This is a Call (22 page)

On 7 April, following a headline show at Madison’s Club Underground, Nirvana climbed back into the Sub Pop van and headed for Milwaukee to resume their tour. Vig mixed the tracks the following week and sent the master tapes to Jonathan Poneman and cassette copies to the band. The plan was that Nirvana would return to Madison in June to finish the album, which was to be called
Sheep
, a title Cobain intended as a barbed joke on hipsters who would pick up the album based on Sub Pop’s bullshit alone. But the Sub Pop van never reappeared in Madison, and as months passed without any communication from the label Vig feared he’d screwed up.

In reality, Sub Pop was facing its own problems. Always a hand-to-mouth operation – famously Poneman and Pavitt once had T-shirts printed up reading WHAT PART OF ‘WE HAVE NO MONEY’ DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND? – by the summer of 1990 the label was in serious danger of bankruptcy. Behind the scenes, Poneman and Pavitt were seeking to secure a licensing deal with a major label, using Nirvana’s brilliant new demo as bait. Unbeknownst to the pair, initially at least, their brightest young stars were shopping the demo around too.

The notion that Kurt Cobain negotiated the music industry as a wide-eyed, guileless
naïf
is a lie. The publication of the singer’s diaries as
Journals
in 2002 revealed that he plotted and planned his every musical and career move far in advance of their execution, and knew exactly how the industry worked. He was more than aware that Sub Pop viewed his band as a valuable commodity; his plan now was to cut out the middlemen and approach the labels directly. Nirvana’s stint at Smart Studios also convinced him of another cold hard fact – that his drummer was not good enough to take the step up to the next level with him.

One week after the end of the band’s US tour, he and Novoselic drove out to Bainbridge Island and told Channing he was out of the band. That same week he also broke off his relationship with Tracy Marander. It was time for the singer to look after number one.

On 11 July 1990 Cobain and Novoselic borrowed Mudhoney’s drummer and Tad’s gear to record a one-off song, ‘Sliver’, at Reciprocal for a Sub Pop single. A loosely autobiographical tale of an unhappy boy dropped off with his grandparents while his parents attended a rock show, it was Cobain’s most immediate song to date, employing a quiet/ loud dynamic which saw stripped-back verses exploding into a distorted wall-of-sound chorus as Dan Peters’s drums kicked in hard. A class apart from the rough-hewn sludge on
Bleach
, the
Sliver
single dropped into the underground rock scene like a grenade.

‘Sub Pop has yet to find anything to top Nirvana’s massive fusion of rock and perfect pop,’ declared
NME
, hailing the single as ‘The best record this label has put out since Mudhoney’s
Touch Me I’m Sick
’.

‘It wasn’t until “Sliver” that anyone thought Nirvana could be a commercially successful band,’ says Cobain biographer Charles R. Cross, then Editor of Seattle’s
The Rocket
. ‘Even as late as 1990 most people in Seattle thought Mudhoney would be the first band to break huge. Nirvana were the dark horse.’

In August 1990, at Thurston Moore’s invitation, the band were invited to open a clutch of West Coast dates for Sonic Youth. Moore, his partner Kim Gordon and Dinosaur Jr’s J. Mascis had caught a Nirvana show in New Jersey the previous summer, and had been blown away by the band’s brutish power. Having acquired a dubbed copy of Nirvana’s Smart Studios cassette, he was now talking the band up to everyone he knew. For Cobain, the opportunity to support the revered New York noiseniks was too good to pass up, irrespective of the fact that his band once again had no drummer. With Dan Peters committed to a European festival tour with Mudhoney, Cobain turned to his old friend Dale Crover for help once more.

Two days before the tour was due to start at Bogart’s in Long Beach, California, Cobain, Novoselic and Craig Montgomery drove down to San Francisco to meet up with Crover at Buzz Osbourne’s house. It was then that Osbourne suggested the party should head over to the I-Beam to watch his friends in Scream.

Cobain took some persuading. Together with his next-door neighbour Slim Moon, the owner of Olympia’s Kill Rock Stars record label, the singer had gone to see the band from Bailey’s Crossroads play Tacoma’s Community World Theater back in October 1987, during Dave Grohl’s first tour with the Stahl brothers. Expecting a set of righteous punk rock, Cobain was horrified to discover that Scream’s live show was now largely built around the kind of strutting hard rock he himself was trying to disown.

‘Kurt hated it,’ remembers Slim Moon, still a respected figure in Olympia’s tight-knit and fiercely independent musical community. ‘He kept saying, “It sucks when good bands turn into Van Halen.” For some reason he was particularly annoyed that they were playing guitar solos on Telecasters. He talked about how much he hated it for the whole drive home.’

Back in San Francisco, Cobain agreed to go to the I-Beam to keep the peace. This time he didn’t notice what guitars Franz Stahl was playing, or that Pete Stahl dressed more like Sammy Hagar than Ian MacKaye. This time his focus was solely upon Scream’s powerhouse drummer.

‘I was standing with Kurt and Chris,’ recalls former Nirvana soundman Craig Montgomery, ‘and Kurt said, “That’s the kind of drummer we need.” Dave had an energy that was hard to miss and Kurt and Chris were pretty blown away by his playing. He seemed like a good fit for what they were doing.’

Six weeks later Dave Grohl packed his drums into a large cardboard box and boarded a flight bound for Seattle.

Grohl arrived in Seattle on the afternoon of Friday 21 September 1990. Cobain and Chris Novoselic were at the city’s Sea-Tac airport to greet him. As Novoselic nudged his Volkswagen van out of the airport for the 29-kilometre drive to his home in Tacoma, where Grohl was due to crash for his first few weeks in Washington, the drummer offered Cobain an apple to break the ice.

‘No thanks,’ said Cobain. ‘It’ll make my teeth bleed.’

The rest of the journey was conducted in silence.

The following evening Nirvana were billed to play an all-ages show with local punks Derelict, Dwarves and Melvins at Seattle’s 1,500-capacity Motor Sports International Garage. The gig was a huge deal for the band: it was by far their biggest hometown headline show to date, and Sub Pop had flown journalist Keith Cameron and photographer Ian Tilton from
Sounds
magazine across from London to write a cover story on the group ahead of their first full UK headline tour in October. With Mudhoney on hiatus while guitarist Steve Turner finished college, Cobain had asked Dan Peters to play drums for the evening. That afternoon Cobain informed Grohl that he wouldn’t really be able to speak to him, or introduce him to friends, at the show, as the sudden appearance of an unknown drummer at the gig might set tongues wagging among local scenesters. A bemused Grohl duly watched the show from the crowd, soaking in the atmosphere. He was astonished to see that every other kid in the room seemed to be wearing one of Nirvana’s new Fudge Packin’ Crack Smokin’ Satan Worshippin’ Motherfuckers T-shirts.

While standing in the crowd, Grohl was recognised by 20-year-old Greg Anderson, a local metalhead who’d caught a Scream show in Olympia just a few weeks previously. The pair struck up a conversation about old school heavy metal while waiting for Melvins to take the stage. Anderson, who had played alongside future Foo Fighter Nate Mendel in local punk acts and now runs heavyweight US metal imprint Southern Lord in addition to playing guitar in a host of experimental/ stoner/doom bands – including the Pete Stahl-fronted Goatsnake – recalls that Grohl was rather more enthused about seeing Buzz Osbourne’s band than his prospective new employers.

The following day the Novoselics threw a barbecue at their house for the visiting British journalists, and the drummer sat quietly in the background chowing down on surf and turf as Cobain, Novoselic and Peters outlined their future plans to Keith Cameron. The next day he joined Cobain and Novoselic at the Dutchman, the grubby Seattle rehearsal room where the pair had written ‘Sliver’ with Peters just a few months earlier, and auditioned for a vacancy Peters understandably thought had already been filled. Before the trio had finished running through their opening number, Cobain and Novoselic knew that they’d got their man.

The following day Kurt Cobain dropped in unannounced to Calvin Johnson’s KAOS radio show to play an impromptu four-song acoustic session. During the show he casually informed Johnson that Nirvana had a new drummer, nothing less than ‘the drummer of our dreams’.

‘His name is Dave and he’s a baby Dale Crover,’ he enthused. ‘He plays almost as good as Dale. And within a few years’ practice he may even give him a run for his money.’

‘This new kid on the block can’t dance as good as your MTV favorites but he beats the drums like he’s beating the shit out of their heads!’ Cobain wrote in an excitable Sub Pop press release. ‘His name is Dave Grohl. Dave is formerly of the Washington D. band Scream. He passed thru the gruelling Nirvana initiation ritual with flying colors and is now an important cornerstone in the Nirvana institution.’

Dan Peters missed Cobain’s surprise announcement on KAOS. So when Nirvana’s frontman called him the following day, Peters assumed Cobain wanted to talk about the band’s imminent UK tour. Instead, he was sheepishly informed that the band had recruited a new permanent drummer. Communication had never been one of Cobain’s strong points, as Grohl himself had immediately discovered.

‘I don’t remember them saying, “You’re in the band,”’ he admitted years later. ‘We just continued.’

Nirvana’s new drummer played his first gig with the band at the North Shore Surf Club in Olympia on 11 October 1990. The 300-capacity club had sold out within a day of the tickets going on sale, a feat which so impressed Grohl that he felt compelled to phone home to share the news with his mother.

‘The venue was down the street from where Kurt and I lived,’ he recalled in 2005. ‘We soundchecked and I went to get something to eat. When I got back there was a line around the block. I called my mother and said, “Mother, there’s at least 200 people in line!” I was amazed. With Scream the band usually outnumbered the audience.’

The show was sweaty, frenzied and intense. Grohl had to start the set’s opening number, a cover of the Vaselines’ ‘Son of a Gun’, no less than three times, as the band kept blowing the power in the tiny venue. A few songs later the bare-chested drummer put his sticks right through his snare drum skin: Cobain held the broken drum aloft like a war trophy to the cheering crowd. Grohl had officially arrived.

‘I felt I had something to prove,’ he later recalled. ‘I knew we sounded good as a band. And we were fucking good that night. Absolutely, I was nervous. I didn’t know anyone – no one in the audience, no one in the band. I was completely on my own. That was the only thing that mattered, that hour on stage. That’s what I was focused on.’

‘Grohl was simply a monster,’ says Charles R. Cross. ‘Chad Channing is often underrated; he was a great drummer for the early van-touring Nirvana because he was an affable guy, a talented drummer and he played the punk-era songs of Nirvana as well as anyone. However, with Dave Grohl Nirvana became a very different beast. He powered Nirvana’s shows and made them spectacular events. It was Grohl who turned Nirvana into the powerhouse it became.’