Pat Smear reveals his surprising favourite album
Best known for founding punk band the Germs alongside Darby Crash, Belinda Carlisle, and Lorna Doom, Pat Smear has enjoyed a prolific career as a guitarist, best known for contributing his skills to Nirvana and Foo Fighters.
Germs’ first album (GI) was produced by Joan Jett and was widely praised for being an important contribution to the punk scene. Smear’s thrashing guitar was as punk as could it be and greatly inspired Kurt Cobain. Therefore, in 1993, Cobain approached Smear to be an additional guitarist for Nirvana’s upcoming tour.
Smear, a fan of Nirvana, gladly accepted. He recalled: “It was an unexpected phone call from Kurt, and I jumped at it. I was a fan, like everyone else. I had actually read an interview with them not too long before he called me, where he said Nirvana was always meant to be four people. I thought, ‘Wow, I want that.’ And then it happened.”
Despite being a musical predecessor to Nirvana, Smear was already such a fan that he believed he was being pranked at first. Before he knew it, Smear was playing alongside the band on Saturday Night Live, the iconic MTV Unplugged in New York recording, which was released as a live album in 1994, and From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah.
Upon the dissolution of Nirvana following Cobain’s suicide, Smear joined the Foo Fighters with Dave Grohl and has remained a frequent collaborator with the band ever since, most recently joining them to create their 2014 album Sonic Highways.
As a pioneering member of the American alternative scene, you may expect that Smear’s favourite album is a punk classic or maybe a grungey masterpiece. But in an interview with Grohl celebrating 25 years of the Foo Fighters, the frontman revealed something rather unexpected about Smear.
Grohl expressed his love for being in such an important band, stating: “I love my band. […] I love them as people, I love them as players, […] I love being in this band, so one of the best parts is that every single person is different. Everyone has a different influence, everyone has a different sound. And if you’re lucky enough to be in a band like that, you should take advantage of it.”
This led Grohl to reveal a peculiar fact about Smear. He said: “Pat Smear loves Mariah Carey more than any other fucking artist, ever. Pat Smear! The fucking king of punk rock! He’s a punk rock legend, and Butterfly by Mariah Carey is his favourite album of all time. You have to take advantage of that, and be able to celebrate the diversity that your band allows.”
Mariah Carey’s Butterfly was released in 1997, shortly after the release of Foo Fighters’ legendary album The Colour and the Shape. The Grammy-nominated Butterfly has been labelled as an R&B classic, and Carey enlisted the help of such artists as P. Diddy, Missy Elliott, and Q-Tip to produce the album.
It is definitely an unexpected choice to come from Smear; however, it just goes to show how expansive the guitarist’s musical taste really is, which is always a good thing when it comes to being a musician.
