“Just all right”: The band Dave Grohl thought blew Nirvana away
Every band needs time to gel as a unit before firing on all cylinders. Even if the greatest players get into a room with instruments, it takes time before anyone gets on the same page and finally has the sense to assemble the songs they want to hear. Although Dave Grohl was exactly what Nirvana needed to go from a popular indie band to superstars, he admitted that this other grunge heavyweight could play circles around them in their early years.
If things had gone slightly differently, though, Grohl would have been perfectly happy jamming in the hardcore band Scream for the rest of his life. Even though it was far from Top 40 radio, living off of dollar-store corndogs suited Grohl fine as long as it meant getting up onstage every night and being an absolute maniac behind the drumkit.
All they were missing were the songs to back them up, and Kurt Cobain was brandishing the tunes that anyone with a pulse could relate to. Even if it was hard to decipher what he was talking about a lot of the time, the urgency of the band’s first album, Bleach, came from the great melodies sprinkled throughout every song, whether it was the glorified pop song ‘About a Girl’, or the one-line verses of ‘School’.
Everything seemed perfect, but Cobain kept getting dissatisfied with how the drums sounded with Chad Channing behind the kit. There were pieces that stood out, like the beginning of ‘In Bloom’, but when looking at the performance on Bleach to Grohl’s unhinged sounds on Nevermind, it’s as if Don Henley got replaced with John Bonham behind the kit.
Although Dale Crover from Melvins managed to sit in with Nirvana when they were looking for drummers, Cobain’s melodies were getting stronger. Despite not sounding remotely like grunge, ‘Sliver’ was the first sign of how they would sound on their breakthrough album, but when Grohl first caught their live show, he thought that Melvins were the clear victors.
Buzz Osborne may have had a few more years in the public eye than Cobain, but when Grohl was introduced to his future band, he knew they were nowhere close to Melvins, saying, “I thought they were all right. They didn’t completely blow me away. The Melvins played before them, and I was so into the Melvins that I was spent by the time Nirvana went on.”
Even if he wasn’t paying attention, there’s a good chance that Grohl saw a lot more potential with Cobain. Both of them had loved The Beatles since they were kids, and when Grohl’s power behind the kit combined with Cobain’s Lennon-esque melodies, they knocked every single hair metal act off the map.
While Grohl would find his calling playing with Nirvana, Melvins were a better encapsulation of what the term ‘grunge’ stood for in its prime. Even if they weren’t the most commercial band in the world, their music still holds up as some of the heaviest pieces of rock to come out of the alternative scene.
