Dave Grohl, Times Like His

by Martin James

  In an interview with NME’s Edwin Pouncey a few months later, Cobain was less than complimentary about their single. “I wish we could have recorded it a lot heavier,” he said. “It was one of our very first recordings. We weren’t sure just what we wanted to do, so it turned out kinda wimpy compared to our most recent recordings.” (5)

  Those most recent recordings eventually appeared on June 15, 1989, as Nirvana’s debut album Bleach. “This is the biggest, baddest sound that Sub Pop have so far managed to unearth,” wrote Pouncy in his NME review of the album. “So primitive that they manage to make label mates Mudhoney sound like Genesis. Nirvana turn up the volume and spit and claw their way to the top of the musical garbage heap.” (6)

  Bleach immediately marked out the world of difference between hardcore and grunge. Here the tracks were slowed down while guitars were piled up high. The effect was like a juggernaut rolling through open roads, unstoppably heavy and seemingly on the verge of losing control. Among the grunge blueprints however, one song stood out for its lightness of touch: ‘About A Girl’, which opened with a gently strummed guitar, offered the first real hint at the strength of Cobain’s ability to conjure up timeless pop melodies. It also represented a breathing space from Cobain’s howled vocal style, which often left him hoarse.

  As a collection, Bleach suffered from the ‘too samey’ sound. Guitars and drums never benefited from varied EQ’ing, and because the album was recorded so quickly (the Sub Pop way) there were no chances to try different takes with alternative mike set ups for any instrument. Furthermore, the set occasionally veered into over looming experimental territory, especially on ‘Sifting’, where Cobain’s tune-smithery had yet to acquire that ability to know when enough is enough.

  “It’s nice doing a record quickly, but then, it’s nice to not be in a hurry,” producer Jack Endino said in 1997. “To be able to step back and go, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s get a different drum sound on this song. Why don’t we play with a different guitar amplifier?’ That’s the sort of thing you can’t do when you’ve got a day to do an album. You just have to set up the mikes and go. Which is why Bleach pretty much has the same guitar sound from beginning to end ‘cause we had one guitar amp, one day to record it. We recorded on eight track, but we didn’t even use all of them – we used six or seven, usually. You basically just roll tape. And that’s what’s fun about indie rock, but that’s also what limits it sometimes.” (7)

  Ultimately however, whatever the failings in its overall sound, Bleach was the album that introduced the world to the sound of grunge. This was the sound that everyone would try and emulate in order to get on the grunge gravy train in the coming months.

  Bleach also highlighted a growing problem in the Nirvana camp. Kurt was increasingly unhappy with Channing’s drumming. The tracks ‘Paper Cuts’ and ‘Floyd’ were lifted from the original sessions with Dale Crover on drums because it was rumoured that Cobain felt the new drummer couldn’t improve on the originals.

  Furthermore, although second guitarist Jason Everman featured in the band shots for the album, he didn’t actually play on it. While Nirvana were on a US tour in support of Bleach however, Everman left the band. Cobain and Novoselic maintained that he was fired, while Everman himself insists the departure was his own decision. Whatever the reason, Everman eventually became the bassist for Soundgarden, while Nirvana retreated into the studio to record their next release, Blew EP as a three piece once again.

  In April 1990, the band went in to Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin, with Butch Vig producing. The intention was to start work on the band’s second Sub Pop album. It was a session that was once again to show up Cobain’s dissatisfaction with Channing. Throughout the week-long session, the frontman frequently stepped behind the kit to show the drummer what he felt was required.

  Things came to a head on the spring US tour with Cobain becoming openly hostile to Channing. After those dates, Channing was ousted from the drum seat, although he maintains he left of his own accord.

  “All I can think is the reason they got rid of Chad was more personality-wise,” explained Jack Endino in 1997. “I always thought Dale (Crover) was a brilliant drummer, and it was pretty hard for anybody to come up and fill his shoes. And when Chad first joined the band, he had to sweat it a little bit; it took Chad a while to get into the groove of it. When I recorded the ‘Love Buzz’ single, I didn’t think he was very good. He wasn’t hitting very hard; it was hard to record him. That’s why the drum sound on ‘Love Buzz’ is really not that great, because I had to do horrible things with it to try and make it sound good at all. Because he was barely touching the drums. By the time they did Bleach he was playing much better and by the time they did those demos with Butch Vig, I thought he was playing very well indeed.” (8)

  Channing was gone and thus opened the vacancy that Grohl would fill with legendary results. Despondent about the precarious situation Scream found itself in, Grohl called his friend Buzz from the Melvins. “They were coming into town and I said, ‘(Scream) kinda broke up. We’re stuck. So, when you come into town, if you can put us on the guest list, that would be great.’ He said, ‘What happened?’ (and) I told him.”

  Buzz tipped Grohl off about the aforementioned Nirvana drummer vacancy and also suggested his chances of being enrolled were very good: “He told me, ‘Nirvana came to Scream’s show in San Francisco a couple of weeks earlier and said they thought you were awesome and if you were ever available that you should give them a call.’” (9)

  ‘I had Bleach and I had heard it before,” Grohl told manateebound.com, “so I’d thought about it for a couple of days and called Kurt up. He said, ‘Well, actually we already have a drummer.’ They were playing with Danny (Peters) from Mudhoney. I said, ‘OK cool. Ya know, give me a call when you come into town – we aren’t doing anything.’” Not prepared to be drummerless for long, Cobain and Novoselic had approached Mudhoney’s Dan Peters to fill the role.

  Grohl looked to have been left high and dry. Later that night, however, Kurt called him back and said to Grohl, “Maybe you should come up here.” Grohl packed up his kit bag and headed off for Seattle. On September 22, 1990, with Peters apparently enrolled as the latest Nirvana drummer, the band played the Motor Sports International Garage in Seattle, sharing the bill with The Derelicts, The Dwarves, and The Melvins. Numbered among the audience was Dave Grohl.

  Grohl stayed for a while with Novoselic in Tacoma, and then moved in with Cobain, who was living in Olympia. A week after the Motorsports Show, Cobain made an appearance on KAOS where he announced the arrival of Dave Grohl as Nirvana’s latest drummer. According to rumour, Peters had not even been told he was out of the band.

  Recalling his earliest meetings with Cobain and Novoselic, Grohl said that they were in awe of both his pedigree and the scene he had been a part of. The Nirvana boys were, it transpired, huge fans of the DC scene. Grohl on the other had was less than enamoured with the grunge revolution.

  “When I went up there to meet with Kurt, the first thing he said to me was, ‘Wow, you’re from Washington!’ Everybody out there worshipped Washington. It was weird after that to see what people made of Seattle and that scene. As far as I’m concerned, all that had already happened in DC.” (10)

  “I think one of the reasons they wanted me was that I sang backup vocals,” Grohl said in 2001. “I don’t remember them saying, ‘You’re in the band.’” (11) But Grohl was in the band and this signalled the final demise of Scream.

  In the aftermath of Scream’s demise, Pete and Franz Stahl went on to form Wool with Government Issue drummer Peter Moffett and bassist Al Bloch. The band made a name for themselves with a rough hybrid of melodic hardcore and hard rock and delivered a blistering introduction with the debut Budspawn EP on the independent External Records. Following the departure of Moffett, Wool signed to London Records with new drummer Chris Bratton in tow. Their subsequent album, 1994’s Box Set took the basic tenet of that debut EP and expanded it into potentially
chart friendly post-grunge rock directions. Sadly commercial success was never to be theirs.

  Scream came back together again for a reunion tour in 1993 in support of the posthumously released Fumble, and then again in 1996 while Franz Stahl was also playing with Foo Fighters (as will be chronicled below). However, critics were less than positive about this latest reincarnation of these Washington DC old-timers. This release of Fumble was met with sharp criticism for its apparent cashing in on Grohl’s success with Nirvana (a later live album was also unfairly accused of cashing in on the Foo’s popularity).

  Regardless of how Scream were later perceived by a somewhat uncharitable press, Grohl recalls his days in that band with genuine, unbridled relish. In 1995, he said, “The feeling of driving across the country in a van with five other guys, stopping in every city to play, sleeping on people’s floors, watching the sun come up over the desert as I drove, it was all too much. This was definitely where I belonged.”

  In many ways, Scream was Dave Grohl’s first love. This was the first band that he worked with intensively. He cut his teeth as a performer and studio musician with them, took on an increasingly large role in the songwriting and was able to play a significant part in their development. They were the yardstick he would measure everything by in the future. And that included Nirvana.

  There are, however, many Scream fans who would argue that Grohl’s’ arrival with the band marked out the creative decline of the once triumphant hardcore ambassadors. His time coincided with a far more hard rock-orientated sound. The earlier hints of reggae, that all-pervading Bad Brains influence, quickly diminished and the straight-ahead driving rock sound soon dominated.

  This was obviously partly due to the fact that Grohl’s drumming pushed this kind of sound. His technical ability – though breathtaking – was often overpowered by the sheer volume of his drumming. The rest of the band could sometimes be seen to be following suit.

  Furthermore throughout the Scream years, Grohl’s oft-cited need to be in the driving seat came to the fore. His increased role in the band eschewed all of the accepted ideas of a drummer’s place in a band. Here he quietly assumed a central creative position and gradually displayed an authority that underlined his position in the Scream legacy.

  It would be wrong however to assume that this inability to remain a backroom boy while the others soak up the glory was driven by ego. In fact, the need to take care of things, to organise and continually push is something that is central to Grohl’s psyche. It’s the trademark of a hyperactive, the product of an inability to sit still for one minute.

  Perhaps one of the most touching examples of this came when Grohl’s parents split up when he was only seven. He took it upon himself to become the man about the house, taking care of everyone in the process. “I could look after myself pretty easy so I just focused on making sure the family was happy. I’ve been doing it ever since,” he told Q’s Michael Odell in February, 2003.

  Whether or not Scream benefited from Grohl’s paternalism is open to debate. He certainly gained invaluable experience and exposure in his time in that band. It was a truly worthy experience of which he never talks in a negative fashion. One fact about this era in Grohl’s life certainly remains true – Scream leave behind a legacy of great moments, both with and without Dave Grohl.

  Just as the Washington harDCore scene had become synonymous with Straight Edge ideology and, in the shape of Positive Force, political activism, the Seattle grunge scene became associated with its own, somewhat questionable ethos. In this case, the ideology was the so-called slacker generation. Grunge was its soundtrack and Nirvana the reluctant heroes.

  Slacker was a derisory term given to an aspect of what had been coined Generation X, a media-invented demographic created to attempt to pigeonhole disaffected American youth. This was the generation born between 1961 and 1981 – the children of the baby boom generation – who became viewed as a generation of underachievers.

  The term Generation X was adopted from the Douglas Coupland novel of the same name, in which three intellectuals wonder aimlessly through life, never fulfilling, or even attempting to fulfil, any of their natural potential. Its movie counterpart, Richard Linklater’s Slacker gave the Gen X concept an even more heavily-focussed look and sound (it used Seattle grunge for its soundtrack) and provided the greater media with the hook it needed to approach, and ultimately condemn the so-called ‘generation without conscience’.

  The need for the creation of this new demographic came from the older generation’s desire to set itself up as the lofty standard from which everything had fallen. Where post-WW2 veterans viewed the birth of rock ’n’ roll with disdain, so too the children of the 1960s, the baby boomers, looked down their noses at this generation who were politically inactive and would rather consume that protest. Much was made of the growth in the video games market; the onslaught of buddy shows on TV which seemed to carry no message beyond consumerism; and the increasingly non-oppositional music. The slackers, it was thought, were losers and proud of it. And further more, they certainly weren’t going to do anything about changing things.

  This slacker attitude was apparently born out in the need among Generation X’ers to look back with nostalgic warmth rather than push forward into the unknown. Thus, unlike the generation before them, these artists, musicians, actors, painters etc merely appropriated the surface level attributes of their medium. When applied to grunge it was argued that bands like Nirvana and Mudhoney were merely lifting the sheen from the surface of the greats and never aspiring to the creation of anything of a lasting resonant depth.

  The generation was supposedly “numb and dumb,” lazy apathetic under-achievers who would return home to their parents after graduating from college. X-ers (as they were called) were thus identified as white, upper-middle class and college-educated, with no ambition beyond hanging out, and getting a MacJob to pay for their lifestyle (a MacJob was Coupland’s term for a dead-end occupation). Slacker was a million miles removed from the Yuppies of the 1980s. Indeed, where the ‘me’ generation of that decade had valued the ability to make it alone, the X-ers were seen as a generation that truly valued relationships. They were, after all the first “latch key” children. Those who lost their family community to the dollar.

  Of course, the Generation X (or Generalization X as Village Voice critic Mike Rubin called it) argument was fundamentally flawed. First and foremost in the fact that the thing which marked this generation out was its desire not to be tagged with a marketing demographic. No sooner had the term slacker been invented than the people it was aimed at rejected it wholesale. To adopt the term as a way of describing yourself meant victory to the media and the marketing people. Fierce individualism has always been a basic tenet of this generation.

  One of the most argued points of the Generation X debate was that it was a catch-all phrase intended to cover a hugely diverse range of people. It was, however, the slacker tag that really upset people. Here was a generation that was being pigeonholed as lacking real ambition or vision, and yet these same people were actively altering world perspectives. Furthermore, on a personal level, people weren’t just sitting back and letting things happen. Voting figures may have been in decline, but it would have been wrong to assume that this meant a politically apathetic generation were being unleashed upon the world. People remained politically active, but addressing things that they faced on a day-to-day level.

  Nirvana, quite simply, were not slackers. They were neither middle-class graduate under-achievers, nor were they apathetic MacJobbers. In fact, they had a work rate which would put most people to shame and ambitions that looked towards global domination. Musically they were bungee jumping without a safety harness. Yet their songs was accused of pandering to the Generation X need for enhanced emotional responses in their music. They wanted sounds that reinforced their dark and sad side. Quite simply music was the language through which the slacker generation expressed its feelings.

  Unwittingly, Ni
rvana and their contemporaries were being adopted as the epitome of Generation X and, in the chaotic months that followed, their powerful beauty and questioning lyricism would be used as a soundtrack for a global marketing ploy – through Nirvana, corporate materialism would be sold to this most cynical generation.

  Dave Grohl joined Nirvana just a few short weeks before the release of their next single ‘Sliver’. Clocking in at just over two minutes, the single not only displayed the band at their most pop, echoing REM at their most frivolous, but in some cruel twist of fate it also featured departing drummer Dan Peters.

  Sub Pop had wanted another record out of the band as quickly as possible and even went as far as to interrupt a Tad session at Reciprocal on July 11, so that Nirvana could lay down a new track. So, while Tad were on their lunch break, Nirvana came in, borrowed Tad’s gear and knocked out their next single. As a result, Peters may have been the band’s shortest-lived drummer, but he did manage to stake his claim to drumming on one record.

  “It wasn’t that we were unhappy with Dan’s drumming, it was just that Dave has qualities which match our needs a little closer,” recalled Cobain. “He takes care of backing vocals for a start. We were blown away by him when we saw him playing with this band Scream a few months ago and Chris and I agreed we’d ask him to join Nirvana if we ever had the chance. Ironically that chance came just weeks after we got Danny in.” (12)

  Following a burst of intense rehearsal in which he learned the entire Nirvana back catalogue and jammed on numerous covers, Dave Grohl made his debut appearance with Nirvana on October 11 at the Northshore Surf Club in Olympia, WA.