“Oh my God!”: The one song Dave Grohl said made Nirvana sound huge
There’s a good chance that Dave Grohl will probably still be known as the drummer for Nirvana even after all the dust has settled on Foo Fighters’ career.
He should be commended for having one of the greatest second acts in rock and roll history, but no matter how many times people blast ‘The Pretender’ or ‘Everlong’, there’s not much in their catalogue that could hold a candle to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, especially when considering how hard Grohl hit in the band. But even if the band were going places with their signature tune, the music was already turning a corner before Grohl joined.
If anything, the fact that Grohl decided to join his Seattle friends was practically a godsend. Chad Channing was never going to go the distance with the group the way Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic were, and even if he did have some decent fills during the group’s tenure, it took Grohl’s strength as a drummer to give them the same kind of thunder you would hear out of someone like John Bonham.
In fact, there’s a good chance that Grohl is responsible for killing hair metal at the beginning of Nevermind. Cobain deserves all the praise in the world for writing the tune that would eventually put an end to bands like Warrant and Winger, but if you had to pinpoint an exact moment when those bands were history, it was the opening drum fill that led the song in before the distortion kicked things into high gear.
But it took a lot more than a few decent drum hits to get everyone on board. Butch Vig was already hard at work getting the band to start working on their tunes at Smart Studios, and while that did lead to Channing being able to feature on the song ‘Polly’ by hitting a couple of cymbals, the moment really belongs to Grohl. And nowhere was that more apparent than the moment that they walked into Sound City Studios.
You have to remember that all the band had ever heard up until that point was what they had done onstage, so getting to hear themselves in context was going to be a lot different. When they kicked into the song ‘In Bloom’, though, Grohl remembered being taken aback knowing what they had just played. Channing may have come up with that signature opening fill, but it felt so much different hammered out by Grohl’s hands.
This was the sound of pure rock and roll, and even though the band weren’t a hit yet, Grohl could tell that they had hit on something that would change the world, saying, “When we recorded the first song [In Bloom], we plugged in sat down, recorded the first couple of takes and went into the control room to listen to playback. Butch hit ‘play’, and it was unlike anything we ever heard. It was Nirvana, but the biggest, baddest, punchiest version of Nirvana we’d ever heard. It was just like, ‘Oh my God! How did that happen?’ It was that room and that board.”
The room may have had a history of getting the best out of everyone from Fleetwood Mac to Tom Petty, but there was no way to replace what Grohl was playing in the studio. The band had clearly found their groove after playing a few shows together, and even if they had to do a few tweaks like working out the speed of a song like ‘Lithium’, they were working with a much more aggressive approach than anything they had recorded before.
That kind of music would become an extremely double-edged sword once Cobain became one of the biggest stars in the world, but Grohl could already tell where they were heading. He already lucked out by joining one of his favourite underground bands, but he didn’t realise how over-ground they would become once they hit MTV.
