte Lee Wilkes our tour manager – and it didn’t seem like anything unusual was happening until we’d get to the gig and it was fucking chaos. And we started to notice there were normal people here. We were like, “What are they doing here? That guy looks like a jock, what the fuck is he doing here?” And it was like, “Oh, maybe that video thing is attracting some … riff-raff.”’

  On 12 October 1991 Nevermind entered the Billboard album chart at number 144. That same day Butch Vig drove down to Chicago from Madison to meet up with the band at their headline show at the Metro, the same venue Cobain, Novoselic and Chad Channing had played as a support band on the eve of their Smart Studio session 18 months previously. The drummer was astonished to find around 5,000 people waiting in line for the 1,100-capacity club.

  ‘At that point there was a huge buzz in the air,’ says Vig. ‘People were calling me going, “Oh my God, the Nirvana record is amazing.” And I knew there was this electricity in the air, that something was going to happen for them. I took an artist friend of mine, Bill Rock, to the show and he was like, “Who’s Nirvana?” I said, “They’re going to be the next Beatles.” Right before the band came on they were playing the end of Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish really loud over the PA and that ended right as Nirvana walked onstage so I was double proud in a way. And the second Nirvana walked onstage it was like Beatlemania, kids were just screaming and crying, and Bill was like, “Holy shit!” He didn’t know any of the songs, he just saw them play and saw the crowd reaction and he said, “This is incredible.” And it was. I was thinking, “Wow, this record has really affected people.”’

  By coincidence, Courtney Love was also in Chicago on 12 October. Hole’s lead singer had blown into the Windy City to see her on – off boyfriend Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins, but following an argument with Corgan, Love elected to hook up with Babes in Toyland drummer Lori Barbero for a trip to the Metro instead. Later that evening, she and Kurt Cobain had sex for the first time. Their coupling took place in the hotel room Cobain was sharing with Dave Grohl: after unsuccessfully attempting to block out the sounds of passion emanating from the adjoining bed, Grohl crept out of his own bed and sought refuge in soundman Craig Montgomery’s room. He and Cobain would never be so close again.

  The tour rumbled on. In St Louis, Missouri, the owners of the Mississippi Nights club called in the local police after Cobain, frustrated at the band’s set being interrupted time and time again by over-enthusiastic stage divers, invited the entire 500-strong audience onstage. In Lawrence, Kansas the band hung out with ‘Beat’ legend William Burroughs, a hero to both Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl’s father, James. But in Dallas, Texas on 19 October the tour almost came to a sudden juddering stop, when bouncers at the Trees nightclub threatened to kill the band.

  ‘We had a lot of fun on that tour,’ laughs Grohl. ‘In Dallas, Kurt smashed up the monitor board that belonged to the bouncer standing in front of him, and then jumped into the crowd and hit the guy on the head. The guy’s head was spilling blood and he started to beat Kurt up. And Kurt was totally fucked up. Afterwards, the promoter said, “That guy is gonna come back with his friends and he’s going to fucking kill you, so stay in here, and when I give you the secret knock, I’m gonna get you the fuck outta here and into a cab.” So we run outside: Kurt gets into the cab, Chris gets into the cab … and here comes the guy with all his friends so the cab pulls off … And I have to jump back into the club all by myself. Then they get stuck in traffic and some guy breaks the window. Meanwhile, some chick takes me back in her car … and she gets into a car accident. It was insane.’

  Promoting their new Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge album, Mudhoney were also touring US clubs in October ’91. The two bands’ itineraries were due to converge at the end of the month, with two co-headlining shows, at the Fox Theater in Portland, Oregon on 29 October, and at the Paramount in Seattle on Hallowe’en. When Nirvana arrived in Portland, they were informed by Geffen’s regional sales rep Susie Tennant that Nevermind had passed the 500,000 sales mark, and would now be classified as a gold record by the Recording Industry Association of America. The notion of Nirvana and Mudhoney swapping headlining duties for the tour’s remaining two dates was now deemed fatuous: Nirvana would headline both shows.

  The band returned to Seattle as conquering heroes. It seemed that the whole of the Northwest music community was there to greet them. Though Geffen’s decision to film the show for possible future release added a certain tension to the night, Nirvana pulled off a storming nineteen-track set which left no one in any doubt that their time as local underground heroes was at an end.

  ‘Nirvana had never played in Seattle before with expectations,’ says Charles R. Cross. ‘All their other concerts had been them trying to get attention. Finally they came back in October ’91 and everyone came to see them expecting them to be great. And they were.’

  Among the crowd at the Paramount that night were Grohl’s former Mission Impossible bandmates Chris Page and Bryant Mason, who had moved to Seattle the previous summer. After the show Grohl sought the pair out, and sat chatting quietly with them as the backstage area filled up with friends, family, media and peers.

  ‘The backstage scene was absolutely mobbed,’ recalls Page. ‘You could tell things were starting to fly in directions that no one had expected. Dave made some comment like, “This is so crazy.” He kept saying, “It’s all happening so fast … it’s all happening so fast.”’

  On 2 November 1991, as Nirvana headed over to Europe for six weeks of headline shows, Nevermind broke into the top 40 of the Billboard 200, hitting number 35. The following week the album moved up to number 17. One week later it was at number 9: the next it sat at number 4. In the two months since its release the album had now sold 1.2 million copies in the US alone.

  This unexpected success ensured Nirvana were now making headlines outside of the pages of music magazines. As Nevermind climbed up the charts, the New York Times dedicated the front page of its business section to an investigative analysis of Geffen’s ‘orchestration’ of Nirvana’s rise. ‘We didn’t do anything,’ admitted DGC president Ed Rose
nblatt. ‘It was just one of those “Get out of the way and duck” records.’ Interviewed in Details magazine, Mark Kates admitted that, rather than concerning himself with Nirvana’s radio or TV spots at this stage in the campaign, his time might have been better spent driving copies of Nevermind straight from the pressing plant to record shops, such was the consumer demand for the record.

  ‘I was at Geffen when [Guns N’ Roses’ hugely successful 1987 début] Appetite for Destruction was released,’ says Kates, ‘so I’d seen a phenomenon happen before. And in this job it’s very helpful to have had that kind of experience, to be able to read signs and be able to see things that indicate far more than the specific nature of what they are. Let’s just say you get an inner feeling that something is going on that not only can you not control, but also you wouldn’t want to control.’