This is a Call

by Paul Brannigan

  Dave Grohl is now legally forbidden from speaking about this issue: when we spoke in Los Angeles in 2009, mention of Friedman’s name caused Foo Fighters’ frontman to ask me to switch off my tape recorder, the only time during a five-hour conversation that he made such a request.

  Friedman himself did not respond to a request for an interview for this book.

  If the dispute with his former manager was to prove a lesson in music business practices for Dave Grohl, it was as nothing to the storm heading his way. In April 1992 Kurt Cobain announced to Grohl and Novoselic that he wished to redraft Nirvana’s publishing agreement. Up until this point, publishing royalties had been split evenly between the three band members: under the new arrangement proposed by Cobain, the band’s publishing would be altered so that Cobain would receive 90% of monies due … and more contentiously, the agreement would be applied retroactively, dating back to the release of Nevermind. In effect, this agreement meant that both Grohl and Novoselic now owed Cobain money. The ensuing arguments nearly split the band.

  ‘This is a sticky conversation,’ Grohl told me in 2009, ‘but yeah, let’s just say that things changed. And I realised, “Okay, wait, this isn’t three guys in a van any more.” I kinda knew that, because my mom had a gold record on her wall, but that’s when I started thinking, “You know, I don’t know if I signed up for this, this isn’t what I signed up for.”

  ‘When we signed our deal it was a three-way split. And sometimes that changes after you sell ten million fucking records, you know? So the publishing issue came up … and I got nothing. Close to nothing. Like nothing at all … My first reaction was, “Okay, yeah … I mean, like, how much do you need? I’ve already made enough money to buy a house … Holy shit! So that’s not too terrible.” And then I found out what it really meant. And I’m like, “Wait a minute, should I be punished because I didn’t know what I was signing?” Because apparently nobody else did either. So that was a big one. I considered bailing out at that point. But I stayed …’

  While Nirvana lay low, seeking to deal with their internecine issues out of the glare of the world’s media, the ‘grunge revolution’ gathered pace. No one had paid much attention at the time, but on the day Nevermind album reached the summit of the Billboard 200, another Seattle rock band had chalked up a modest, yet significant, chart success of their own. For Pearl Jam, news that their début single ‘Alive’ had broken into Billboard’s Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart at number 32 wasn’t a cause for wild celebration in itself, but it demonstrated that four months on from the release of their début album Ten they still had impetus, still had momentum. And Nirvana’s milestone achievement had laid down a new marker: ‘I remember thinking, “Wow, it’s on now,” guitarist Mike McCready told one US journalist a decade later. ‘It changed something. We had something to prove: that our band was as good as I thought it was.’

  Five months later, on 5 May 1992, Ten was certified platinum in the US, as it passed the one million sales mark. By mid-July, when Pearl Jam and their friends in Soundgarden left their hometown to start the second annual Lollapalooza tour alongside the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ministry and ex-N.W.A. rapper Ice Cube, both Chris Cornell’s group and Alice in Chains had platinum albums under their belts too. Jumping upon the bandwagon somewhat belatedly, Rolling Stone and Spin began to hype Seattle as ‘the new Liverpool’, and scores of major-label A&R men descended wolfishly upon the community to strip it of its assets. In every down-tuned riff and misanthropic grunt emanating from the Crocodile Café, the Showbox and the Off Ramp the majors thought they heard ‘The New Nirvana’: Mudhoney duly left Sub Pop for Reprise, Tad inked a deal with Warners imprint Giant Records and Melvins signed to Atlantic. As former Rolling Stone writer Cameron Crowe was bringing the ‘Seattle Sound’ to Hollywood, with Matt Dillon (who portrayed troubled teen Richie White in Over the Edge) starring as disaffected rocker Cliff Poncier in the sappy Jet City-based, grunge-soundtracked romantic comedy Singles, a host of fame-hungry Californian rock bands were donning flannel shirts and cherry red Doc Martens boots and heading in the opposite direction, hoping to buy into the feeding frenzy enveloping the city. A generation of down-at-heel, ornery local musos were left wondering where it all went right.

  In the midst of all this drama, noise and confusion, hardly anyone noticed Dave Grohl’s first solo album emerge without fanfare on the tiny Simple Machines label run out of a suburban home in Arlington, Virginia by Jenny Toomey and her Tsunami bandmate Kristin Thompson. Released on cassette only, as part of Simple Machine’s Tool Set tape series, Pocketwatch was packaged as the work of a band named Late!, but the cassette inlay card credits revealed ‘all music and instruments’ to be the work of one ‘Dave G’. And here lay the foundations of a career of which the young multi-instrumentalist could not at this point have imagined.

  Officially the Pocketwatch cassette was recorded in just two studio sessions: the opening six tracks were laid to Ampex tape with Barrett Jones at ‘Upland Studios’ aka Laundry Room in Arlington on 23 December 1990, while the remaining four tracks were recorded by Gray Matter man Geoff Turner at his WGNS studio in Arlington on 27 July 1991. There is some dispute about this chronology, however: Barrett Jones maintains that the ten tracks were actually comped together from a number of different studio sessions, while legendary DC producer Don Zientara also claims to have worked on the cassette with Grohl at Inner Ear. Whatever, the truth is that Grohl’s burgeoning talent as a songwriter might never have been revealed at all, but for a crush on a pretty girl.

  ‘Basically I’d been living in Olympia and there was a girl from Washington DC that I had a super crush on, this girl Jemmy Toomey,’ Grohl told me in 2009. ‘I always had a crush on her, she was so fucking cute, and I was secretly in love with her. She came over to the studio one day and I was recording with Barrett and she said, “Wow, this is really cool, we should put out a cassette.” Up to that point the only people who’d heard anything I’d done were my mom, my sister, Barrett, Pete [Stahl] and my buddy Jimmy [Swanson] – they were my audience – but she heard it and liked it and wanted to do it so I was like, “Okay …” I was just excited that someone was excited enough to want to hear it.’

  ‘My band was recording with Barrett too,’ remembers Toomey, ‘and either we found out that Dave was going to be there and so I dropped by to see what was going on, or it was just an overlap, like they were closing down what they were doing and we were loading our stuff in. But I remember really liking it and I asked him for a tape. Maybe I was crushing a little too, but I thought it was really good.’

  ‘It was right around the time that PJ Harvey was beginning to do stuff, and you have these people like PJ and Dave who just come out of nowhere with this effortless creativity and this ability to synthesise all this stuff: there’s just this bright, white light that comes out of them when they do what they do and it feels just effortless. I thought it was really interesting.’

  While it’s fair to say that without Nirvana and Foo Fighters Dave Grohl’s Pocketwatch cassette would be of no more historical significance than Toomey’s own short-lived Tool Set side-projects My New Boyfriend and Slack, its lo-fi production, warmth, wit and humour ensure that it has a naïve charm all its own.

  The cassette’s stand-out (and best known) track is ‘Friend of a Friend’, a stark, gently strummed meditation upon Grohl’s early months in Olympia, finding his feet in a strange town with bandmates he barely knew. Written on Kurt Cobain’s couch in the small hours of a bleak mid-winter, it’s a sensitive, tender observation of the intimate friendship between Cobain and Novoselic, the songwriter who ‘plays an old guitar, with a coin found by the phone’ and his more gregarious, sociable best friend who ‘thinks he drinks too much’. The first Dave Grohl-penned song written on an acoustic guitar, ‘Friend of a Friend’ would re-emerge in 2005, re-recorded by Grohl for the acoustic portion of Foo Fighters’ In Your Honor double album: the events of the intervening years only serve to heighten the song’s poignancy.


  Pocketwatch also saw the first public appearance of ‘Color Pictures of a Marigold’, another gently unfolding, quietly voiced acoustic track Grohl held dear: though the version on Pocketwatch is credited to the Christmas 1990 session with Jones, Grohl demoed it again at Laundry Room on 16 February 1991, suggesting that he was not yet fully convinced he had the definitive recording on tape. Two years later he would cut the track again with Steve Albini, and it would achieve cult status as the only Nirvana song neither authored nor sung by Kurt Cobain, when it emerged on the B-side of the Heart-Shaped Box single with the shortened title ‘Marigold’.

  That the two best-known tracks on Pocketwatch are skeletal acoustic sketches does not paint an accurate representation of the album: for the most part, Dave Grohl’s début solo album offers up the kind of fuzzed-up, driving alternative rock the singer would take to the bank with Foo Fighters in later years. Among its noisier components, ‘Petrol CB’ (confusingly retitled ‘There’s That Song Again’ when it emerged on vinyl on the 1992 Simple Machines’ seven-inch box set Neapolitan Metropolitan) stands out; featuring a gnarled stop-start riff, harshly distorted vocals and a reverb-drenched, shimmering chorus, it suggests that Grohl, like many of his peers in the Alternative Nation in the early’90s, was taking some songwriting cues from My Bloody Valentine. ‘Just Another Story About Skeeter Thompson’ is memorable for entirely different reasons, as over a grinding, insistent crossover-punk riff Grohl delivers a humorous spoken word ‘tribute’ to Scream’s mercurial bassist: he recalls how, while staying at his friend Tos Nieuwenhuizen’s house in Amsterdam during his second European excursion with the band from Bailey’s Crossroads, he was interrupted while reading Maximumrocknroll (‘or Flipside … one of those punk things’) by Thompson holding out his penis for examination, asking, ‘Does that look like pus to you?’ Delightful.

  Future Foo Fighters B-side ‘Winnebago’, the hoarse-throated Hüsker Dü-esque ‘Hell’s Garden’ and the dynamic DC hardcore-flavoured instrumental ‘Pokey the Little Puppy’ are enthusiastic rather than enthralling, but their characterful crunch measures up nicely against the strains of corrosive alt-rock delivered by contemporaries on the Amphetamine Reptile, Trance Syndicate and Matador labels in the early 1990s. As with Nirvana’s Bleach, Pocketwatch merits respect rather than reverence, and its full significance would be measured by events that lay ahead, but it remains an engaging blueprint for Grohl’s signature songwriting style.

  With Grohl loath to promote Pocketwatch in any way – the drummer being anxious that the album might be viewed as a crass cash-in on the popularity of Nevermind – as Jenny Toomey remembers it, “no one really noticed” the cassette for the longest time. When word of its existence finally went overground, Simple Machines almost buckled under demand for the tape, not least because Toomey had to dub every single copy from Grohl’s second-generation demo tape by hand in her bedroom: ‘People don’t ever think about this in relation to labels, but indie labels don’t get in trouble when they’re not successful, they get in trouble when they have one artist that’s more successful than they can keep up with,’ she points out.

  ‘Eventually we just took it off the catalogue, because it was just too much,’ she admits. ‘I don’t bear any ill-will to Mr Grohl, and I haven’t really seen him much over the years, but there were several times when we literally just begged him to let us put it on CD, not just because wouldn’t it be nice to have a “little engine that could”, that helped us pay for the other records, but also because it was a pain in our ass to dub them five at a time! But whatever, we respected him, and we were certainly very proud to have put it out. I was always amazed that Dave ever second-guessed it: he seemed fairly modest about his skills for a long time.’

  The release of the Pocketwatch tape had the unexpected side effect of spurring Nirvana back into action. Impressed by Barrett Jones’s production on the cassette, Cobain booked a one-day session at the new Laundry Room Studio – in the basement of the West Seattle house Jones and Grohl had been sharing since July ’91 – to hammer out some new material. Convening at Grohl’s house on 7 April 1992, the band snapped back into high gear immediately, recording one-take performances of future B-side ‘Curmudgeon’ and ‘Oh, The Guilt’ (set aside for a future split single with Touch and Go records’ brilliant Jesus Lizard) and treating themselves to two runs through a cover of ‘Return of the Rat’ by seminal Portland garage rockers The Wipers (destined for release on the singles box set Eight Songs for Greg Sage and The Wipers, which also featured contributions from Hole and the heavyweight Portland hardcore crew Poison Idea).

  ‘We got to the point where we could just crank out songs,’ Chris Novoselic later stated. ‘Kurt would be improvising, and we were so good at playing we’d just pick up the song; the second time we’d play the song we’d record it. That’s what happened with those B-sides we did at the Laundry Room.’

  With Cobain understandably preoccupied with looking after his now pregnant wife in Los Angeles, it would be a further two and a half months before Nirvana properly returned to action. In the interim, Grohl took advantage of his free time to add bass, guitar and drums to Melvins’ mainman Buzz Osbourne’s solo EP King Buzzo at the Laundry Room, displaying both a wry wit and a shrewd knowledge of punk rock history by adopting the pseudonym ‘Dale Nixon’ on the record credits, ‘Dale Nixon’ being the same name Greg Ginn had employed when covertly laying down the bass parts on Black Flag’s My War album. The EP featured a re-working of ‘Just Another Story About Skeeter Thompson’, now simply titled ‘Skeeter’.

  In mid-June Nirvana regrouped to return to Europe to make up the dates they had cancelled at the back end of 1991. Old problems surfaced almost immediately. Three days into the tour, following a superb 22 June show at the King’s Hall in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which this writer was privileged to attend, Cobain collapsed at breakfast in the city’s Europa Hotel. The official line given to UK journalists covering Nirvana’s ‘comeback’ was that the singer had a ‘weeping ulcer’: ‘It’s because he eats a lot of junk food,’ deadpanned PR Anton Brookes. In reality Cobain was suffering from methadone withdrawal. When a news journalist from Melody Maker queried the official diagnosis, bluntly asking the PR man directly whether there was any truth in the rumour that’s Cobain’s collapse was the result of a heroin overdose, Brookes was forthright and bullish in his dismissal of the story.

  ‘Everyone’s been saying that, but there’s nothing in it,’ he countered. ‘I mean, how many times did Kurt supposedly die in car crashes last year? Some people claim he started the LA riots! It’s all bullshit. It’s just cos they’re the most copy-worthy band in the world right now.’

  It was an admirable performance by the PR man, but few were convinced. The paper’s decision to run their story under the headline ‘Nirvana Star Rushed to Hospital with “Mystery Stomach Bug”’ hinted at both their own heavy scepticism and the deeper, darker problems they intuitively knew were bedevilling the Seattle three-piece.

  ‘You had to say and do a lot of things to keep face for the band,’ Brookes subsequently admitted. ‘I did that out of loyalty, not because they were paying me, but because they were friends. Everything had changed. Nirvana had become a multi-million-pound industry. To management and everyone else, it was still the same close-knit family, but I remember we all went around together then – the band, crew, [support band] Teenage Fanclub – everybody except Kurt and Courtney, who stayed in their hotel room. It became them and everyone else.’

  For all the PR man’s skills, however, the cracks in the Nirvana camp could not be papered over forever. With rumours circulating that Nirvana’s proposed August headline slot at Reading festival was likely to be cancelled, in July writer Keith Cameron, one of Nirvana’s most loyal, supportive and trusted confidants in the media, and a man who had shared floor space with Dave Grohl at the Novoselic’s Tacoma home less than two years previously, was flown to Spain to interview the band for NME to set the story straight. This he did, but not
in the way in which Nirvana’s management or PR people had envisaged.

  When he arrived in Spain, Cameron found the atmosphere enveloping the Nirvana camp to be poisonous, with both the crew and indeed the band’s rhythm section walking on eggshells to avoid upsetting Cobain and his six months pregnant wife. After being made to wait for two days for an audience with the singer, on 3 July Cameron was bemused to see Cobain being led meekly into the subterranean dressing rooms at Palacio de los Deportes de la Comunidad de Madrid by Love, who loudly and sarcastically trumpeted, ‘Here he is! Here’s everyone’s little investment!’

  When Cameron finally sat down with his old friend, Cobain flatly denied that he was using heroin – going so far as to demand that the writer check his arms for traces of needle marks. But the perceptive Cameron quickly surmised that the real story of the tour lay not with the singer’s personal problems, but with the attitude of his heavily pregnant wife.

  Musing upon how Nirvana could go from ‘nobodies to superstars to fuck-ups’ in the space of six months, Cameron’s verdict was damning:

  ‘Spend two days in tour fatigues with this new, arena-compatible Nirvana production machine – “I don’t know the names of most of the crew,” admits Dave – and it dawns on you that the overriding issue here is not that Kurt Cobain is on heroin (or isn’t, or was, or is and is trying to get off) but that his wife is a grade A pain in the arse,’ he wrote.

  Cameron’s hard-hitting story was filed under the brilliant headline ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. ‘This is serious shit,’ he wrote, ‘and it’s no wonder some people are freaking and saying Reading will be it. Game Over. The End.’