The one band Dave Grohl said was painful to leave: “We were like brothers”
Given what Dave Grohl has gone through since his days in Nirvana, he knows a thing or two about band breakups.
As much as he might like the idea of having one big musical family in Foo Fighters, there are bound to be a few times where a certain member isn’t cutting it or doesn’t have the same chemistry to carry them into the next phase of their career. But before he even reached the big time, Grohl felt that there were a lot of burned bridges that he wished didn’t end up like they did.
At the same time, was there any reason to think that anyone in their right mind would have left Nirvana? Even for as bad as Kurt Cobain could get on tour, they were always a machine whenever they got into the studio, and with Cobain’s amazing knack for writing melodies, there was no limit to how far they could go with Grohl pounding away behind the drums when working on their classic tracks.
Because, really, Grohl is as important a member of Nirvana as Cobain in many respects. Although every member of a power trio usually needs to pull an equal amount of weight, getting Grohl in the band was like drafting in a punk version of John Bonham. He had the right amount of power to carry them into the next phase of their career, but he knew that joining the band would have meant leaving his buddies in Scream behind.
Nirvana was far too tempting, but Grohl did have a lot of regrets about leaving his teenage band behind after so many years, saying, “It wasn’t really screwing them over, but we were like brothers. We were on tour and broke up in LA when one of the members went home to D.C. without saying anything to anyone. So we were stuck. Fortunately, we had a Canadian roadie who was getting his unemployment checks shipped down to LA, so we could buy beans and hot dogs. It was just a drag. Someone called and said Nirvana was looking for a drummer and they thought I was good. I had to leave my friends and move to Seattle. It was painful.”
While that kind of lifestyle might have sounded a lot worse than becoming a member of one of the greatest bands of the 1990s, that simply wasn’t how Grohl operated. He wanted to see it through to the end with Scream, but when he had the chance to right the wrongs that he made back in the day, it wasn’t like he was the most diplomatic when he started to motion for Franz Stahl to join Foo Fighters.
First of all, Stahl was technically good enough to be in the band. He had everything that a guitarist could have asked for, and when Pat Smear left the group, he gave the band the right shot in the arm when they were playing live. But in the background, there was always something preventing him from being one of the central figures of the band, despite playing with Grohl for so many years.
For whatever reason, the way that he played opposite Nate Mendel and Taylor Hawkins never really gelled in the way it was supposed to, which ended up forcing Grohl’s hand when firing him a few months into joining the group. That may as well have reopened an old wound and created a few new ones along the way, but to Grohl’s credit, he always tried to give a loving nod to his old band whenever he could.
Going back to basics on a record like Wasting Light was one thing, but getting Scream to open up their opening show was exactly the kind of thing that brought everything full circle. Scream may have been a bit of a stepping stone for Grohl, but if he had stayed there for the rest of his life, the world would have missed out on some of the greatest rock music that the world had ever seen.
