Dave Grohl has reflected on hearing Nirvana for the first time, remembering listening to their music well before he even joined the group.
It’s a little hard to imagine, but there was in fact a time in which Nirvana didn’t feature the now-legendary Dave Grohl as their drummer.
Their longest-tenured drummer, Grohl was the final entrant in a string of five percussionists that Nirvana boasted between 1987 and 1990.
While Kurt Cobain once revealed that all the other drummers “sucked” compared to Grohl, there was in fact a time when Dave Grohl was just a Nirvana fan rather than a band member.
As Alternative Nation reports, Grohl recently took part in a live conversation, recalling how he felt when he listened to the band’s 1989 debut album, Bleach.
“Nirvana on the other hand, had really great songs,” Grohl began. “They had a record that came out called Bleach, came out in I think 1988 or 1989, before I was in the band.”
“I’m not the original drummer. But they had songs. They had this song called, ‘About A Girl.’ And ‘About A Girl’ was basically, it was like, it was like a Beatles song.”
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Check out Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged version of ‘About A Girl’:
“It was two and a half minutes long and the melody was beautiful and the rest of their songs were like- [screams] but then they had this beautiful thing,” he continued. “So it was clear like, wow that dude could actually write songs.”
“Everybody loved Nirvana. Nobody knew anything about who they were or what their deal was but fuck, I loved Nirvana. They were cool as shit. That record was amazing and I played it all the time.”
Funnily enough, Dave Grohl’s comments about the track’s Beatles influences are rather fitting, with Kurt Cobain revealing he was inspired to write the song after spending a night listening to Meet The Beatles.
While the songwriting was inspired by the songwriting talents of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the music aspect was somewhat more modern, with Cobain labelling it something of a “jangly R.E.M. type of pop song” at one point.
In related news, Nirvana’s former manager recalled how Kurt Cobain recognised the singing talents of Dave Grohl long before he formed the now-iconic Foo Fighters.
“Kurt just said to me, ‘I don’t think you realise how good a singer Dave is, but I hear him singing harmonies every night’,” Danny Goldberg recalled, noting that Cobain may have been viewing Grohl as a friendly musical rival of sorts.
“It was like he was really doing it so I would know this because there was this very fraternal side of him and a sweet side of him, but also it had a touch of envy in it. I mean he was competitive.”
Check out Nirvana’s ‘About A Girl’:
