The one group Dave Grohl said every band listened to
It’s hard to think of any real reference point for grunge when Dave Grohl first kicked off Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’.
Kurt Cobain was responsible for writing the tune and changing the entire music scene overnight, but Grohl’s drum fills were the firing shot that struck down all of the phoney hair metal bands that were still omnipresent around Los Angeles. The air seemed to taste a little different by the time the song was over, but they weren’t doing anything that they hadn’t heard in their record collections.
The only difference was that no one had heard this kind of music in the mainstream. Plenty of underground acts were making grunge music years before the flannel shirts and Doc Marten boots became commonplace at every department store, but it was probably going to be a cold day in hell before anyone heard a Melvins or Mudhoney song sharing airtime with Guns N’ Roses and Whitesnake.
But the reason why Grohl’s parts worked so well on Nirvana’s material was because of how simple they were. Cobain didn’t want Nevermind to sound too poppy when he first began working on it, but by hitting hard and keeping things incredibly simple, Grohl turned into the 1990s version of John Bonham for a lot of people, almost commanding the stage like a scrawny caveman as he bashed away on his kit.
Even if there was a lot of influence left over from Zeppelin, you’d hardly hear that kind of sound in Cobain’s guitar lines. His melodic sensibilities were a lot closer to bands like The Beatles and REM whenever he sat down to write a song, but when he plugged in his guitars and cranked everything up, you were served up a wall of guitars that pummelled you every single time you listened to ‘Territorial Pissings’ or ‘Drain You’.
That’s before even getting to their debut record, Bleach. Despite everyone knowing the album for tunes like ‘About A Girl’, the rest of the record is borderline metallic in some places. Cobain probably would have never stood for songs like ‘Blew’ being mentioned in the same breath as other “metal” bands from the time, but if there was one bit of connective tissue to the genre, it was from Black Sabbath.
Underground giants like Buzz Osborne and Henry Rollins always shouted praise for Sabbath, and Grohl argued that grunge would have never existed were it not for Ozzy Osbourne and Tony Iommi, saying, “I love Black Sabbath. They made an amazing contribution to music today. Almost every band that made it big in the Nineties owed a debt to them.” In Nirvana’s case, though, Sabbath’s influence is something that’s more felt than heard a lot of the time.
Yes, there are the signature fuzz boxes that sound identical to some of Iommi’s devilish guitar tones, but their brand of darkness is something that struck a more intimate nerve with Cobain. Although Cobain wasn’t the kind to write about the devil and mystical imagery, the tone of ‘Something in the Way’ isn’t all that different from the pitch-black tone that Sabbath set for themselves on their first albums.
And even after grunge, every other 1990s band that wanted to make something even remotely heavy was still pulling from Sabbath, whether they wanted to or not. The early days of Osbourne screaming for them may have been a distant memory by that point, but all of the band’s disciples were still out there preaching the good word of heaviness across every genre.
