Did Dave Grohl ever sing before Foo Fighters?
There aren’t many musicians who can truly do it all. While some might master two elements, such as guitar and vocals, it’s a rare achievement for someone to excel at every component of a band and feel entirely at home in the studio on their own. Paul McCartney is perhaps the most famous example of a musician who mastered every aspect of rock, but another hugely influential figure who followed in his footsteps is Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl.
Grohl has enjoyed a phenomenal career. Starting out like any adolescent dreamer of his age by listening to classic records by the likes of The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Rush and Kiss, music quickly became his sanctuary. He was then gifted his first drum kit for his 12th birthday, and from that moment on, he would throw himself into the world of the instrument. He formed a technically brilliant but elemental style that sits at the nexus of John Bonham’s power, Neil Peart’s precision, and Ringo Starr’s aptitude for serving the song and creating rhythmic riffs.
In his teens, Grohl found a home in the hardcore movement that was flourishing in the DC area, which was close to his Virginia hometown. Bands like Minor Threat and Bad Brains opened his mind to the punk sound and philosophy, and at the age of 17, he auditioned for another influential group, Scream. They hired him on the spot as their new drummer and took him on a global jaunt of personal and musical discovery.
Playing with Scream led Grohl to join Nirvana. His recruitment into Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic’s group gave them the missing piece of the puzzle. He wasn’t just their drummer, though, and would help them take over the world in different ways.
So, did Dave Grohl ever sing before Foo Fighters?
Grohl did sing before Foo Fighters. Not only did he provide backing vocals for most of Nirvana’s classic material, but he was also the primary songwriter and vocalist on 1993’s ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ B-side, ‘Marigold’. Notably, ‘Marigold’ was first released as ‘Color Pictures of a Marigold’ on 1992’s Pocketwatch, the cassette album released by Late!, the pseudonym for Grohl, who sang, played guitar, bass, and drummed on the record.
According to Grohl, Cobain loved that he wrote and sang songs and had the idea of restructuring some of his ideas into future tracks by the band. Tragically, though, this never came to fruition due to Cobain’s 1994 death. However, after he returned to music following the immediate fallout from the frontman’s suicide, he would take his demos and form them into fully-fledged tracks such as ‘Alone + Easy Target’ and ‘Exhausted’ from Foo Fighters’ 1995 self-titled debut.
Due to his work on ‘Marigold’, after he formed Foo Fighters, some audience members would heckle the new band to play the Nirvana song. Guitarist Pat Smear recalls in Back and Forth: “No one had heard the songs yet, so there was this song called ‘Marigold’ that Nirvana had made with Dave on vocals. So, out of nowhere, you would just hear someone scream ‘MARIGOLD’, and we never played it. How awkward that must have been for Dave.”
