The classic Nirvana song that forced Dave Grohl to use a click track
The number one enemy of drummers everywhere is the click track. No one wants to think that their normal drumming isn’t quite up to par, and the idea of having a little rhythmic *ting* leading them along with every single beat is one of the most demoralising things to happen to any percussionist. It might happen to many industry professionals, but Dave Grohl wasn’t ready to hear those words when recording one of his greatest albums.
Before he joined Nirvana, Grohl was known as the drummer for the punk rock band Scream, playing songs at breakneck tempos with zero breaks. As soon as he hooked up with The Mevins, it was lead singer Buzz Osborne who introduced him to the guys in Nirvana to tell them he was one of the best drummers around.
According to Butch Vig, Nirvana knew that they had found their permanent drummer, saying in the documentary Back and Forth, “I get a call from Kurt Cobain, and he says ‘Butch, we’ve hired the best drummer in the world. I’m not kidding you, he’s awesome dude’. And he hung up the phone”. Although Vig was hired originally to produce a handful of tracks off of Nevermind, he became the full-fledged producer once the band moved out to Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California.
While the band could run through classics like ‘In Bloom’ in only a handful of takes, Vig had a problem with the song ‘Lithium’. Unlike Grohl’s usual rapid tempos, this song thrived on having a consistent beat throughout, gently nudging the song along as Kurt Cobain screamed over the top.
In an interview for the documentary Sound City, Butch remembered the track having a few tempo issues, recalling, “It wouldn’t always stay at the right tempo. Dave would always speed up. It would start one way and then gradually get faster and faster until it was racing along. So I asked Dave if he had ever worked with a click track”.
Grohl was gutted as soon as that word was uttered, saying, “My heart just broke. No drummer ever wants to be told to play to a click track. You always want to keep that human element as the song fluctuates. I listened to [the final version] and was like, ‘Now it sounds like it’s slowing down’. It’s OK to speed up a little, isn’t it?”.
Aside from that one hiccup, Vig was impressed across the board, recalling the story of when they played ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ for the first time, saying: “I said, ‘Well play me some songs, you guys’, and the first song they did was ‘Teen Spirit’. Dave hit that opening drum fill, and it just floored me”.
Although Vig’s mix gave the band the sound they wanted, the mixing job by engineer Andy Wallace helped expose their music to a whole new audience, turning Nirvana from a decently successful indie band to one of the biggest rock bands in the world, bringing both loads of praise and problems for every member of the group. While Grohl was free to play whatever he wanted once he got out on the road, that internal sense of rhythm with the click track helped him internalise ‘Lithium’ much better.
