Dave Grohl says playing Nirvana songs felt “forbidden” after Kurt Cobain’s death: “For a long time I was afraid to play the opening riff to Smells Like Teen Spirit”
Dave Grohl has been reflecting on Nirvana’s legacy and the difficult period following Kurt Cobain’s death, explaining why even returning to the band’s most iconic songs once felt completely off-limits.
Speaking with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Grohl says that the aftermath of Nirvana wasn’t just about grief or moving on – it reshaped his entire relationship with music for a while.
“I think that we all wound up in places that felt… I don’t want to say comfortable, but safe,” says Grohl [via Guitar World]. “When I went into the studio and recorded that stuff by myself, I felt safe there. And I can’t speak for [bassist] Krist [Novoselic], but I think at that time it was like we were just trying to get our feet back on the ground. For me, that’s something that I thought, ‘Okay, well, music is the thing that’s going to rescue me.’”
READ MORE: “I’d go back to my mother’s house and sleep in my childhood bed and feel like life is still real”: Dave Grohl on coping with Nirvana’s sudden mainstream success
But even as he found his way back into recording with the Foo Fighters, revisiting Nirvana’s old catalogue still proved difficult.
“It’s such a weird thing to feel afraid to play songs,” Grohl explains. “And for a long time it’s like I was even afraid just to sit down at a drum set and play the opening riff to Smells Like Teen Spirit. It just seemed sort of forbidden.”
“And so the few times that Krist and Pat [Smear] and I have gotten together to do it, it’s a trip,” he continues. “It’s like a time warp. It’s like a time capsule. The noise that the three of us make together, you don’t really get that noise anywhere else.”
“When you’re in the room and it happens, the way that Krist strums his bass lines, the bass that he uses, the equipment he uses, his sense of feel and time, it’s like all of those things combined with Pat like with that crazy Germs/Pat Smear guitar thing. And then some loud-ass drums, when it happens, you’re just like, ‘oh fuck, I remember this. Shit, I haven’t heard this in 35 years’. It’s a really beautiful sound and a beautiful feeling.”
Elsewhere in the chat, Grohl also looks back at Nirvana’s earliest days, including a meeting with record label executives before Nevermind was released. Sitting in a high-rise office across from a major label exec, Grohl remembers Cobain being asked what the band wanted.
“Kurt says, ‘We want to be the biggest band in the world,’” he recalls. “And I think we all laughed. I don’t know if he was kidding. Still to this day I think about it.”
While the prospect sounded impossible at the time, Grohl notes there was always something clear about Cobain’s writing.
“The songs that he wrote, I think he wrote them to be heard,” he says. “I think that most songwriters when they write songs, you want them to be heard or you want them to be felt or you want – not necessarily validation – but you want someone to feel what you feel just as a listener wants to feel what the artist feels.”
“I don’t know what the exact intention was,” he adds, “but I do know that Kurt was one of the greatest songwriters of all time. And it was inevitable that his songs would be recognised as some of the greatest songs of all time.”
Meanwhile, Foo Fighters’ latest album Your Favorite Toy is now out. Listen to the title track below.
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