Dave Grohl on the first time he played with Nirvana
It was a massive leap of faith for Dave Grohl to fly out to Seattle in 1990. The young drummer might have only been 21 years old, but he had already paid his dues throughout his teenage years playing for Washington D.C. punk legends Scream for nearly half a decade. When Scream suddenly dissolved, a lost Grohl called Melvins singer Buzz Osbourn, who, in turn, passed him on to Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic, and the rest is history.
It just so happened that, at nearly the exact moment that Scream had broken up, Nirvana was looking for a new drummer. The band had recorded a few demos with drummer Chad Channing for their upcoming second studio album, but Channing departed before any sessions could be completed. With little else in his future, Grohl decided to fly out West and audition for the open drum spot.
When asked by Uncut in 2021 if he remembered the first time he and the rest of Nirvana first played, Grohl’s memory was crystal clear. “Absolutely. It was in a rehearsal space in a warehouse district south of Seattle,” Grohl explained. “I knew the album Bleach, but before I flew up to audition for the band, I had memorised it. When we sat down to play for the first time in this little damp, dank, disgusting rehearsal space that I think belonged to either Mudhoney or Tad, we locked in perfectly immediately.”
“Plus, they hadn’t had anyone to sing backup vocals before, so Kurt encouraged me to sing the backup harmonies that he had put on the album but had never sung live,” Grohl added. “Within one minute, we knew that this was the right thing to do. It doesn’t happen often, there are only a few times in life when things lock in perfectly. It happened with Them Crooked Vultures as well. When things just settle in so comfortably, you immediately know that it is meant to be.”
Cobain had been busy writing songs for the band’s next album, but when Grohl joined, it was easier for him to play along to the already-released material featured on Bleach. He had been a massive fan of the album prior to arriving in Seattle. He was a stranger to the happening grunge scene there, but felt a kinship to the music that Cobain had crafted.
“When I joined the band in September 1990, I had only heard Bleach. I loved that record so much,” Grohl explained. “It really stood apart from all the other music I was listening to, mostly because of Kurt’s sense of melody. There was lots of noise, lots of heavy riffs and lots of punk rock going around, but there was something about Nirvana that set them apart. The song ‘About A Girl’ on Bleach just kind of blew everybody’s minds, that the band had that much of a range of dynamics, not just musically but melodically.”
“When I joined, I hadn’t heard any of the music they had recorded with Butch Vig months before [in Madison, Wisconsin, in April 1990]. Originally, those recordings were meant to be the next Sub Pop record, but that fell apart,” Grohl also said. “When they played me those demos – they considered them demos – ‘Breed’ was then titled ‘Imodium’. I loved that riff, I loved the chorus, the simplicity of melody.”
In truth, the songs even had a hint of Scream about them, so in hindsight, it seemed clear that the future Foo Fighters man was the right fit for the band. The songs were laden with melody no matter how disguised they were under Cobain’s growled distortion, and this sense of ’70s AM radio rhythms has always been a tenet of Grohl’s drumming. In fact, he even says that he was ripping off disco beats during his time in Nirvana.
“‘Lithium’ was there and ‘In Bloom’. ‘In Bloom’ was the song that they had invested the most faith into,” Grohl claimed, reciting the inception of future seminal classics. “They had made a video for it, and the production was amazing. I heard those songs and thought, ‘Wow, these guys have really taken a giant leap from Bleach to this new material.'” And he was determined to be a part of it from the get-go. Thankfully, the band were instantly impressed.
Check out ‘In Bloom’ down below.
