That wasn’t the first awkward moment they had had. On the phone with Kurt before he headed up to Seattle, Dave mentioned a party he had gone to after a Scream show in Olympia. The band had bought a bunch of beer and the great disco music spilling out onto the street augured well for a happening bash. They arrived at the apartment to find about twenty people, with all the guys on one side of the room and all the girls on another. “They were total Olympia hot chocolate party Hello Kitty people,” says Dave. The band stood around drinking beer and feeling awkward until suddenly someone turned off the stereo. “This girl comes in and sits down and plugs in this guitar and starts playing this total bad teen suicide awful music, ‘Boys, boys/ Bad/ Die,’ ” Dave says. “And after every song everyone would clap and we were like, ‘Let’s get out here!’ ” Dave had just begun insulting the “sad little girl with the bad fucking songs” when Kurt said, “Oh yeah, that’s my girlfriend, Tobi.”
This guitar has seconds to live. Kurt at the Motor Sports show. (© Ian T. Tilton)
Kurt was actually at the party and remembers that the members of Scream were making fun of everybody there. “They were real rocker dudes,” says Kurt. “I hated them, I thought they were assholes.” Kurt remembers Dave in particular. “He brought up this Primus tape from their car and tried to play it and everyone got mad at him.”
The Motor Sports gig happened to be the night after Dave arrived. He was stunned by the size and enthusiasm of the crowd—the only other local show he’d seen that big was Fugazi in D.C. In Seattle, punk rock had become big business. “It seemed like a local punk scene gone bad, in a way,” says Dave. “I saw the Nirvana T-shirt stand—every fucking kid and their brother buying the ‘crack smokin’, fudge packin’ T-shirt. They must have sold two hundred T-shirts that night—that’s insane for a local punk rock show.
“I didn’t know what I was getting myself into at all.”
Dave was not terribly impressed by Nirvana. “I thought they were all right,” he says. “They didn’t completely blow me away. The Melvins played before them and I was so into the Melvins that I was spent by the time Nirvana went on.”
Also from the Sounds shoot: Kurt smiles! Future Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl is at left. The can of sausage would reappear in the “Sliver” video two years later. No one knows why. (© Ian T. Tilton)
Still, the material seemed fun to play and besides, although Dave thought Danny Peters was “a fucking incredible drummer,” he didn’t think Nirvana sounded quite right with Peters. He was probably right—Peters is an excellent, hard-hitting drummer, but doesn’t play in the heavy, Bonhamesque style that Nirvana requires. Peters played well at the Motor Sports show, but he didn’t quite fit—it was like a man wearing a very nice hat that nevertheless didn’t go with his suit.
Danny Peters, Kurt, and Chris pose for a Sounds magazine photo shoot at Chris and Shelli’s house the day after the Motor Sports show. (© Ian T. Tilton)
Dave stayed with Chris and Shelli at first. The day after the Motor Sports show, Chris and Shelli threw a barbecue, during which Chris, Kurt, and Danny Peters did an interview for a cover story in the now defunct English music weekly Sounds. No one was to know they were auditioning a new drummer.
A few days later, Kurt and Chris auditioned Dave at the Dutchman. “We knew in two minutes that he was the right drummer,” says Chris. “He was a hard hitter. He was really dynamic. He was so bright, so hot, so vital. He rocked.” Dave was steady, solid, tasteful, and definitely a hard hitter. When he played a roll on his snare, it sounded like the powerful chop of spinning helicopter blades; when he pounded on his gigantic tom-toms, they didn’t make a tone so much as they exploded like rifle shots; his outsized cymbals fluttered like punching bags under his attack. Dave could also sing, giving the band the potential for live harmonies for the first time.
Then there was the delicate matter of telling Danny Peters that he was out of the band after only a few weeks.
During an acoustic appearance on Calvin Johnson’s KAOS radio show a few days later, Kurt revealed that they had a new drummer and that he hadn’t even broken the news to Peters yet. “Who is the new drummer?” Johnson asked. “His name is Dave and he’s a baby Dale Crover,” Kurt answered. “He plays almost as good as Dale. And within a few years’ practice, he may even give him a run for his money.”
Kurt acknowledged the awkward situation with Peters. “Dan’s such a beautiful guy and such a beautiful drummer,” he said, “but you can’t pass up an opportunity to play with the drummer of our dreams, which is Dave. He’s been the drummer of our dreams for like two years. It’s a bummer, a big bummer.”
A tour of England had been planned. “Kurt called me up,” says Peters, “and he said he thought they were going to go with Geffen and I’m like ‘Cool.’ Then I go, ‘So what about this tour?’ And he goes, ‘Ahhh. Ummm. Well, ah, well … We got another drummer.’ And I wasn’t bummed at all. I kind of half-assed expected it and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s cool.’ I wasn’t sure how they were feeling because their communication skills at that time were kind of not happening. I wasn’t bummed at all. I’m still not bummed.”
And as Chris points out, “If he was going to join our band, that would be the end of Mudhoney. And we loved Mudhoney so much, we didn’t want to be responsible for that.”
“Dave suits them way better than I did,” Peters admits. “He really does. To me, that’s more important, too. He’s got the heavy shit right there. He beats the fuck out of those drums. They definitely got the person that suited them better.”
Peters went on to a short stint with Screaming Trees, then Mudhoney re-formed and eventually signed with Warners in 1992. Peters says he’s having a great time with Mudhoney, one of America’s greatest rock and roll bands. “The only thing is,” he says, “[Nirvana] put out one fuckin’ killer record and I sure would have liked to play on it.”
Meanwhile, Scream dissolved and the guitarist and the singer, brothers Franz and Pete Stahl, later formed Wool. In the summer of 1993, Dave joined Skeeter and the Stahls for a triumphant Scream reunion tour.
Kurt and Chris had found a rehearsal space in Tacoma, a converted barn—it had brown shag carpet and a massive P.A. that made a loud hissing sound. They shared it with a slick bar band—students from the Guitar Institute of Technology, by Chris’s guess.
Dave stayed with Chris and Shelli for a month, then moved in with Kurt in Olympia. The Cobain/Grohl house was knee-deep in corn dog sticks. “It was the most filthy pigsty I’d ever lived in,” says Kurt (and that’s saying a lot). They passed the time by shooting a BB gun, occasionally scoring a direct hit on the windows of the State Lottery Building across the street.
Dave describes the apartment as “small, cluttered, dirty, smelly.” Six-foot-tall Dave slept on a five-foot couch. He slept in the same room as Kurt’s tank and the clicking of the turtles’ shells against the glass as they tried to escape would keep him up at night. “It just felt so weird,” says Dave. “The last two and a half years have been pretty weird.
“There wasn’t a lot to do,” Dave continues. “There was a lot of time just spent sitting in the room totally silent reading or just totally silent doing nothing, staring at walls or going downtown and seeing a ninety-nine-cent movie or shooting BB guns in the backyard.” Kurt and Dave began going to sleep at six in the morning as the sun was coming up and waking as the sun was going down, never seeing sunlight.
The two barely spoke. The conversation rarely got past “Are you hungry?” “Yes.”
Still, Kurt became more social after Dave moved in. “Kurt sort of came out of his shell,” says Slim Moon. “He was around more, he seemed happier with his life. He was hanging out with actual Olympians.” Being around so many artistic people seemed to have an energizing, inspiring effect on Kurt; in Olympia, he could express himself without inhibition or fear of rejection. As a highly creative person, Kurt yearned to be around other creative people. In Olympia, he appreciated that he was appreciated.
Kurt had been going out with Tobi Vail since before Dave moved in. She was a couple of years younger than Kurt and had no intention of settling into a long-term relationship. “I was definitely looking for somebody I could spend quite a few years with,” Kurt says, even though he was only twenty-three at the time. “I wanted that security and I knew that it wasn’t with her. So I was just wasting my time and I just felt bad about it.” By late 1990, that fact was becoming painfully apparent, and that’s when Kurt says he broke up with Tobi.
“He was just a wreck,” says Dave, “just a mess.” But Kurt insists that it wasn’t strictly because of Tobi. “It was just that I was tired of my life, basically,” he says. “I was tired of living in Olympia with nothing to do. All during the time that Tracy and I were breaking up, I wanted to move to Seattle. I knew that I was long overdue for a change. I didn’t have any extreme thing I could do to just get out of it right away. It wasn’t like all the other times where I could have a fight with somebody and get kicked out of their house and have no choice but to do something else.
“I was just tired of not finding the right mate,” Kurt says. “I’d been looking all my life. I just got tired of trying to have a girlfriend that I knew that I wouldn’t eventually spend more than a couple of months with. I’ve always been old-fashioned in that respect. I’ve always wanted a girlfriend that I could have a good relationship with for a long time. I wish I was capable of just playing the field, but I always wanted more than that.”
The rides in the van to Tacoma for practice had already been quiet enough, but then Kurt stopped talking completely. Finally, after weeks and weeks of this, they were driving home from practice one night when Kurt broke the silence by saying “You know, I’m not always like this,” adding that he would eventually recover from the breakup. “I just kind of said, ‘Oh, that’s cool,’ ” Dave says. “But I was thinking to myself, ‘Oh, thank God!’ ”
They practiced from ten o’clock to one in the morning almost every night over a four- or five-month period. The band’s chemistry was quickly falling into place. “We felt like we could do whatever we wanted to do,” Dave says. “There weren’t any restrictions and it got weird and jammy and we’d do these noisy new wave noise experimental jam things. We’d always start off the practice just jamming. We’d set up and plug in and jam for twenty minutes on nothing at all.” Out of the jams sprang countless songs, but they’d soon forget them or lose the tapes they recorded them on. “There were probably thirty or forty songs we had written that are just gone,” Dave says.
After a few weeks, Dave played his first show with Nirvana at the North Shore Surf Club in Olympia. The show had sold out on one day’s notice and Dave was so amazed that he called his mother and sister about it. They opened with a cover of the Vaselines’ “Son of a Gun.” Or at least they tried to—they blew a circuit twice before someone realized all the amps were on one line. It was a frenzied show—Dave played with such force that he broke his snare drum. “I picked it up and held it in front of the audience to show them that we have a new drummer who’s very good,” says Kurt.
“Kurt and Chris knew—and everybody else knew who saw them play—that they were only a hint of what they could be until Dave joined the band,” says Slim Moon. “He just knew how to play drums and he understood their music. Chad just never got it and the guys before Chad never really got it. Danny was a great drummer but he just wasn’t right.”
Then they went over to Europe for a tour with L.A. rockers L7, ostensibly to promote the “Sliver”/“Dive” single, which didn’t actually come out until a month after they left. At London’s Heathrow Airport, they met tour manager Alex Macleod. Macleod and Dave had met on a Scream tour and they hadn’t exactly hit it off. The working papers for the tour listed Danny Peters as Nirvana’s drummer, so Macleod was surprised to see Dave coming through Customs at the airport. “Oh, fuck,” thought Dave. “Oh, fuck,” thought Macleod.
But they quickly made amends, partly out of necessity and partly because they shared an appreciation for what Macleod calls “inane, senseless humor.”
Along for the ride were soundman Craig Montgomery, monitor man Ian Beveridge, and a lot of equipment. They also had a VCR and two tapes—a Monty Python episode and Spinal Tap, which had long since become standard equipment on any tour bus.
They played to packed houses of about a thousand people a night, winning rave reviews from the all-important U.K. music weeklies. Kurt only half-sarcastically told Keith Cameron in the October 27 Sounds, “I don’t wanna have any other kind of job, I can’t work among people. I may as well try and make a career out of this. All my life my dream has been to be a big rock star—just may as well abuse it while you can.” He added that the band was exploring a more pop style of songwriting—“We figured we may as well get on the radio and try and make a little bit of money at it.”
Nirvana’s U.K. publicist Anton Brookes recalls that Kurt was very confident that he would soon realize his dream. “I remember Kurt saying that the album was going to go Top Ten and there were these tracks that were going to be massive as singles,” Brookes says. “You could see in his face that he totally believed that. He knew it.”
Meanwhile, John Silva at Gold Mountain Management in L.A. had recently begun calling up the band and offering his expertise; Chris began consulting him informally on business matters. Gold Mountain, founded by industry veteran Danny Goldberg, counted decided nonpunks such as Bonnie Raitt and Belinda Carlisle as clients, but they also had Sonic Youth. And since whatever Sonic Youth did was by its very nature cool, Gold Mountain was cool by Nirvana. And since Thurston Moore was raving about Nirvana to Gold Mountain, the feeling was mutual. Goldberg was still kicking himself for passing on Dinosaur Jr even after Moore raved about them and he wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.
In November, Gold Mountain flew the band down to L.A., and met with Goldberg and Silva, a hip, bright, and aggressive young manager who had worked with several alternative acts including Redd Kross and House of Freaks. Silva was in touch with the underground enough to have amassed a gigantic seven-inch indie-rock singles collection; he’d even shared an apartment with the Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra. Chris liked the fact that Goldberg was also the head of the Southern California chapter of the ACLU; Dave dug that Goldberg had been a publicist for Led Zeppelin in the mid-seventies. After a meeting with Goldberg and Silva, Kurt and Chris left and called Silva from the lobby of the building to say they were going with Gold Mountain. They would have told him in person, they said, but they were late for another major label schmooze.
Sleep had become Kurt’s favorite pastime—he often claimed to be a narcoleptic and to this day, he usually wears pajamas, probably to make sure he’s properly dressed just in case Mr. Sandman should come knocking. “I’d sleep just to get away from the pain,” Kurt explains. “While I was asleep, my stomach wouldn’t hurt. Then I’d wake up and curse myself that I was still alive.”
One day, Kurt was up at the Gold Mountain offices, moping around. “What the fuck are you moping about?” asked John Silva.
Kurt replied, “I’m awake, aren’t I?”
“I just like to sleep,” Kurt says. “I find myself falling asleep at times when I’m fed up with people or bored. If I don’t want to socialize and I’m stuck in a social situation, like backstage or being on tour in general, I just sleep throughout the day. I would prefer to be in a coma and just be woken up and wheeled out onto the stage and play and then put back in my own little world rather than deal with … For so many years, I’ve felt like most of my conversation has been exhausted, there’s not much I can look forward to. Everyday simple pleasures that people might have in having conversations or talking about inane things I just find really boring, so I’d rather just be asleep.”
With lawyer Alan Mintz shopping around the band to all the major labels, Gold Mountain on their side, and a colossal buzz that just kept growing, Nirvana became the object of every major label A&R person’s desire from coast to
coast. The band was very wary of the slick, big-city corporate label types. At the fancy restaurants they’d get taken to, Kurt would just eat the expensive food and not say a word, while Chris would usually get quite drunk. It was essentially a milder version of their first meeting with Jonathan Poneman. But this time, they made sure they were nice enough to he labels so that they would get asked back to dinner a few more times, which, after all, was the point. “We felt like snotty little hot-shit kids,” Dave says. “We felt like we were getting away with something.”
At first, the band was confused. Why was everyone so interested in a punk rock band from Aberdeen? For one thing, bands such as U2, R.E.M., and Jane’s Addiction were beginning to score gold and platinum records. “Alternative rock” was the new industry buzzword. The canned, lightweight pop then dominating the charts—Paula Abdul, Milli Vanilli, etc.—was making the major labels some quick money, but the labels knew they had neglected to cultivate artists with long-term potential. Alternative bands fit the bill nicely and the best of them had an important thing going for them—a large and loyal fan base. Just like Nirvana.
Other indie bands were being courted, too, like Dinosaur Jr, fIREHOSE, and Teenage Fanclub.
After a while, Kurt, Chris, and Dave began to understand all this and started thinking that they might actually be in a position to be a moderate commercial success—enough to make a living at it, anyway.
The band flew to New York to check out Charisma Records and Columbia Records. Dave was homesick, so he flew to New York on a record label’s tab and then caught a shuttle down to D.C. At Columbia, they met label president Donny Ienner, who told them, “Listen, men, I’m not going to dick you around. We want to turn you into stars.” Actually, that’s precisely what they wanted to hear—Kurt and Chris were afraid that they were going to be treated as a fringe band that no one at a major label would pay any attention to. But Columbia seemed “too Mafiaesque, a little too corporate,” Kurt says. They liked Charisma, even though the label saw fit to make a special “Welcome Nirvana” video that was playing as they walked into the conference room.
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