This is a Call (23 page)

‘His contribution transformed us into a force of nature,’ said Novoselic. ‘Nirvana was now a beast that walked the earth.’

Lounge act

I didn’t really think that much of ‘Teen Spirit’ at first. I thought it was just another one of the jams that we were doing: we had so many jams like that, that we’d record onto a boombox tape and then lose the cassette and lose the song forever. But ‘Teen Spirit’ was one we kept coming back to …

Dave Grohl

In the darkness, no one could see the tears streaming down Dave Grohl’s face. It was the evening of 20 October 1990, and Grohl and Kurt Cobain had sneaked into London’s Brixton Academy to catch the final show of Boston alt. rock alchemists Pixies’ sold-out UK tour. Having stepped off an 11-hour trans-Atlantic flight that same afternoon, Grohl was jetlagged and a little spaced out, but as he looked around the cavernous converted theatre and saw the sheer exhilaration etched on the faces of 4,500 sweat-drenched indie-rock fans screaming Black Francis’s surrealist lyrics about ‘slicing up eyeballs’ back at the stage, the euphoria of the evening overcame him and he cried tears of pure joy. That a band this wired, this warped, this utterly uncompromising could connect on such a visceral, human level in a room this size so far from home seemed to Grohl truly transcendent. Just like the B-52s’ appearance on
Saturday Night Live
a decade previously, it represented a small, but significant, victory for the outsiders, for the freaks. One day, Grohl thought as he blinked back the tears, I want to be up on that stage.

Nirvana had stages of their own to conquer in the week ahead, in Birmingham, Leeds, Edinburgh, Nottingham, Norwich and London, where the 2,000-capacity Astoria theatre had sold out one month in advance of their arrival. There was a tangible street-level buzz around the band, and Kurt Cobain sensed it. With Grohl behind him, though, he knew his band was ready. For the very first time, Nirvana had a swagger in their step.

A surprise awaited Grohl in Birmingham on the opening night of the tour. Nirvana’s support band, all-girl rockers L7, were already inside Goldwyn’s Suite when the headliner’s van pulled up outside, and Grohl heard his name being called as soon as he stepped into the venue. L7 bassist Jennifer Finch had booked Scream on a Bad Religion bill in Los Angeles some months previously, and she recognised their former drummer immediately. Before the night was over the pair were making out like teenagers.

Though the past four years of his life had largely been spent cooped up in foul-smelling tour vans with punk rock lifers for company, finding girlfriends was rarely a problem for Grohl. Holding onto them was a little trickier. His first love, at age 13, was Sandy Moran, the most ‘gorgeous, angelic’ girl in the seventh grade at Oliver Wendell Holmes Middle School. The pair dated for two whole weeks – ‘We’d meet at her locker after every period and give each other hickeys,’ Grohl would later recall – before the feather-haired heartbreaker told her infatuated boyfriend that she didn’t want to get tied down, and dumped him. The following year, aged 14, he lost his virginity to a high school female basketball player two years his senior at a house party; when he returned to school the next week he discovered that his partner had quit school and moved from the area. At 16 he fell ‘hopelessly in love’ with a girl named Wendy, only to see her move to Arizona with her family just weeks after the pair started dating. Looking back, Grohl admits he used to fall in love much too easily. But he had never met a girl like Jennifer Finch.

A street-smart, ballsy, tomboy-cute 24-year-old, Finch had started playing guitar at age 10 and saw the Ramones as her first punk rock show aged 11. By 14 she was living on the streets of Los Angeles, shooting up drugs during the day and shooting hardcore bands for fanzines at night. She was, in short, the most punk rock girl Dave Grohl had ever met. The pair were inseparable for the remainder of the tour.

‘We started dating from the second we met,’ recalls Finch, now working in website development and online marketing in her native Los Angeles. ‘Dave was very cute, very kind and a very sweet person. He was shy and very charismatic, but humble too. I liked him from the start.’

Blessed with a sassy new girlfriend and a white-hot new band, memories of the misery of Scream’s final tour faded quickly for Grohl. Nirvana’s ten days in the UK were a blur of gigs, press interviews, practical jokes, food fights and passionate drunken fumblings. The trio cut a four-track radio session for long-time supporter John Peel at the BBC’s Maida Vale studios, found themselves courted by major label A&R men and stood for
that
photo session with the
NME
’s Martyn Goodacre. Unable to keep a smile off his face the whole time he was in the UK, the excitable young drummer charmed everyone he met.

‘The band took a definite step up when Dave joined,’ Nirvana PR Anton Brookes told me in 2010. ‘He took it beyond a level, it became ferocious. He just gave it that extra dimension. Nirvana became a serious contender.

‘Kurt had sent me over a tape, recorded over a copy of
Bleach
, which had “In Bloom” and “Sliver” and “Dive” on it and a few other tracks that went on
Nevermind
, works in progress. And I remember thinking, “Wow, these are going to be massive, they’re going to be able to sell out Brixton Academy!” Kurt told me that he had other songs that were going to be Top Ten singles. He totally believed it. He knew it.’

‘We’re changing a little bit,’ Cobain admitted to Keith Cameron in his
Sounds
interview. ‘The
Bleach
album is pretty different to what we’re doing right now. We figured we may as well get on the radio and make a little bit of money at it.

‘I don’t wanna have any other kind of job, I can’t work among people. I may as well try and make a career out of this. All my life my dream has been to be a big rock star – just may as well abuse it while you can.’

When Nirvana returned from the UK Dave Grohl moved in with Cobain at 114 North Pear Street in Olympia. He was quite unprepared for the squalor in which his friend lived: 114 North Pear Street made the scuzzy European squats where Grohl had laid his head during his days with Scream look like palatial Georgetown townhouses. The kitchen was
filthy
, covered in mould and littered with half-eaten corn-dogs, beer cans and putrefying take-away food. There was only one tiny bedroom, which Cobain had painted black. The living room was cramped and foul-smelling, the TV was broken, and the floor was barely visible beneath the detritus of Cobain’s bachelor life. Half of the room was taken up by Cobain’s stinking turtle aquarium, the other half by a couch which doubled as a spare bed. This was to be Dave Grohl’s home for the next eight months.

‘Kurt was an artist,’ says Grohl, ‘and as much as he was a brilliant songwriter, that passion and creativity made its way out of every pore of his body. The apartment we lived in was an experiment: you walked in and there was sculptures and paintings, there were turtles and medical books and Leonard Cohen records, it was chaos. But it was, like, “This is Kurt.”’

Though he was new in town, Grohl had some familiarity with the neighbourhood in which Cobain lived. Four or five months before moving to Olympia, he had attended a party at the home of Cobain’s next-door neighbour Slim Moon with his bandmates from Scream. It was not a night that held fond memories for the drummer.

‘We’d played in some little art gallery space,’ Grohl recalls, ‘and after we played, Slim said, “There’s a party over at my apartment, you guys should come.” So we were like, “Cool! A party? Let’s go get some beer and we’ll come to this party.” But our idea of a party was perhaps different from theirs …

‘So we show up, the Scream guys, with a couple of racks of beer and it was Olympia, so the “party” was like kids in poodle skirts listening to Joni Mitchell. That shit was dead. And it was like “What the fuck?” And then a girl came out and played guitar and played a song that was kinda
alright
, but it wasn’t good. And once that was over we were like “Fuck this!”’

Grohl went out to Scream’s tour van, grabbed a cassette of the
Frizzle Fry
album by Frank Zappa-inspired San Francisco funk-rockers Primus, and cranked it up on Moon’s stereo. His host and fellow partygoers could scarcely have been more mortified had he walked back into the apartment naked, crushing beer cans against his skull and helicoptering his penis.

‘So I put on the Primus tape and suddenly I’m the epitome of uncool,’ Grohl remembers. ‘And I’m like, “What, I’m not the cool guy? You all are fucking nerds! Let’s jam and get wasted!”

‘That scene … Oh my God, they might as well have been fucking Mormons! As with most everything else in Olympia it felt like everyone was in a suspended reality that they were still 13 years old, that uncomfortable sexual tension of being that old, just past puberty. Everyone was so uncomfortable and nerdy, it just seemed odd. I told this story to Kurt the first time we spoke on the phone. I said, “Yeah, some girl came out and played some really lousy song and she wasn’t any good …” and he was like, “Yeah, that was my girlfriend, Tobi …” I was like, “Fuck, I’m not getting this gig.”’

Tobi Vail, Cobain’s girlfriend, was a key player in Olympia’s proudly anti-corporate indie-rock scene. The drummer in Calvin Johnson’s minimalist, lo-fi rock band The Go Team, in 1990 she formed the fiercely confrontational feminist-punk band Bikini Kill with singer Kathleen Hanna, and coined the phrase ‘Riot Girl’ as a badge of identity for a movement of politically aware female activists starting their own fanzines, bands, record labels and galleries under the DIY punk umbrella. Alongside Calvin Johnson, his K Records co-owner Candace Pederson and a host of other young artists, musicians, activists and creatives, Vail lived at the Martin Building, Olympia’s answer to Dischord House, and the hub of the Olympia scene.

‘I liked Olympia, but it was sorta like Washington DC’s retarded stepbrother,’ says Grohl. ‘There was a connection between the two cities because Calvin and Ian [MacKaye] knew each other, and maybe Calvin lived in DC for a time. But it was a weird scene. It was fun, and I would never say bad things about Olympia because some great things came from there, but I felt like an outsider for sure. The whole time I was in Seattle I felt like an outsider.

‘I remember Slim Moon calling me “The Rocker”. That was the first time anyone had called me that and I was like, “Really?” But I was from Scream, and Scream had long hair and tattoos, so they knew I wasn’t some straight-edge Dischord kid who had gone to Georgetown University. But I’d never really thought about who I was. I wasn’t a squatter and I wasn’t a crusty or an indie guy – I was just a guy with long hair and a leather jacket who played the drums. But from my early days in Olympia I was “The Rocker”.

‘There was one band in town that I related to called Fitz of Depression: I could hang with those dudes because they were kinda scummy like me. But I was lonely. It didn’t take long before I called LA and told Pete Stahl, “Hey man, I really miss you.” Franz and Pete were both pretty fucking pissed off and I could understand that, but I had to do what I had to do. So I’d call down there and talk to Pete and Pete would say, “Hey Franz, do you wanna talk to Dave?” And there’d be this long silence and then Pete would say, “Yeah, he doesn’t really want to talk to you.” So it was a pretty lonely time. I didn’t know anybody up there. I was up there all by myself with a bunch of strangers who, to be honest, were really weird.’

‘I can only guess how out of it someone like Dave would have felt in Olympia after years on the road with the partying road dogs that were Scream,’ says musician, activist and founder of Simple Machines records Jenny Toomey, a DC resident who lived in the Martin Building in the summer of 1990. ‘Baileys Crossroads and Olympia are not a matched pair of cities. I really love Olympia, so I don’t want to seem in any way snarky, but it was simultaneously one of the coolest and most fucked-up places I have ever been. When Dave says those folks were weird … they really were. They all dressed in 1950s and ’60s clothes with kitty-cat glasses, they baked pies and made apple butter, they had dance parties and made mix tapes. Everyone was in a band, everyone crafted, everyone had a fanzine, everyone was everyone else’s biggest fans … even when they were not. It was all sugar and cream with the dark ripple that can only come from living in a building with sixteen to twenty apartments inhabited by a handful of artists who had all slept together, broken up, picked sides and fermented mini wars while maintaining a façade of inclusiveness, openness and revolution. It seemed fitting that the second season of
Twin Peaks
began while I was out there. That show was so Pacific Northwest, with small-town values and dark, evil secrets. That was exactly the Martin apartments.’

‘Because rent was cheap and there was a lot of support for the arty, bohemian lifestyle, and to some extent people could live a very adolescent life for a long time very easily there, there was a certain Peter Pan element to Olympia,’ admits Slim Moon. ‘To people from other parts of the country, people in Olympia might have seemed a little naïve. But they were Peter Pans who were pushing each other to do shit. People pushed each other to excel, to make art, to be in bands, to put on shows, whatever, to do their own thing and not just be consumers. It could be elitist, and maybe there was a secret set of rules that outsiders couldn’t understand, and yes, it could be a mind-fuck. But even if Dave thought that these people are all just unrealistic snot-noses, I think that that little push that the whole subculture of that town gave musicians probably rubbed off on him in some way. Kurt came to love bands like The Raincoats and The Vaselines and even Leadbelly because of Olympia – before he came to town he was listening mainly to hard, heavy music like Scratch Acid and Flipper – so Dave would never have played on songs like [Vaselines’] “Molly Lips” were it not for Olympia. And maybe those influences bled into his songwriting when he started to do his own music.’