“They were assholes”: The Nirvana member Kurt Cobain initially hated
It’s hard for anyone to find a band lineup that works from day one. Even if everyone is on the same page or likes all the same groups, that doesn’t take chemistry into account, and it’s anyone’s guess whether or not things will end in a trainwreck or end up sounding fantastic from the first chord. Although Nirvana did find a sweet spot once they got rolling, Kurt Cobain had no problem admitting that he had issues with one member before he even properly joined.
When looking at Nirvana’s rise to the top, though, it wasn’t out of the question for them to be underground darlings until the day they died. It was clear that the public still wanted bands like Warrant and Winger on the charts, and since Cobain couldn’t have cared less whether he was on the hit parade during the Bleach era, he was more inclined to play basement gigs than think about being the next Freddie Mercury onstage.
But there was more than good songwriting that brought Cobain to the next level of rock stardom. There were some eccentric pieces to Bleach when it first came out, but looking back at the way that Cobain played on Nevermind, he was clearly listening to a lot more of The Beatles and fine-tuning the arrangements for what the songs should sound like.
And it’s not like Dave Grohl was hired during this album cycle by accident. Chad Channing may have helped come up with the foundation for tunes like ‘In Bloom’ and even appeared on ‘Polly’, but Grohl gave each song a shot of adrenaline from the minute he sat behind the drumkit. It was the same unapologetic punk drumming as before, but this time, it had the same muscle that John Bonham had during Led Zeppelin’s peak.
That doesn’t mean that Grohl was the easiest to get along with, though. When Cobain first met the drummer in his first band, Scream, he remembered being annoyed at him and everyone not wanting him to be there, saying, “They were real rocker dudes. I hated them. I thought they were assholes. He brought up this Primus tape from their car and tried to play it and everyone got mad at him.”
That wasn’t even outside of the norm for what Grohl would have done, either. He had cut his teeth working with Scream, and since he seemed to exude music out of every single pore in his body, it wasn’t out of the question for him to be equally as wired offstage as he was when he was behind the kit.
Once Nirvana reined in that energy, though, that’s when things went nuclear. Even though Grohl might not have been the easiest person to wrangle sometimes, hearing his manic drum rolls in the middle of ‘Stay Away’ or watching him slow things down on ‘Something in the Way’ was the reason why Cobain considered him one of the greatest drummers in the world.
For all of Nirvana’s avenues throughout their short career, it was always about serving the song, and Grohl was a master of playing to the track. They didn’t get off on the right foot, but once he found his groove, no drummer on Earth could have stopped him.
