This is a Call (32 page)

Dave Grohl would not be told about the incident until the band returned home to Seattle.

‘There were a lot of those … incidents that you just found out about later,’ he told me hesitantly in 2009. ‘In a weird way, it just became this thing that nobody knew what to do about. If you’ve ever known someone who’s battled something like that you just know that there’s nothing you can do.’

It was in New York that weekend that Grohl woke up to the fact that his bandmate was a heroin addict. In one of the most powerful, graphic and affecting passages in
Come As You Are
the drummer recalled walking into the couple’s suite at the Omni to be confronted with the grim reality of heroin use.

‘I remember walking into their hotel room and for the first time really realising that these two are fucked,’ he stated. ‘They were just nodding out in bed, just wasted. It was so disgusting and gross. It doesn’t make me angry at
them
, it makes me angry that they would be so pathetic as to do something like that. I think it’s pathetic for anyone to do something to make themselves that functionless and a drooling fucking baby. It’s like, “Hey, let’s do a drug that knocks us out and makes us look stupid.” It’s stupid and gross and pathetic for anyone to take it to that point.

‘I don’t know when Kurt started doing it, but evidently he was doing it while we lived together,’ Grohl told me in 2009. ‘But I was oblivious to this. The way life was in the apartment, we would go up to Tacoma and rehearse in the barn until about midnight, then drive back down to Olympia. There was no TV, so we’d either go to a friend’s house to listen to records and smoke, or we’d come back to the apartment and Kurt would go into his room, close the door and write all those journals that have been published. And I would sit on the other side of that door, on my couch, which was also my bed, and play guitar and write songs. There was a four-track in the room so sometimes I’d record, but I’d have to do it really quietly, so as not to wake him up. And I think that’s maybe when he was starting to do some drugs.

‘I joined the band on 23 September 1990, and we left to make
Nevermind
in April, so it wasn’t until after
Nevermind
that Kurt started getting fucked up. I almost want to say that it was in Europe that it started happening, but I don’t know, I just don’t know, because honestly at that time I had no idea, you could be on heroin right now and I wouldn’t know. Now I know, but then I had no idea.

‘I was a kid. I didn’t know anything about heroin. I barely knew anything about cocaine. My drug career was limited to heavy hallucinogenics and mountains of weed. I never did coke, I never did heroin, I didn’t fucking need speed … But also, in Virginia, none of us had any fucking money to buy drugs anyway. It was like, “How am I gonna get high?” “You got any lighter fluid? Okay, put that on a fucking rag …” That kind of shit. Even if we could have afforded heroin I can’t imagine us affording the fucking needles.

‘So around
Saturday Night Live
was a bad time. And then Kurt moved down to Los Angeles. And when he moved down here that’s when it got bad …’

Cobain’s overdose in New York meant that Gold Mountain could no longer ignore the fact that their prime asset was using heroin. Goldberg and Silva contacted the William Morris booking agency to tell them to book no further Nirvana shows until they figured out how to deal with the problem, scuppering a proposed US arena run. While they fretted as to how to address the issue, a spate of distracting legal issues surfaced.

The first involved the use of the name ‘Nirvana’ itself. Unbeknown to Cobain, a band called Nirvana already existed. The original Nirvana were a British psychedelic/progressive rock band who recorded for Island Records in the late 1960s; still touring under that name in the early ’90s, the band undeniably had just cause to sue their Seattle namesakes. The case was settled out of court when Gold Mountain agreed to pay the British group $100,000, a settlement which enabled both bands to continue trading under the Nirvana name.

The second case involved a face from Dave Grohl’s past. Shortly after Nirvana signed their record contract with Geffen, Glen E. Friedman got in touch with Gold Mountain to remind them that he still had Grohl under contract as a member of Scream. Friedman claimed that he had put $10,000 of his own money into financing the final Scream demo – essentially the tape that became 1993’s
Fumble
album – and he wished to reclaim his investment. Gold Mountain initially dismissed Friedman’s claim upon their artist and the dispute raged on for months.

Dave Grohl is now legally forbidden from speaking about this issue: when we spoke in Los Angeles in 2009, mention of Friedman’s name caused Foo Fighters’ frontman to ask me to switch off my tape recorder, the only time during a five-hour conversation that he made such a request.

Friedman himself did not respond to a request for an interview for this book.

If the dispute with his former manager was to prove a lesson in music business practices for Dave Grohl, it was as nothing to the storm heading his way. In April 1992 Kurt Cobain announced to Grohl and Novoselic that he wished to redraft Nirvana’s publishing agreement. Up until this point, publishing royalties had been split evenly between the three band members: under the new arrangement proposed by Cobain, the band’s publishing would be altered so that Cobain would receive 90% of monies due … and more contentiously, the agreement would be applied retroactively, dating back to the release of
Nevermind
. In effect, this agreement meant that both Grohl and Novoselic now owed Cobain money. The ensuing arguments nearly split the band.

‘This is a sticky conversation,’ Grohl told me in 2009, ‘but yeah, let’s just say that things changed. And I realised, “Okay, wait, this isn’t three guys in a van any more.” I kinda knew that, because my mom had a gold record on her wall, but that’s when I started thinking, “You know, I don’t know if I signed up for this, this isn’t what I signed up for.”

‘When we signed our deal it was a three-way split. And sometimes that changes after you sell ten million fucking records, you know? So the publishing issue came up … and I got nothing. Close to nothing. Like nothing at all … My first reaction was, “Okay, yeah … I mean, like, how much do you need? I’ve already made enough money to buy a house … Holy shit! So that’s not too terrible.” And then I found out what it
really
meant. And I’m like, “Wait a minute, should I be punished because I didn’t know what I was signing?” Because apparently nobody else did either. So that was a big one. I considered bailing out at that point. But I stayed …’

While Nirvana lay low, seeking to deal with their internecine issues out of the glare of the world’s media, the ‘grunge revolution’ gathered pace. No one had paid much attention at the time, but on the day
Nevermind
album reached the summit of the
Billboard
200, another Seattle rock band had chalked up a modest, yet significant, chart success of their own. For Pearl Jam, news that their début single ‘Alive’ had broken into
Billboard
’s Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart at number 32 wasn’t a cause for wild celebration in itself, but it demonstrated that four months on from the release of their début album
Ten
they still had impetus, still had momentum. And Nirvana’s milestone achievement had laid down a new marker: ‘I remember thinking, “Wow, it’s on now,” guitarist Mike McCready told one US journalist a decade later. ‘It changed something. We had something to prove: that our band was as good as I thought it was.’

Five months later, on 5 May 1992,
Ten
was certified platinum in the US, as it passed the one million sales mark. By mid-July, when Pearl Jam and their friends in Soundgarden left their hometown to start the second annual Lollapalooza tour alongside the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ministry and ex-N.W.A. rapper Ice Cube, both Chris Cornell’s group and Alice in Chains had platinum albums under their belts too. Jumping upon the bandwagon somewhat belatedly,
Rolling Stone
and
Spin
began to hype Seattle as ‘the new Liverpool’, and scores of major-label A&R men descended wolfishly upon the community to strip it of its assets. In every down-tuned riff and misanthropic grunt emanating from the Crocodile Café, the Showbox and the Off Ramp the majors thought they heard ‘The New Nirvana’: Mudhoney duly left Sub Pop for Reprise, Tad inked a deal with Warners imprint Giant Records and Melvins signed to Atlantic. As former
Rolling Stone
writer Cameron Crowe was bringing the ‘Seattle Sound’ to Hollywood, with Matt Dillon (who portrayed troubled teen Richie White in
Over the Edge
) starring as disaffected rocker Cliff Poncier in the sappy Jet City-based, grunge-soundtracked romantic comedy
Singles
, a host of fame-hungry Californian rock bands were donning flannel shirts and cherry red Doc Martens boots and heading in the opposite direction, hoping to buy into the feeding frenzy enveloping the city. A generation of down-at-heel, ornery local musos were left wondering where it all went right.

In the midst of all this drama, noise and confusion, hardly anyone noticed Dave Grohl’s first solo album emerge without fanfare on the tiny Simple Machines label run out of a suburban home in Arlington, Virginia by Jenny Toomey and her Tsunami bandmate Kristin Thompson. Released on cassette only, as part of Simple Machine’s Tool Set tape series,
Pocketwatch
was packaged as the work of a band named Late!, but the cassette inlay card credits revealed ‘all music and instruments’ to be the work of one ‘Dave G’. And here lay the foundations of a career of which the young multi-instrumentalist could not at this point have imagined.

Officially the
Pocketwatch
cassette was recorded in just two studio sessions: the opening six tracks were laid to Ampex tape with Barrett Jones at ‘Upland Studios’ aka Laundry Room in Arlington on 23 December 1990, while the remaining four tracks were recorded by Gray Matter man Geoff Turner at his WGNS studio in Arlington on 27 July 1991. There is some dispute about this chronology, however: Barrett Jones maintains that the ten tracks were actually comped together from a number of different studio sessions, while legendary DC producer Don Zientara also claims to have worked on the cassette with Grohl at Inner Ear. Whatever, the truth is that Grohl’s burgeoning talent as a songwriter might never have been revealed at all, but for a crush on a pretty girl.

‘Basically I’d been living in Olympia and there was a girl from Washington DC that I had a super crush on, this girl Jemmy Toomey,’ Grohl told me in 2009. ‘I always had a crush on her, she was so fucking cute, and I was secretly in love with her. She came over to the studio one day and I was recording with Barrett and she said, “Wow, this is really cool, we should put out a cassette.” Up to that point the only people who’d heard anything I’d done were my mom, my sister, Barrett, Pete [Stahl] and my buddy Jimmy [Swanson] – they were my audience – but she heard it and liked it and wanted to do it so I was like, “Okay …” I was just excited that someone was excited enough to want to hear it.’

‘My band was recording with Barrett too,’ remembers Toomey, ‘and either we found out that Dave was going to be there and so I dropped by to see what was going on, or it was just an overlap, like they were closing down what they were doing and we were loading our stuff in. But I remember really liking it and I asked him for a tape. Maybe I was crushing a little too, but I thought it was really good.’

‘It was right around the time that PJ Harvey was beginning to do stuff, and you have these people like PJ and Dave who just come out of nowhere with this effortless creativity and this ability to synthesise all this stuff: there’s just this bright, white light that comes out of them when they do what they do and it feels just effortless. I thought it was really interesting.’

While it’s fair to say that without Nirvana and Foo Fighters Dave Grohl’s
Pocketwatch
cassette would be of no more historical significance than Toomey’s own short-lived Tool Set side-projects My New Boyfriend and Slack, its lo-fi production, warmth, wit and humour ensure that it has a naïve charm all its own.

The cassette’s stand-out (and best known) track is ‘Friend of a Friend’, a stark, gently strummed meditation upon Grohl’s early months in Olympia, finding his feet in a strange town with bandmates he barely knew. Written on Kurt Cobain’s couch in the small hours of a bleak mid-winter, it’s a sensitive, tender observation of the intimate friendship between Cobain and Novoselic, the songwriter who ‘
plays an old guitar, with a coin found by the phone
’ and his more gregarious, sociable best friend who ‘
thinks he drinks too much
’. The first Dave Grohl-penned song written on an acoustic guitar, ‘Friend of a Friend’ would re-emerge in 2005, re-recorded by Grohl for the acoustic portion of Foo Fighters’
In Your Honor
double album: the events of the intervening years only serve to heighten the song’s poignancy.

Pocketwatch
also saw the first public appearance of ‘Color Pictures of a Marigold’, another gently unfolding, quietly voiced acoustic track Grohl held dear: though the version on
Pocketwatch
is credited to the Christmas 1990 session with Jones, Grohl demoed it again at Laundry Room on 16 February 1991, suggesting that he was not yet fully convinced he had the definitive recording on tape. Two years later he would cut the track again with Steve Albini, and it would achieve cult status as the only Nirvana song neither authored nor sung by Kurt Cobain, when it emerged on the B-side of the
Heart-Shaped Box
single with the shortened title ‘Marigold’.