How did Nirvana song ‘Marigold’ predict Foo Fighters?
Being the lead singer of one of the biggest bands in the world wasn’t exactly on Dave Grohl’s agenda when he started playing in Nirvana. That role would always fall on Kurt Cobain, and even when Foo Fighters began as a tiny idea in Grohl’s mind, he was usually upfront in saying that he owed many of his songwriting lessons to watching Cobain. Before he walked into that studio in 1994 to start all over, ‘Marigold’ already predicted where Grohl would be taking his new outfit.
Then again, there are a lot of pieces to the B-side to ‘Heart Shaped Box’ that aren’t meant to be taken all that seriously. The whole thing sounds like a demo just put together in someone’s basement, and given that there is one verse and a chorus written for the song, it was clear that Grohl was still just starting out with songwriting.
But if you start looking at this tune and the debut Foo Fighters album right next to each other, this tune really is the bridge between In Utero and the sounds of ‘I’ll Stick Around’. Not many artists would have been willing to go on afterwards, but ‘Marigold’ gave Grohl an unintentional road map for where he wanted to go.
It’s not like he was uncomfortable with his tunes by any stretch. He had already released the demo Pocketwatch on his own, but if you were next to Cobain looking to showcase your songs, chances are you would get cold feet as well. Despite sounding primitive, though, the chord progression is actually a common trope that has shown up in a lot of Foo Fighters songs going forward.
One of Grohl’s habits on guitar is finding a unique shape of a chord and moving it up and down the neck, and ‘Marigold’ is the first time that crops up, making use of various open strings that give the guitar a watery feel to it. Upon digging into his deep cuts, Grohl uses the same mentality on ‘Floaty’ off the debut, as well as later on tunes like ‘Let It Die’ and ‘Come Alive’ off of Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace.
And we can’t leave out the most obvious example of him using that kind of chord structure, ‘Friend of a Friend’. Although it waited years before turning up on In Your Honor, the spare acoustic tune feels like the unintentional sequel to ‘Marigold’, complete with lyrics that are about Cobain and how no one dared to speak when he stepped up to play the guitar.
Although ‘Marigold’ should get credit for kicking off Foo Fighters’s career, no one should have expected Grohl to play the track live. In footage from the documentary Back and Forth, guitarist Pat Smear remembered Grohl getting heckled for not playing it live, saying, “There was a song called ‘Marigold’ by Nirvana. It was the only song that people knew to shout out, so you would just hear ‘Marigold’. And we never played it. How weird that must have been for Dave.”
Then again, Grohl seemed to make peace with the tune along the way, eventually performing it as part of their acoustic set Skin and Bones and adding a few more layers of sound on top of it. On the one hand, ‘Marigold’ is a sad reminder of the innocence Nirvana had, but given how much Grohl has moved on from those days, it now stands as the first few rumblings of the next phase of his career.
