“We went out and made noise”: Dave Grohl on the worst gig Nirvana ever played
Every band will have those nights when nothing is really working onstage. Being a rock star is still a job at the end of the day, and having the same energy every single night will take it out of the seasoned pros after a while. Whereas most acts thrive on audience interaction whenever they go onstage, Dave Grohl admitted that one gig with Nirvana was up there with one of the worst gigs that he had ever played.
Granted, saying that Nirvana wasn’t a great live band would have been missing the point half the time. While most people wouldn’t have appreciated a band that destroyed their gear every time they finished onstage, it’s also a spectacle to see someone like Krist Novoselic launch his bass into the air and practically have a guitar duel with Kurt Cobain until both of their instruments are completely torn to pieces.
And would anyone expect anything less than that? This is the same band that ended their most famous video by having a huge stampede of fans tearing through the set of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, so it’s not like they weren’t opposed to having a little bit of anarchy whenever they performed.
That being said, they could be a trainwreck when things weren’t working. Look no further than some of the gigs before Grohl was even in the band, and you’ll see performances where Cobain threw himself into the drums because he had had enough of what Chad Channing had been doing behind the kit.
At the same time, there’s something punk rock about them being dishevelled every time they went onstage. This was their chance to be heard as one of the greatest rock bands of all time, but since Cobain was never comfortable being a rock star, watching them do the exact opposite of what you’d expect out of a band like Kiss was a perfect way of bringing rock and roll back down to Earth.
Although that was normally fine within the confines of a club, Grohl thought that they hit their worst gigs when they hit the stadium circuit, saying, “There was a time we went down to South America, and we weren’t used to playing to 100,000 people, but we were doing this Hollywood Rock Festival. Our thing was to take the piss out of something so huge, so rock and roll, so we went out and made noise for an hour, played ‘Rio’ by Duran Duran.”
Despite the idea of Cobain singing ‘Rio’ sounding absolutely hilarious, playing to that big an audience when they were still finding their feet was bound to be tough. Grohl hadn’t even become comfortable being ‘the quiet one’ sitting at the back, but when someone graduates to the same level as Metallica or Pink Floyd, it becomes a lot harder to feed off the audience when there’s no telling where the crowd of people ends.
Still, the fact that they were able to make a complete fabrication of rock and roll is what made them so captivating to watch in the first place. Sure, they may have been taking the piss out of rock and roll, but no one has been able to rock harder than they had when they were goofing around.
