In his right hand Cobain held 1,000 American dollars. In his left hand was a suicide note. ‘Like Hamlet, I have to choose between life and death,’ it read. ‘I choose death.’
‘So I see that [on CNN] and I’m like, “What the fuck?”’ says Grohl. ‘And so Krist and I get on the phone. And then someone says, “He’s okay, he’s just in a coma, he’s not dead.” It was so chaotic and crazy. I mean, there are certain people in your life that you just know they’re not gonna make it. So in the back of your mind you emotionally prepare yourself for something like that to happen … not that it makes it easier, but so that when it does happen your world won’t collapse completely. But it was so weird, and surreal, that 28 hours ago I was hanging out with these people. But then someone called and said that he died, and I lost it, I just fucking lost it. This was just twenty minutes later. And then someone rings up again and goes, “Oh, no, he didn’t die.” It was bad.
‘And then he came home, and we talked on the phone. And I told him, “Man, Kurt, fuck …” I didn’t tell him that someone had told me that he’d died, but I told him that I was terrified and so worried. And he was really apologetic, like, “So sorry, I was partying and drinking and I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing.” And I said, “Listen, I don’t think you should die!” And then, I think, well, then, you know what happened …
‘From there on out it wasn’t long until he died. It was a weird fucking thing. I was totally non-emotional. I don’t even know if I was in shock, I was just shut down. I remember trying to make myself cry and I couldn’t.’
The circumstances of Kurt Cobain’s last days are still somewhat confused. On 18 March Courtney Love called the Seattle police out to her family home, telling them that her husband had locked himself in a room and was intent upon killing himself. The following week, together with Danny Goldberg, John Silva, Gary Gersh, Krist Novoselic and other close friends, Love staged an intervention to convince Cobain to go into rehab in Los Angeles. On 1 April Cobain jumped over the wall of the Exodus rehab clinic and caught a flight back to Seattle. Four days later the singer barricaded himself into the greenhouse of his Lake Washington home, shot up 1.52 milligrams of heroin, placed a shotgun against his head, and pulled the trigger with his thumb.
When Dave Grohl talks about Kurt Cobain’s last days his body language and speech patterns change. The bounce disappears from his voice, and his recollections are delivered haltingly. When we spoke in November 2009, he slumped almost horizontal on the couch in his suite at the Sunset Marquis, with his head in his hands and tears in his eyes.
‘It’s hard for me to even talk about,’ he said finally. ‘It was just so nuts, I don’t even know how to explain it. The time leading up to that … I can’t talk a lot about it. I can’t talk about it too much because a lot of fucked-up shit went down that nobody knows about. And Krist and I have always kept quiet about a lot of what happened because it’s a personal issue. People know that there was an intervention. People know that he was sent to Los Angeles. People know that he split rehab and that he disappeared. And I know just about as much as everybody else does.
‘But there’s some other things that happened long before any of that stuff that made it clear that maybe we weren’t going to be a band forever. And I think maybe at that point it was time for everybody to back away from it. I’d had enough before he’d disappeared, I think Krist and I had both had enough of it.
‘One of my favourite lines in a Nirvana song – which is fucking dark and I didn’t realise its weight until I sat in my house in Seattle playing Ian MacKaye the first mixes of In Utero, without a lyric sheet – is the line on “Scentless Apprentice” where Kurt sings, “You can’t fire me because I quit.” Ian heard that and he goes, “That’s fucked up.” And I realised, “Wow, that is fucked up.” So to me if there’s one line in any song that gives me the chills it’s that one. Maybe all those things that people wrote about him painted him into a corner that he couldn’t get out of.’
As news of Kurt Cobain’s death reverberated around the world, Grohl locked the doors of his Shoreline home and retreated into grief with his fiancée Jennifer Youngblood. One day, weeks later, a letter arrived. It had been sent to Grohl by his friend Nick Christy, the frontman of Nameless, Grohl’s first band. Christy offered Grohl his condolences and tried his best to empathise with his friend’s loss. And at the conclusion of the letter Christy tried to shine some light into the darkness.
‘Dude, you’re awesome, you’re great at what you do, you’re talented and I’m sure you’re going to land on your feet,’ he wrote. ‘You’re a special person and I’m sure God has a plan for your life. And I know you’ll do fine.’
I’ll stick around
After Kurt died … the way that I thought about, and listened to, music changed forever. All that bullshit, which I tried so hard to avoid, all of that fucking ‘cool’, all of that fucking guilt, just went away. I just thought, ‘You know, it’s so useless.‘ Why am I here in the first place? I’m into music. Do a lot of people enjoy it? Of course. Do I care if they think I’m cool? No, I just wanna fucking play …
Dave Grohl
From the outside, with its red brick walls, arched doorways and slanted red slate roofs, Robert Lang Studios in Seattle resembles an enchanted castle. Perched on a hillside affording spectacular views of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains, it’s an imposing structure, with an impressive client list and a truly fascinating back story.
In the early 1970s Lang and his best friend Dubby had a dream of building a recording studio in Seattle. In 1974 they realised that dream, opening a small facility in Richmond Beach in the Shoreline area. The studio was compact and bijou – early clients jokingly christened it ‘Munchkin Studios’ due to its minuscule dimensions – but to its owners it was every bit as magnificent as Abbey Road or Ocean Way, a sonic temple in which magic might be plucked from the air. In 1979 Dubby passed away, but not before informing his friend that he had a sum of money buried in the ground near the property. The following year Lang found his friend’s stash – a little under $100,000 in $100 bills – and vowed to honour his departed friend’s memory by fashioning a world-class recording facility on the very ground in which Dubby had secreted his life savings. In the years that followed, Lang literally carved a studio space out of the hillside to create a cavernous live room, which he lined with granite, marble and wood. While the project was ongoing Lang could sense his friend’s spirit guiding him: to this day he believes that Dubby’s spirit ‘runs wild’ around the property. That notion would be easier to dismiss had numerous clients not experienced unexplained paranormal activity, from full body apparitions to equipment randomly switching itself on and off, while using the facility.
On 28 June 1993 Lang was cutting a slab of Chinese marble for the floor of his studio, when a blinding flash of light interrupted his work. When he set to his task once more, he noticed what appeared to be a human form newly present in the stone’s white veins: on closer examination he identified the figure as that of the risen Jesus Christ, framed by a halo, holding a flaming torch to the Heavens, an image of resurrection and renewal. A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest, to misquote Paul Simon, but the image is undoubtedly striking, and to Lang, a charming, level-headed and rational man, it is further evidence that his studio is a special, spiritual place.
It was in this studio, the following summer, that Dave Grohl took his first steps towards creative rebirth.
In the weeks and months that followed Kurt Cobain’s April 1994 suicide, Grohl found himself void of direction and motivation; he was lost, untethered and drifting aimlessly.
‘After Kurt died,’ he told me in 2009, ‘honestly, it was maybe the next morning, I woke up and I thought, “Holy shit, he’s gone and I’m still here: I get to wake up and he’s gone.” And then my life completely changed forever.’
As he struggled to make sense of a world without Cobain, Grohl sought solace in the arms of his girlfriend Jennifer
Youngblood. Just weeks after Cobain’s passing, the pair decided to marry. But even as he celebrated life as a newly-wed, Grohl was keenly aware that he remained estranged from the one thing which had always provided him with succour, security and support: the simple act of making music.
‘After Kurt’s death I was about as confused as I’ve ever been,’ he admitted in 1995. ‘To continue almost seemed in vain. I was always going to be “that guy from Kurt Cobain’s band” and I knew that. I wasn’t sure if I had the desire to make music any more.’
But even here, at what was undoubtedly the most disorientating and darkest point of Grohl’s life to date, the musician still maintained at least some sense of perspective. ‘As much as I missed Kurt,’ he said, ‘and as much as I felt so lost, I knew that there was only one thing that I was truly cut out to do and that was music. I know that sounds so incredibly corny, but I honestly felt that.
‘The way that I thought about, and listened to, music changed forever,’ he said. ‘All that bullshit, which I tried so hard to avoid, all of that fucking “cool”, all of that fucking guilt, just went away. I just thought, “You know, it’s so useless.” Why am I here in the first place? I’m into music. Do a lot of people enjoy it? Of course. Do I care if they think I’m cool? No, I just wanna fucking play …’
Grohl’s sense of perspective was brought into sharp focus by words that came addressed to him on a postcard sent by the Seattle punk group 7 Year Bitch. The band had themselves been forced to confront the harsh realities of life when in 1992 guitarist Stefanie Sargent succumbed to a fatal heroin overdose, and two years later the surviving members felt sufficiently moved by Grohl’s circumstances to send him a message wishing him well, a message that provided a light which beamed from the murky present into a more settled future. The words on the postcard read, ‘We know what you’re going through. The desire to play music is gone for now, but it will return. Don’t worry.’
‘That fucking letter,’ Grohl later confessed, ‘saved my life.’
Just two months after Kurt Cobain’s name appeared in the obituary columns of the world’s press, Grohl made his first post-Nirvana public appearance. On 4 June 1994 the drummer was reunited with Thurston Moore, Dave Pirner, Greg Dulli and friends as the Backbeat Band for a breathless, sometimes chaotic sprint through The Beatles’ ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ and Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ at the MTV Movie Awards in Los Angeles. With his hair in a ponytail and his face somewhat obscured by a baseball cap, Grohl attacked his instrument with an almost psychotic abandon as the ad hoc collective imbued these classic slices of rock ’n’ roll history with a messy punk edge of which their authors would surely have approved. A one-off, never-to-be-repeated performance, the night sealed the Backbeat Band’s hallowed, almost mythical, status within the alternative rock world.
Just over a month later, on 12 July, Grohl was reunited onstage with Krist Novoselic in Olympia, when alongside Yo La Tengo guitarist Ira Kaplan the pair joined forces to provide the musical backing for ten-year-old Simon Timony at the fabulously named Yo Yo A Go Go festival. Timony, the stepson of Half Japanese frontman Jad Fair, had been the driving force behind The Stinky Puffs EP, a four-track recording released on a small Texan indie label in 1991 which the youngster had posted to a delighted Kurt Cobain. Half Japanese opened for Nirvana on the band’s autumn 1993 tour, and Timony had met Kurt Cobain, Chris Novoselic and Dave Grohl for the first time at New York’s Roseland Ballroom in November 1993. Shortly before the Yo Yo A Go Go festival the youngster had written to Novoselic asking if he might consider accompanying him onstage for his show on 12 July. On the night of the show Grohl was also on hand with Mark Kates, and made the spontaneous decision to join in.
Though their appearance was unannounced, the media present for the opening night of the festival ensured that this brief re-formation of Nirvana’s rhythm section became global news. ‘One journalist said that Simon had performed a mass healing,’ Fair told writer Gillian Gaar. ‘And that’s really how it felt.’ The Stinky Puffs set, which included a song for Cobain titled ‘I Love You Anyway’, was recorded and released the following year.
Later that same summer Grohl and Novoselic were reunited once more, this time in the live room of Robert Lang Studios. Grohl had been introduced to ex-Minutemen/fIREHOSE bassist Mike Watt at the MTV Movie Awards in June, and the legendary punk rock lifer had asked the drummer if he might consider lending his talents to the recording of his début solo album, Ball-Hog or Tugboat? Signed to Columbia Records in the post-Nirvana gold rush, Watt had already recruited no less than fifty guest musicians (among them Eddie Vedder, Thurston Moore, J Mascis, Beastie Boy Adam Horowitz, Frank Black, Henry Rollins, Circle Jerks’ bassist Zander Schloss and Jane’s Addiction drummer Stephen Perkins) for the project, one its creator likened to a creative ‘wrestling match’. In terms of authenticity, if not commerciality, Ball-Hog … would be a tough act to top: Grohl did not require a second invitation.
He contributed drums to two tracks on Ball-Hog or Tugboat? – ‘Big Train’ and ‘Against the 70’s’. While the former is a filthy-sounding blues rumble with a lyric so nakedly suggestive it might make Mötley Crüe blush (‘Big train, big train, do you wanna ride my big train?’), it is on the latter track that Mike Watt’s début album comes closest to magic. ‘The kids of today should defend themselves against the 70’s,’ sings Eddie Vedder, Pearl Jam’s frontman, with just the right combination of sincerity, determination and annoyance. ‘It’s not reality,’ he adds, ‘it’s just someone else’s sentimentality.’ The song was a minor hit single on US college radio: hearing it at the time, it was hard not to wish Nirvana’s rhythm section could be reunited on a more permanent basis.
Beyond highlighting its creator’s impeccable punk rock credentials, Watt’s Ball-Hog or Tugboat? has one outstanding legacy: it was the catalyst to re-ignite Grohl’s own creative urges.
‘After we went to Robert Lang’s and did a couple of songs with Watt, I thought, “Okay, I’m gonna get my shit together and demo some stuff at home and then book a session, for myself,”’ Grohl told me in 2009. ‘So I booked six days with Barrett. It was some cathartic thing: I needed to punch through this place I’d been trapped in for a while and I thought this would be the best therapy for me.’
Grohl revisited the various recordings he had made with Barrett Jones in the basement of their Bellevue home and selected twelve songs to re-record. In addition, he had penned and home-demoed three new songs in the aftermath of Kurt Cobain’s passing – ‘I’ll Stick Around’, ‘Oh, George’ and ‘This Is a Call’: these too he would redo at Robert Lang’s soundproofed bunker. ‘Before at Barrett’s I’d record songs in fifteen minutes, so I was planning on recording three songs per day this time,’ he recollected. ‘I’d already sequenced the album in my head before recording it, so I went and recorded them in order.’
And so between 17 and 22 October 1994 Grohl committed fifteen songs to tape with Barrett Jones at the studio located minutes from his front door. ‘This Is a Call’ was recorded first, in two takes, totalling 45 minutes of studio time. From there, the pace and tone of the session were established.
‘The first four hours was spent getting sounds,’ Grohl revealed in the first Foo Fighters’ press release. ‘This was a cinch for Barrett, whom I’d asked to produce since he was the one person in the world I felt comfortable singing in front of. By five o’clock we were ready to record. Over the past six years Barrett and I had perfected our own method of recording. Start with drums, listen to playback while humming tune in head to make sure arrangement is correct, put down two or three guitar tracks, do bass track and move on to next songs, saving vocals for last. This time, though, it became sort of a game. I wanted to see how little time it could take me to track fifteen songs, complete with overdubs and everything. I did the basic tracks in two and a half days, meaning I was literally running from instrument to instrument, using mostly first takes on everything. All vocals and rough mixes were finishe
d on schedule: one week.’
It is tempting with hindsight to ascribe too much order to the period that followed Grohl’s recording of these tracks and their subsequent release in the form of an album. But life is rarely as ordered as it may appear to outside eyes, a truism that applies to an even greater degree when it comes to bands, musicians and the music industry. Happy accidents are common, and the axis upon which decisions that subsequently come to be seen as pivotal turn is often precarious indeed. While there can be no doubt that as the days of 1994 grew shorter and colder Dave Grohl had in his mind an idea for a creation that would soon enough become Foo Fighters, the notion that he had mentally mapped out a route from basement tape to platinum albums and international acclaim is fanciful indeed. For while the demise of Nirvana provided Grohl not just the obvious visitation of grief and even trauma, it also sounded a quieter note that sounded something like emancipation: Grohl was young, wealthy and suddenly free to follow his instincts as never before. And so when, in early November 1994, the drummer received an invitation from Tom Petty’s management to join Petty’s legendary band The Heartbreakers for a taping of Saturday Night Live, Grohl leapt at the opportunity, temporarily parking thoughts of his own project.
‘My first reaction was, “What the fuck? He couldn’t find a real drummer?”’ Grohl laughed in 2011. ‘Of course I jumped at the opportunity. Because I’ve always loved Tom Petty. Even when I was a stubborn, cynical, punk-rock asshole, I still loved Tom Petty. Because I felt like he was a stubborn, cynical, punk-rock asshole too.’
In 1994 Tom Petty was enjoying one of the peaks of his artistic life. During the previous two years the Gainesville-born singer-songwriter and all-American icon had been squirrelled away at Los Angeles’ Sound City and Ocean Way Recording studios with producer Rick Rubin creating Wildflowers, his second solo album without long-time backing band The Heartbreakers. Released in November of that year, the fifteen-song, 62-minute set can be considered not far short of a masterpiece. Invited to perform two tracks from the album – ‘Honey Bee’ and ‘You Don’t Know How It Feels’ – on Saturday Night Live, Petty was able to call upon the services of the thrillingly capable Heartbreakers once more, but that well-drilled unit were without a drummer, having just lost the services of the always mercurial Stan Lynch. Hence the call placed to Dave Grohl.
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