by Martin James
A mere nine days later, he was on a Transatlantic flight – in which all of the band would film themselves for footage to be included on the official Nirvana video, Nirvana: Live Tonight! Sold Out! – to play a short UK tour and take part in talks with major record labels. To say that Grohl had been thrown in at the deep end was something of an understatement.
Immediately prior to the first date of the UK tour, the band went into London’s Maida Vale Studios to record a session for Radio 1’s John Peel Show. In what was to be Grohl’s first recording session with his new band, the trio ran through ‘D7’, ‘Molly’s Lips’, ‘Son Of A Gun’ and ‘Turnaround’. Even at this point, Grohl was still learning the band’s songs with Kurt taking to the drum kit regularly to advise the new sticksman.
The UK tour kicked off at Birmingham’s Goldwyn’s Suite on October 23. The following night found them in London at The Astoria. Support came from Godflesh and L7. In his review of the gig, Melody Maker’s Jonathan Selzer was less than complimentary, complaining that, “there’s none of the clenched, drawn-out tension of the Bleach LP, and in fact they sound almost sincere, as if everything’s too geared towards gaining our sympathy… Nirvana only seem to have one song. This generally consists of the finely ground drawl of Kurt Cobain repeating a phrase over and over again until it sounds trite and then everybody shakes their hair for a bit. Yowsa. Good bits are few and far between, the slow-burn and anthracitic undercurrent of ‘Blew’. The Prong-like incisiveness of ‘Big Cheese’, and that’s about it. But tonight The Astoria is seething, a sea of moshers bubbling over, people swimming over heads and tangled stage divers being subsumed back into the froth. The mythology of remoteness comes round again, but no one is willing to come around to the fact that Nirvana simply don’t live up to it.”
It was a rare moment of opposition to the Nirvana frenzy from Melody Maker. Indeed, only that afternoon they had been interviewed in their hotel by that magazine’s journalist Push, who was far more positive about the band. Following the interview, all three members of Nirvana ventured to leafy south west London for a meeting with Island Records.
With all of the hype surrounding the grunge explosion, it was inevitable that the majors would come sniffing around for their piece of the action. Soundgarden and Mudhoney had already signed major deals and Nirvana looked certain to follow. “There are six or seven labels interested in us now, but we’re keeping our options open,” explained Cobain. “It’s mainly a question of who understands us best.”
“But we have to remember that a major wants you to make money for them, and if you don’t do that, they can fuck you and they fuck you hard,” added Grohl (who had already suggested that the best thing about being in Nirvana was being taken out for meals by the record companies!) “Oh, sure,” Novoselic confirmed, “but also bear in mind that we’ve got a lawyer. We have the same lawyer as the Rolling Stones, Poison, Kiss and the Bangles!” (13)
The fight by the major labels to secure Nirvana continued throughout the rest of their stay in the UK. Leeds Polytechnic on October 25, revealed a guest list stuffed to the gills with A&R people, while the following night in Edinburgh, Island even went as far as to supply free drinks for all of the bands playing on the bill!
The final night of the tour found the band pulling into Nottingham to play at Trent Polytechnic. Nottingham had long been a stronghold for rock music (the city’s Rock City nightclub being a huge national draw at the time) and hardcore. It was of little surprise that the grunge aesthetic spread like a rash on that Saturday night.
The Nirvana gig that night was startling. The band ran through their set like a blitzkrieg, seemingly punishing their equipment as each new song unfolded. As with the London gig, the audience was a sea of moshers and stagedivers. However, unlike that night the band themselves were absolutely on fire. Cobain delivered his melodies with an executioner’s gusto, Novoselic attacked the air with his bass with a passion that verged on anger, while Grohl attacked his skins, hair flailing everywhere, with bombastic glee. The energy of his pounding was matched only by the size of his grin.
Backstage after the show, the band were in jubilant mood. They had been joined by Everett True (who had also played on the encore – he had once recorded for Creation Records as The Legend) and were keen to party. Grohl joked along while continually pulling the sweat soaked hair from his face. I was there too, reporting for local fanzine Overall There’s A Smell Of Fried Onions. We talked for a while. He seemed good-humoured but slightly stunned by the size of Nirvana’s UK following.
“It seems weird that a few months ago I was stuck in LA, in a band without a bass player, not knowing what to do next… and now this,” he enthused to me. “It’s all happened so fast. But I can’t wait to get into the studio to start recording the band’s next record. Kurt and Chris are great guys. They create a really special, huge sound. And they’re just like me… from Nowheresville.”
For a few weeks it appeared that Charisma Records had secured Nirvana, but lengthy negotiations with Geffen (DGC) put the band on down time for the remainder of the year. Novoselic took the chance to enjoy a holiday while Cobain’s break was interrupted by being admitted to hospital and diagnosed as having irritable bowel syndrome.
Grohl on the other hand decided to use the time to pursue his favourite goal – making music! Since those first multi-track recordings of his own music back in the pre-Fumble sessions for Scream, Grohl had continued to lay down his tracks with his friend Barrett Jones. He had subsequently amassed quite a collection of music.
On December 23, Grohl went into Jones’ Laundry Room studio and embarked on a session which would produce six new songs: ‘Pokey The Little Puppy’, ‘Petrol CB’, ‘Friend Of A Friend’, ‘Throwing Needles’, ‘Just Another Story About Skeeter Thompson’ and ‘Colour Pictures Of A Marigold’. Many of the songs themselves owed a huge debt to the influence of Cobain’s songwriting. Strangely however, it wasn’t so much the grunge sound, but the use of lilting, understated melody.
‘Pokey The Little Puppy’ was a four minute, three chord hardcore instrumental run-through, which echoed Ian MacKaye’s Fugazi with its bass-led dissonance and edgy dynamics. Only a slow-grinding, chugging guitar middle-eight, complete with guitar hooks following the bass line offered any hint as to Grohl’s latest day job with Nirvana. ‘Petrol CB’ owed a huge debt to Cobain. The melody scorched between distorted howl and Neil Young-esque chorus, while guitars were cranked up and swinging between heavy fuzz and almost acoustic strum. ‘Friend Of A Friend’, a confessional dark acoustic strum along the song found Grohl singing about his friend’s friend, the guitar. An instrument which is presented as being a replacement for human love. “When he plays, no one speaks,” laments Grohl. A touching moment in which Grohl displayed his rarely seen softer side, and one of the highlights of the session.
‘Throwing Needles’ offered both a peak into Grohl’s future and a quick look into his past. With its pounding drums, thrashing guitars and pop melody, it could have come direct from the debut Foo Fighters album. However, the rock dynamics also echoed the final recordings of Scream.
Scream make another return on ‘Just Another Song About Skeeter Thompson” in which Grohl eulogised his one-time bassist over a hardcore assault. The spoken words told of Skeeter’s new-found relationship with a Dutch girl on the band’s second European tour. She was wealthy and Skeeter started turning up in nice clothes, so the story goes. Eventually he moves in with her.
“She was really good looking, really cool, you know,” Grohl explains as guitars, drums and bass fly through a breakneck groove. This quite bizarre track would turn up as a B-side to The Melvins King Buzzo EP in 1993 that featured Grohl on drums. King Buzzo was otherwise known as Buzz Osborne.
The final track recorded during these experimental sessions was ‘Colour Pictures Of A Marigold’, which once again found Grohl strumming an acoustic guitar while he delivered a near-falsetto vocal performance, complete with harmonies. Perhaps the least interesting son
g from the session, it did however display a touching frailty in his delivery.
With these exploratory sessions completed, Grohl went to Music Source Studios, Seattle, for a session with Nirvana on New Year’s Day, 1991. They recorded ‘Aneurysm’ and a new version of ‘Even In His Youth’.
Technically Nirvana was still signed to Sub Pop, although a deal had been agreed with Geffen. Reports suggested they would sign that deal on March 30 for a $287,000 advance and a buy-out from Sub Pop for $75,000. Furthermore the band would have to contribute half of this sum. Sub Pop also received a 2% royalty on the next two albums (extended to three with the release of Incesticide in 1992).
“It was unbelievable,” explained Grohl in 2001 of the band’s sudden high income. “We went from selling amp heads and ‘Love Buzz’ singles for food, to having millions of dollars. Coming from Springfield, Virginia, I went from having no money at all and working at Tower Records to being set up for the rest of my life. I remember the first time we got a thousand-dollar check. We were so excited. I went out and bought a BB gun and a Nintendo – the things that I always wanted as a kid.” (14)
Ironically it wasn’t the biggest advance on offer for Nirvana, who had also been offered $1m by Capitol. Nevertheless, at a Seattle show, Cobain introduced the band as “major corporate rock sell-outs” before launching into their first performance of their soon-to-be-epochal single, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’.
In May, Nirvana started work on their follow up to Bleach. Tentatively titled Sheep the set was to be recorded at Sound City Studios, Van Nuys in California. Butch Vig, who had already worked on the demos earlier in the year, was installed as producer.
Talking about the recording in 1997, Vig recalled how impressed he was by the Grohl’s drumming. “Kurt had called me up and said, ‘I have the best drummer in the world now. He plays louder and harder than anybody I’ve ever met.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, right.’ But they were totally right. Kurt’s guitar was super-loud and the bass was super-loud, but the drums… there were no mics on them in this room and they were just as loud acoustically as the amps! And also Dave turned out to be so cool; really easy to work with, and full of energy, and really brought a lot of life and fun to the sessions. He kept it real light.” (15)
Previous Nirvana producer, Jack Endino threw a different light on Grohl’s actual creative input on the songs on what would eventually become the watershed album, Nevermind. “You’ll notice if you play the Chad (Channing) demos for the Nevermind stuff and compare them to Nevermind, they’re exactly the same drum part. The guy was getting pretty good when they got rid of him. But Dave is obviously an amazing drummer himself, so what are you going to do? He was a much harder hitter than almost anybody.” (16)
The drum parts, it would seem, were set in stone within Cobain’s own imagination. He had written the songs, and he knew what the drums needed to be like. It is one of the ironies of Grohl’s post-Nirvana career that he has been accused of megalomaniacal tendencies when it comes to the drum parts, but this was never levelled at Cobain whose genius seems rarely to have been questioned.
Grohl himself had another take on Cobain’s need to dictate the beats. “Kurt was kind of a drummer himself,” he said in 2001. “When he would play guitar or write songs, if you ever looked at his jaw, he would be moving his jaw back and forth, like he was playing the drums with his teeth. He heard in his head what he wanted from a rhythm, and that’s a hard thing to articulate.” (17)
Following the recording of Nevermind, the band headed out on a tour of the west coast of America, taking in Denver, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Hollywood, Tijuana, Santa Cruz, Sacramento and Portland. It was in the middle of these dates that the band went to see Butthole Surfers and Kurt Cobain first met a woman by the name of Courtney Love. Journalist Everett True already knew Love through her band Hole. He subsequently introduced Cobain to her, although it also transpired that Grohl had previously known of Love.
With a short break before their August tour of Europe, Grohl once again went into the studio to record some more of his own tracks on June 27. This time, however, he didn’t use The Laundry Room, but instead opted for WGNS Studios in Arlington. The engineer for these sessions was Geoff Turner, although Barrett Jones did assist.
Jones’s Laundry Rooms had in fact temporarily closed down. Jones subsequently followed Grohl to Seattle in June 1991 (“Dave had just moved out here and joined some band I’d never heard of called Nirvana!”), where he would eventually set up a studio in his west Seattle home and eventually record the first post-Nevermind Nirvana material, plus a session with King Buzzo on which Grohl played drums (this eventually became a King Buzzo single in 1993).
Grohl recorded four songs at the WGNS session: ‘Hell’s Garden’, ‘Winnebego’, ‘Bruce’ and ‘Milk’. It was immediately apparent how much the Nevermind sessions had effected him. Song arrangements, melodies, guitar style and even drum and vocal balance had grown in a similar direction as his band’s recent recordings.
‘Hell’s Garden’ featured a quiet melodic verse which erupted into a straight ahead power chord punk guitar hook, which echoed ‘White Riot’ by The Clash, complete with screamed vocals. ‘Winnebego’ was reminiscent of Green River with its neo-country melody, guitars picking out octaves at breakneck speed and drums seemingly tumbling over themselves, before highlighting the dynamics with razor sharp precision. ‘Bruce’ offered a slower Led Zeppelin-esque groove over which a multitracked guitar feedback soup rocked like Metallica while ‘Milk’ presented the most obviously Cobain-inspired moment, thanks to its combination of grunged-up country and western verse, one word chorus and melodies that echoed 1960s act Love.
Although these were solo recordings, it is possible that Grohl had written them with Nirvana in mind, perhaps seeking an increased involvement in the songwriting, as had happened with Scream. Indeed, ‘Marigold’ was eventually recorded with the band and included during the In Utero sessions and later released as a B-side to the ‘Heart Shaped Box’ single in 1993. Grohl supplied the vocals. According to the book, Nirvana, by Jeremy Dean, ‘Winnebego’ was also recorded by Nirvana and placed on a B-side, however the track has never surfaced as a Nirvana recording either on an official or bootleg release.
Another interesting aspect of this second Grohl session is that it shows how calm things were for Nirvana at this stage. That he could even consider solo material (whether for release or not) reveals how unexpected the band’s success was for everyone. Certainly the rollercoaster ride they were about to embark upon would make it increasingly difficult for Grohl to record his own material for quite some time.
The first single to be lifted from Nevermind appeared on September 9. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. So much has been written about this one pivotal track, but as a deliberately simplistic review, it was a monstrous record. Wave after wave of quiet-to-a-storm crescendos built around Kurt’s increasingly melodic guitar licks and a vocal line that was about as hooky as a pop record could get. The video for the song subverted the cheerleader popularity hierarchy in high school into a punk rock revolt. However, it was still polished enough to be MTV-friendly and the music station jumped on the record.
Stunning as the song was, the speed with which it captured the airwaves was nothing short of unbelievable. Almost immediately ‘…Teen Spirit’ became the soundtrack to a generation, with its lyrics becoming instant catch phrases for the so-called slacker kids.
However, there was also a crucial point about the timing of this track. Nirvana’s major label debut arrived at a point when rock music was in decline. Alternative rock bands like The Pixies, Sonic Youth and REM were past their best. Even more recent indie bands like Dinosaur Jnr and Lemonheads had failed to live up to their original promise. There was simply a huge gap in the market. With maximum marketing and promotional exposure through Geffen’s well-oiled machine, Nirvana quickly filled that void. However, it was their talent, and Cobain’s increasing iconic status, that helped them sustain this position.<
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In the UK, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ peaked at #6. It also went Top 10 in the US Billboard charts. Despite the success of the single, Geffen only pressed 50,000 copies of Nevermind, shipping a modest 46,251 of these. Indeed, neither band nor label expected the album to do that well.
In 2001, Grohl talked about the band’s lack of confidence in the album’s commercial potential. “It didn’t seem possible,” he admitted. “The charts were filled with fucking Mariah Carey and Michael Bolton. It seemed like we were about to make another pass through the underground. One of the first people to say they thought the album was going to be huge was Donita Sparks of L7. And I didn’t believe her. I was going, ‘There’s absolutely no way.’
It was playing the Reading Festival in England in August, 1991 - we were maybe fourth on the bill – watching the audience respond to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. It was something about the song. People just bounced to it. Basically, it’s a dance beat – the verses are like Cameo-disco drumming and the choruses are heavy-metal 60s go-go.” (18)
Nevermind was eventually released on September 24, three weeks after that Reading Festival appearance. Critics were united in their praise for the album. “Forget all the prejudices you may or may not have about Seattle’s Sup Pop scene of three years back,” wrote Melody Maker’s Everett True. “There will not be a better straight-ahead rock album than Nevermind released all year… When Nirvana released Bleach all those years ago, the more sussed among us figured they had the potential to make an album that would blow every other contender away. My God, have they proved us right.” (19)
Steve Lamacq wrote in the NME: “Nevermind is an album for people who would like to like Metallica, but can’t stomach their lack of melody; while on the other hand it takes some of the Pixies’ nous with tunes, and gives the idea new muscle. A shock to the system.” (20)