Dave Grohl, Times Like His

by Martin James

  However, after a lengthy 1987 European tour with Fire Party in support, the Scream habit finally proved too much for founder member and drummer Kent Staxx. He quit the band to return home to his wife and child. He would become a carpenter based in northern Virginia and would also drum for the reformed Iron Cross.

  For the first time since their inception some six years ago, the original line-up of Scream had been broken up. They decided to keep going, and made tentative steps towards finding a replacement. These included putting drummer wanted flyers in music stores around DC…

  Enter Dave Grohl. He played his first gig with Scream at an Amnesty International benefit. Scream’s set ended with part of the audience marching on the embassies of various countries known for human rights violations. It was, if nothing else, a powerful introduction into the world of Scream.

  From here, Grohl became a part of the band with surprising ease. The endless touring provided them with the chance to bond and the opportunity for Pete Stahl to take on a fatherly role over the teenage Grohl.

  “When Pete found out my real age and that he was ten years older than me, he became my father figure,” explained Grohl to unamass.com. “We’d be on the road for months in a van, and he’d be teaching me how to behave on the road, how to survive without burning out, how to have fun, when to be serious. And he’d protect me from Skeeter!” (14)

  Skeeter would openly tease the young Grohl, subjecting him to daily taunts and forcing Grohl to inhale the stench of his ‘Road Warrior’ feet. All a part of being in a family for sure, but Stahl made sure that Skeeter’s antics didn’t turn Grohl into an outsider.

  Scream’s first Grohl-related release came in the shape of 1988’s No More Censorship. The album was released on Washington-based RAS (Real Authentic Sounds) Records, a label known for reggae but with ambitions to break into the rock market.

  Grohl’s inclusion on No More Censorship was instantly notable. The band’s drum sound was suddenly much bigger and more direct while his trademark subtle fills came into their own. Also notable was the presence of his voice on backing vocals.

  Despite gaining critical acclaim the album was in fact a huge disappointment to many Scream fans who felt the rock side was too traditional, claiming all of the band’s hardcore allegiances were being stripped out. The record was a commercial failure and the band was forced to continue on their endless road trip to promote themselves.

  “My first trip to Europe was amazing. In February of 1988, we flew into Amsterdam and spent the next two months playing in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, England and Spain. Most shows were in squats (buildings taken over by punks at war with the system, fighting the police for their right to a place to live) and youth centres, very few were in bars or night-clubs. It was awesome. Most shows were actually pretty crowded since Scream was one of the few American hardcore bands to visit Europe previously.”

  Scream toured the US five times and Europe three times during this period. However, their sound was never quite straightforward enough for the increasingly narrow palate of the international hardcore fraternity.

  “We were a punk rock band who also played hard rock. Franz was playing all this great metal guitar stuff which would then go into these really fucking fast hardcore punk riffs. You know, people were like… they just couldn’t figure it out,” explained Grohl during an early Foo Fighters interview. “They had enough rabid fans to sell a few thousand records every year and stay steadily out on the road,” he explained further to Eric Brace of unomas.com. “(A couple of major record labels) came sniffing around, but nothing ever happened.” (15)

  In 1989, Scream captured their frenzied live show for the first time on the album Live At Van hall In Amsterdam on Konkurrel Records. They also went into the studio in December of that year to record what was to be their final album, Fumble. The set failed to see the light of day until July 1993 when it was released to coincide with the Scream reunion tour, featuring Grohl back behind the kit, by then an international success as a part of Nirvana.

  Fumble was a particularly interesting moment in the Grohl story, as it also displayed the beginnings of his songwriting ambitions. Furthermore, he also adopted a recording technique to work on his own stuff that would resurface in the early days of Foo Fighters – multi-tracking himself playing every instrument. Grohl had discovered the technique one day when he visited Barrett Jones in his Laundry Room Studios.

  “In between Scream tours, I was hanging out with Barrett more and more, helping him out with his solo project in the studio. Since he had his own eight track in the basement, we would jam on his songs and record them pretty quickly. I sometimes played bass or guitar on some songs. That summer I realised that if I were to write a song, record the drums first, then come back over it with a few guitars, bass, and vocals, I could make it sound like a band. So I came up with a few riffs on the spot and recorded three songs in under fifteen minutes. Mind you, these were no epic masterpieces, just a test to see if I could do this sort of thing on my own. It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.”

  No epic masterpiece perhaps, but Grohl’s first effort turned out to be a highlight on Scream’s final album Fumble. Called ‘Gods Look Down’, the Grohl demo displayed both the musician’s power and a sense of vulnerability. It was this balance that would mark out his earliest demo recordings. Indeed, Jones himself is adamant that Grohl’s version of ‘Gods Look Down’ was far superior to the Scream version. “I knew Dave could play from working with him before,” Jones told unomas.com from his studio in Seattle, “but that first song he did by himself was incredible, and is still one of my favourite things he’s ever done. He walked in and started laying down tracks, and he was just so damn good at it from the very start that it drove me nuts.” (16)

  Despite having no label to release Fumble, Scream’s popularity in Europe sustained them for another tour through the spring of 1990. It was, as Grohl has described it, “a real ballbuster, twenty three shows in twenty four days.” So demanding was the schedule that bassist Skeeter Thompson quit three-quarters of the way through. His replacement came in the shape of J. Robbins of Jawbox. Thomson had suffered some personal problems but managed to sort himself out long enough to return to Scream after the European jaunt drew to an end.

  Skeeter’s mid-tour departure didn’t stop the band from recording yet another live album as a part of the German Your Choice Live series. Recorded live at Oberhaus, Alzey, Germany on May 4, 1990, the album again captured the band at their live best with a set drawn from each period of Scream’s existence.

  Skeeter Thompson decided to return to the band when they got back to the States, but the homecoming was marred by the discovery of an eviction notice in Peter Stahl and Skeeter’s mailbox. The notice demanded they vacate the premises the very next day. Faced with impending homelessness, they decided on the only logical course of action – they went out on the road again!

  They hastily booked what was to be Scream’s final tour. It was the summer of 1990 and the band found itself increasingly out of favour with the US punk scene. The dates were plagued with low attendances and cancellations. Then, halfway through the tour while they were in LA, Skeeter upped and walked again.

  Word soon started to get back to harDCore headquarters of Scream’s impending demise. With no thoughts to the adage ‘flogging a dead horse’, the remaining members vowed to search for a new bassist and carry on. Suddenly Scream and their roadie were stranded in LA with no money to get home and no way of playing live to earn any more cash.

  “This was in September of 1990 and we were there for a month, staying with Sabrina – Pete and Franz’s sister – who lived out there,” recalled Grohl in 1997. “Our roadie, Barry, was from Canada, and he was getting these social welfare checks mailed to him in LA, so we lived off of that.”

  Scream’s Pete Stahl also recalled this as a dark time in the band’s life. Talking to Eric Brace of unomas.com, he explained: “Man, that was a really depressing time.
We were all so broke, just sitting on my sister’s couch, all of us wondering if that was it.” (17)

  For Dave Grohl, of course, it wasn’t. In Seattle, a band called Nirvana had a debut album to promote but no drummer. A twist of fate had opened up an opportunity for Grohl that would eventually cement his place in rock history forever.

  Notes

  1. Dave Grohl Feature by Eric Brace (www.unomas.com)

  2. I Was A Teenage Punk Rocker (Kerrang!) 1997

  3. Dave Grohl Feature by Eric Brace

  4. Dance of Days – Two Decades of Punk in the Nations Capital by Mark Anderson and Mark Jenkins (Soft Skull Press) 2001

  5. unknown

  6. unknown

  7. unknown

  8. Dain Bramage biography by Keith Richmond (www.pooldrop.com) 1998

  9. Dave Grohl: His Life So Far by Tommy Udo (Metal Hammer) 2003

  10. Interview with Scream (Touch and Go)1982

  11. Interview with Scream (Thrill Seeker2)1982

  12. Flipside #36 –1982

  13. ibid

  14. Dave Grohl Feature by Eric Brace

  15. ibid

  16. ibid

  17. ibid

  2

  MTV MELTDOWN: SELLING PUNK TO THE MASSES

  What’s the final thing a drummer says before being kicked out of a band?

  “Hey you guys, I’ve got a few songs we could try.”

  In 1986, just as the DC harDCore explosion was finding a truly international stage through the Dischord/Southern Studios partnership, the seeds of a band were being sown that would ultimately enjoy global domination and acquire historical cultural significance. That band was Nirvana and the scene they belonged to became known as grunge. Nirvana were themselves huge fans of the DC scene – in fact, they were fans of punk rock from everywhere.

  The Nirvana story starts in the redneck town of Aberdeen, where a young Kurt Cobain had discovered a taste for punk and hardcore through a friendship with Matt Lukin and Buzz Osborne of local band The Melvins. Cobain and school friend Chris Novoselic would spend their free time hanging around the Melvins rehearsals. Inevitably, they both started to harbour dreams of forming a band.

  “(Aberdeen) is a logging town,” Cobain said in 1990. “That was all there was to do round there. Chop down trees and work in sawmills. I didn’t want that sort of life. I was a real misfit. The place was full of jock, meatheads…” (1)

  “We were branded Satanists back home,” explained Novoselic a year earlier. “This girl came knocking on the door looking for a wallet and she goes, ‘You know what the other kids told me in the neighbourhood? Don’t go there, they worship the Devil.’ That’s why nobody ever bothered us in redneck country. We would neither confirm or deny Satanic affiliations.”

  “Maybe it was those desecrated cemetery pieces burned in our front yard,” added Cobain. “But you don’t have to do anything to be considered extreme back there. Just take a lot of acid.” (2)

  Cobain started recording his own songs as early as 1982. He would drive the short distance to his Aunt Mari Earl’s house in Seattle – she was a musician with a number of instruments and recording equipment.

  By 1985, Cobain had formed his first band Fecal Matter with the Melvins’ drummer Dale Crover, who was to play bass in this latest outfit. Together the duo recorded a demo at Earl’s house using a TEAC four-track. The session lasted for a few days with the duo recording the backing tracks at full volume before adding Cobain’s vocals. The final tape consisted of seven songs showing early hints at the Nirvana sound, and a lyrical bent which focussed on the personal politics of an angry teenager. Much like his counterparts in DC, Cobain’s targets were school, the education system, the attitudes of other kids in school and so on. Interestingly, the tapes included an early instrumental version of ‘Downer’ which would appear on Bleach, Nirvana’s first album.

  Over the next couple of years, Cobain would play in numerous bands. One such group, Brown Cow (their original name Brown Towel was retired off after being mispelt on a poster) featured Crover on drums and Osborne on bass. He also played in a number of bands with Novoselic: one with Cobain on guitar, Novoselic on bass, and Bob McFadden on drums; another with Novoselic; plus a short stint with the Stiff Woodies, a band which included Osborne, Crover, Lukin and Gary Cole in its line up.

  It wasn’t until 1987 that Cobain and Novoselic teamed up with the intention of forming a band that would last more than a few gigs. Joining the duo on drums was the first in a long line of drummers, Aaron Burckhard. Together the trio started gigging extensively and even recorded what is considered to be the first Nirvana demo, at KAOS, Olympia’s Evergreen State College’s radio station.

  Nine months later, Cobain and Novoselic entered Seattle’s Reciprocal Recording studio to record a number of songs with engineer Jack Endino (ex-Skin Yard). Their drummer for this session was Dale Crover. Burckhard had been replaced because the duo claimed they were dissatisfied with his performance. Indeed, prior to the recording, in October 1987, they placed an advert in Seattle music paper The Rocket. It read: “SERIOUS DRUMMER WANTED. Underground attitude, Black Flag, the Melvins, Zeppelin, Scratch Acid, Ethel Merman. Versatile as heck.”

  In the next few months, Cobain and Novoselic would go through a series of drummers. Crover had rejoined the Melvins and they had all moved to San Francisco. He was replaced by Dave Foster who played in the newly-named Nirvana’s debut gig in Seattle on April 24, 1988, as a part of the Sub Pop Sunday gigs at The Vogue. Foster would be forced to quit the band when he lost his driver’s license and they subsequently reinstated Burckhard, but he was later dropped again.

  Nirvana once again placed an advert in the next issue of The Rocket. This time it read: “DRUMMER WANTED. Play hard, sometimes light, underground, versatile, fast, medium slow, versatile, serious, heavy, versatile, dorky, nirvana, hungry.”

  Eventually Cobain and Novoselic enlisted the drumming skills of Chad Channing, whom they had first met when Nirvana had shared the bill with Channing’s band Tick-Dolly-Row. Nirvana had finally settled on a line-up and could begin its complicated and ultimately tragic path to rock beatification.

  Nirvana were unwittingly about to become the core part of a new rock scene evolving in Seattle. While New York and Washington obsessed on the harder, faster and tighter ideology of harDCore, this new and only-loosely associated batch of Seattle bands were using their punk roots to address a far wider sound. To them, 1976 punk rock did not represent Year Zero or a sound paradigm, but simply an attitude and approach through which rock music’s history could be redressed.

  Thus, these bands would explore the sub-metal riffing of Black Sabbath, the melodies of Steppenwolf, the dynamics of Creedence Clearwater Revival, even the frailty of Neil Young. To them, the whole of the rock pantheon was up for grabs. It was an approach to the standard song that echoed much of Sonic Youth’s experimentation but raged to the same intense volume as Black Flag.

  At this stage the mainstream was dominated by bands that had stripped rock of its original anger and replaced it with a sanitised MTV compliance. The new bands coming out of Seattle were far more in tune with rock’s original outsider ethos.

  Soon, the burgeoning Seattle scene was awash with innovative and exciting bands. One of the originators – Green River – split into two factions, becoming known as Mudhoney and Mother Love Bone (later to be renamed Pearl Jam), each offering a pivotal take on the sounds of Seattle’s underground. Mudhoney offered punk’s take on 1960s garage rock, through hardcore’s distortion. Their debut six track mini-album Superfuzz Bigmuff quickly came to be seen as the blueprint for the Seattle sound, thanks to the inspired trash pop of ‘Touch Me I’m Sick’.

  Other bands emerged with a similarly loud, brash and dirty approach. Swallow produced a rock sound that flirted with the punk pop aesthetic of Buzzcocks; Blood Circus produced minimalist rock that used Motörhead as its inspiration; Tad delivered a sound which was as huge and downright crushing as their main man’s actual size – b
all-breaking rock straight from The Stooges’ back door; Soundgarden drew on the licks of Led Zeppelin; The Walkabouts injected folk-inspired songs with the dissonance of early Pixies; Girl Trouble were the sound of the Cramps after they’d been taken outside and beaten black and blue.

  In 1989, Melody Maker’s Everett True, the journalist who is generally regarded as the man who discovered Nirvana, produced an article called ‘Sub Pop: Rock City’ (after the central record label of the scene and a Mudhoney track). In it, he described the Seattle scene as the “most vibrant, kicking music scene encompassed in one city for at least ten years.”(3) He used the term ‘grunge’ on numerous occasions to describe the guitar sound throughout the piece. Grunge. The word stuck and the scene had found its name.

  When Nirvana’s ten track demo tape landed on the desk of local label Sub Pop, an association was agreed that ensured history in the making had begun. Like Reciprocal Studios, Sub Pop had formed to capture the energy of the nascent Seattle rock scene. Thus, with Channing settled on the drum stool, Nirvana returned to Reciprocal to record their first single for their new label. Once again working with Endino, they recorded a cover of Shocking Blue’s ‘Love Buzz’, alongside their own tracks, ‘Big Cheese’ and ‘Spank Thru’, plus a never-released song ‘Blandest’.

  The debut Nirvana single, ‘Love Buzz/Big Cheese’ was released in November, 1988, although it didn’t receive its first UK review until the following February. The record, which launched the mail-order only ‘Sub Pop Singles Club’ was limited to a run of only 1,000 copies, all of which were individually numbered.

  “Nirvana are beauty incarnate,” wrote Everett True in his review of the single. “A relentless two-chord garage beat which lays down some grievous foundations for a sheer monster of a guitar force to howl over. The volume control ain’t been built yet which can do justice to this three-piece! …a limited edition of 1,000 love songs for the psychotically disturbed.” (4)