‘Pocketwatch’: The solo album Dave Grohl made while in Nirvana
It’s hard not to think of Foo Fighters as a Dave Grohl side project that got way out of hand. Even though he may claim to have a band mentality whenever he gets behind the microphone, there’s no disputing that Foo Fighters is Grohl’s group and that everything that goes onto one of their records has to go through him first. Despite the massive attention to detail, Grohl initially had a solo career long before the band was even an idea.
When putting together his first punk rock groups, though, Grohl never liked the idea of being a frontman with a bunch of hired guns. Rock and roll was always about having fun for him, and bringing in every friend he knew to play music was half the fun, putting together acts like Mission Impossible and Freak Baby during his first jam sessions.
Once he had the opportunity to audition for the hardcore band Scream, Grohl knew it was too big an opportunity to pass up. Going on the road while still in his teens, Grohl would become a fixture on the hardcore circuit, eventually catching the eye of Buzz Osbourne of Melvins, who passed his name along to a young band looking for a drummer, Nirvana.
When teamed up with Kurt Cobain’s melodies, Grohl turned Nirvana into a machine with his drum fills, turning the album Nevermind into one of the biggest smashes in history. Although Grohl had been working on songs of his own between Nirvana sessions, he even admitted that he had no intention of bringing them to the band.
Compared to Cobain’s way with melody, Grohl thought that none of his songs could come close to what the frontman did. When talking to Lars Ulrich, Grohl said, “Our songwriter was pretty kickass. I mean, that’s the one joke about drummers. What’s the last thing a drummer says before he gets fired? Hey guys, I wrote a song I think we should play.”
Between sessions for Nirvana recordings, though, Grohl was hard at work honing his craft as a songwriter, only without a band to put together. Rather than wait to release the album outside the confines of Nirvana, Grohl decided to put the album out under another name, using the pseudonym ‘LATE!’ for the record Pocketwatch.
Even though Nirvana was still working on the festival circuit, this was a slight glimpse into what made Grohl tick musically. Outside of the sounds of his main outfit, Grohl’s first record on his own features traces of what would go on to be classic Foo Fighters songs, including a weird rendition of what would become ‘Friend of a Friend’ off In Your Honour.
Cobain would eventually be impressed by Grohl’s output, letting the drummer sing one of his songs for the B-side to ‘Heart Shaped Box’, which would become the track ‘Marigold’. Although the plan was for the following Nirvana projects to become a group effort between all three band members, everything came to a halt with the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994, after which Grohl formed Foo Fighters out of making music for fun in a studio across the street from his house.
While Pocketwatch is a lovely time capsule for what Foo Fighters would become after the dissolution of Nirvana, it was never intended to be the lost album of classics. Throughout the album, Grohl is finding his feet as a songwriter, knowing that he could take his craft to new heights with just a little bit more polish.
