Dave Grohl recently sat down with blink-182’s Mark Hoppus on his Apple Music podcast, After School Radio, in an interview that saw him reflect on his earliest encounter with Nirvana.
Grohl, a Virginia native, recalled the first time he moved up to Seattle following the dissolution of his band Scream. “Our band fell apart in Los Angeles in 1990, we were stuck there,” Grohl notes.
Whilst trapped in Los Angeles, Grohl received a fateful phone call from his friend, letting him know that Nirvana was looking for a drummer.
“They had the record Bleach. He’s like, ‘Man, they’re looking for a drummer, and they actually just saw you up in San Francisco and said like, if we could get a guy like that, we’d be super stoked.” He’s like, “You should call them,'” Grohl recalled.
“And so I called Chris, bass player and I’m like, “Hi, this is Dave from Scream.” We start talking, I’m like, “Hey, I hear you need a drummer.” He’s like, “Actually we have Danny from Mudhoney is now our drummer.” I’m like, “Oh, okay, cool. Whatever. Give me a call. If you come down to Los Angeles.” Then he calls back and says, “Actually, you know what? You should talk to Kurt.” So I called Kurt, we talk about music, we talk about NWA and Neil Young and Public Enemy and Black Flag. And he’s like, “Well, if you can get up here, that’d be rad. Let’s jam.”
Grohl rolled the dice, packed up all his belongings in Los Angeles, and ventured out to Seattle. “They had a show, I went to see them play. I’d never seen them before. And then the next day we got together and jammed and it was like immediate. So we just knew in five minutes like, ‘Oh, okay. Now, this is Nirvana.'”
After committing to becoming a permanent fixture in the Nirvana fold, Grohl moved in to Kurt Cobain’s dingy apartment.
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“I moved in with Kurt and this is Fall 1990,” Grohl explains. “Kurt lived in this apartment that was super duper tiny. I slept on the couch. He had this turtle aquarium thing that stunk so bad. It was so gross. There was a hole in the window. So it was freezing inside. It was just squalor.”
Grohl went on to explain that he associates Mark Lanegan’s 1990 debut record, The Winding Sheet, with that formative period of his life.
“The Winding Sheet had just come out, and it was… We had three records in Kurt’s apartment,” Grohl shared. “One was the Mark Lanegan record, the other one was a Bobcat Goldthwait stand-up album, and the other one was Divine, singing ‘The Name Game.’
“If anybody knows who Divine is will understand. But, so I wore that Mark Lanegan record out. And I think it’s a good example of how important music can be to you emotionally, because when you find that emotional match, like an album that understands you, or you understand an album in a way that you connect to it emotionally, this album to me, it was being completely on my own with no money, sleeping on a couch in this broken busted apartment in this band where I didn’t know the guys and it’s gray and rainy for months and months and months on end.
“This album was the one thing that gave me any relief or a sense of… I don’t know. I wore that album like a blanket for months and still to this day, whenever I hear one of those songs, this song in particular, it just takes me right back to sleeping on that tiny couch.”
