This is a Call (33 page)

That the two best-known tracks on
Pocketwatch
are skeletal acoustic sketches does not paint an accurate representation of the album: for the most part, Dave Grohl’s début solo album offers up the kind of fuzzed-up, driving alternative rock the singer would take to the bank with Foo Fighters in later years. Among its noisier components, ‘Petrol CB’ (confusingly retitled ‘There’s That Song Again’ when it emerged on vinyl on the 1992 Simple Machines’ seven-inch box set
Neapolitan Metropolitan
) stands out; featuring a gnarled stop-start riff, harshly distorted vocals and a reverb-drenched, shimmering chorus, it suggests that Grohl, like many of his peers in the Alternative Nation in the early’90s, was taking some songwriting cues from My Bloody Valentine. ‘Just Another Story About Skeeter Thompson’ is memorable for entirely different reasons, as over a grinding, insistent crossover-punk riff Grohl delivers a humorous spoken word ‘tribute’ to Scream’s mercurial bassist: he recalls how, while staying at his friend Tos Nieuwenhuizen’s house in Amsterdam during his second European excursion with the band from Bailey’s Crossroads, he was interrupted while reading
Maximumrocknroll
(‘
or Flipside
…
one of those punk things’
) by Thompson holding out his penis for examination, asking,
‘Does that look like pus to you?’
Delightful.

Future Foo Fighters B-side ‘Winnebago’, the hoarse-throated Hüsker Dü-esque ‘Hell’s Garden’ and the dynamic DC hardcore-flavoured instrumental ‘Pokey the Little Puppy’ are enthusiastic rather than enthralling, but their characterful crunch measures up nicely against the strains of corrosive alt-rock delivered by contemporaries on the Amphetamine Reptile, Trance Syndicate and Matador labels in the early 1990s. As with Nirvana’s
Bleach, Pocketwatch
merits respect rather than reverence, and its full significance would be measured by events that lay ahead, but it remains an engaging blueprint for Grohl’s signature songwriting style.

With Grohl loath to promote
Pocketwatch
in any way – the drummer being anxious that the album might be viewed as a crass cash-in on the popularity of
Nevermind
– as Jenny Toomey remembers it, “no one really noticed” the cassette for the longest time. When word of its existence finally went overground, Simple Machines almost buckled under demand for the tape, not least because Toomey had to dub every single copy from Grohl’s second-generation demo tape by hand in her bedroom: ‘People don’t ever think about this in relation to labels, but indie labels don’t get in trouble when they’re not successful, they get in trouble when they have one artist that’s more successful than they can keep up with,’ she points out.

‘Eventually we just took it off the catalogue, because it was just too much,’ she admits. ‘I don’t bear any ill-will to Mr Grohl, and I haven’t really seen him much over the years, but there were several times when we literally just begged him to let us put it on CD, not just because wouldn’t it be nice to have a “little engine that could”, that helped us pay for the other records, but also because it was a pain in our ass to dub them five at a time! But whatever, we respected him, and we were certainly very proud to have put it out. I was always amazed that Dave ever second-guessed it: he seemed fairly modest about his skills for a long time.’

The release of the
Pocketwatch
tape had the unexpected side effect of spurring Nirvana back into action. Impressed by Barrett Jones’s production on the cassette, Cobain booked a one-day session at the new Laundry Room Studio – in the basement of the West Seattle house Jones and Grohl had been sharing since July ’91 – to hammer out some new material. Convening at Grohl’s house on 7 April 1992, the band snapped back into high gear immediately, recording one-take performances of future B-side ‘Curmudgeon’ and ‘Oh, The Guilt’ (set aside for a future split single with Touch and Go records’ brilliant Jesus Lizard) and treating themselves to two runs through a cover of ‘Return of the Rat’ by seminal Portland garage rockers The Wipers (destined for release on the singles box set
Eight Songs for Greg Sage and The Wipers
, which also featured contributions from Hole and the heavyweight Portland hardcore crew Poison Idea).

‘We got to the point where we could just crank out songs,’ Chris Novoselic later stated. ‘Kurt would be improvising, and we were so good at playing we’d just pick up the song; the second time we’d play the song we’d record it. That’s what happened with those B-sides we did at the Laundry Room.’

With Cobain understandably preoccupied with looking after his now pregnant wife in Los Angeles, it would be a further two and a half months before Nirvana properly returned to action. In the interim, Grohl took advantage of his free time to add bass, guitar and drums to Melvins’ mainman Buzz Osbourne’s solo EP
King Buzzo
at the Laundry Room, displaying both a wry wit and a shrewd knowledge of punk rock history by adopting the pseudonym ‘Dale Nixon’ on the record credits, ‘Dale Nixon’ being the same name Greg Ginn had employed when covertly laying down the bass parts on Black Flag’s
My War
album. The EP featured a re-working of ‘Just Another Story About Skeeter Thompson’, now simply titled ‘Skeeter’.

In mid-June Nirvana regrouped to return to Europe to make up the dates they had cancelled at the back end of 1991. Old problems surfaced almost immediately. Three days into the tour, following a superb 22 June show at the King’s Hall in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which this writer was privileged to attend, Cobain collapsed at breakfast in the city’s Europa Hotel. The official line given to UK journalists covering Nirvana’s ‘comeback’ was that the singer had a ‘weeping ulcer’: ‘It’s because he eats a lot of junk food,’ deadpanned PR Anton Brookes. In reality Cobain was suffering from methadone withdrawal. When a news journalist from
Melody Maker
queried the official diagnosis, bluntly asking the PR man directly whether there was any truth in the rumour that’s Cobain’s collapse was the result of a heroin overdose, Brookes was forthright and bullish in his dismissal of the story.

‘Everyone’s been saying that, but there’s nothing in it,’ he countered. ‘I mean, how many times did Kurt supposedly die in car crashes last year? Some people claim he started the LA riots! It’s all bullshit. It’s just cos they’re the most copy-worthy band in the world right now.’

It was an admirable performance by the PR man, but few were convinced. The paper’s decision to run their story under the headline ‘Nirvana Star Rushed to Hospital with “Mystery Stomach Bug”’ hinted at both their own heavy scepticism and the deeper, darker problems they intuitively knew were bedevilling the Seattle three-piece.

‘You had to say and do a lot of things to keep face for the band,’ Brookes subsequently admitted. ‘I did that out of loyalty, not because they were paying me, but because they were friends. Everything had changed. Nirvana had become a multi-million-pound industry. To management and everyone else, it was still the same close-knit family, but I remember we all went around together then – the band, crew, [support band] Teenage Fanclub – everybody except Kurt and Courtney, who stayed in their hotel room. It became them and everyone else.’

For all the PR man’s skills, however, the cracks in the Nirvana camp could not be papered over forever. With rumours circulating that Nirvana’s proposed August headline slot at Reading festival was likely to be cancelled, in July writer Keith Cameron, one of Nirvana’s most loyal, supportive and trusted confidants in the media, and a man who had shared floor space with Dave Grohl at the Novoselic’s Tacoma home less than two years previously, was flown to Spain to interview the band for
NME
to set the story straight. This he did, but not in the way in which Nirvana’s management or PR people had envisaged.

When he arrived in Spain, Cameron found the atmosphere enveloping the Nirvana camp to be poisonous, with both the crew and indeed the band’s rhythm section walking on eggshells to avoid upsetting Cobain and his six months pregnant wife. After being made to wait for two days for an audience with the singer, on 3 July Cameron was bemused to see Cobain being led meekly into the subterranean dressing rooms at Palacio de los Deportes de la Comunidad de Madrid by Love, who loudly and sarcastically trumpeted, ‘Here he is! Here’s everyone’s little investment!’

When Cameron finally sat down with his old friend, Cobain flatly denied that he was using heroin – going so far as to demand that the writer check his arms for traces of needle marks. But the perceptive Cameron quickly surmised that the real story of the tour lay not with the singer’s personal problems, but with the attitude of his heavily pregnant wife.

Musing upon how Nirvana could go from ‘nobodies to superstars to fuck-ups’ in the space of six months, Cameron’s verdict was damning:

‘Spend two days in tour fatigues with this new, arena-compatible Nirvana production machine – “I don’t know the names of most of the crew,” admits Dave – and it dawns on you that the overriding issue here is not that Kurt Cobain is on heroin (or isn’t, or was, or is and is trying to get off) but that his wife is a grade A pain in the arse,’ he wrote.

Cameron’s hard-hitting story was filed under the brilliant headline ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. ‘This is serious shit,’ he wrote, ‘and it’s no wonder some people are freaking and saying Reading will be it. Game Over. The End.’

Around the same time
Melody Maker
’s Everett True wrote a more sympathetic account of the state of the Nirvana nation. The final section of his article was given over to Dave Grohl, who seemed to have retained an excellent sense of perspective amid what he would later term as the ‘tornado of insanity’ enveloping the band.

‘Any musician would be lying if they said that they didn’t want people to appreciate their music,’ he stated carefully. ‘But something on this scale is just too perverse and too bizarre to accept sometimes, especially for us. We definitely aren’t the ones who wanted this. I just don’t want this fiasco to ruin my life.’

In the weeks leading up to the Reading festival, Anton Brookes was forced time and again to deny that Kurt Cobain’s ill-health would compel Nirvana to withdraw from the bill. One of Brookes’s Bad Moon press releases testily concluded with the words ‘Nirvana are playing fucking Reading.’ But in truth no one really knew whether or not the gig would happen: not Brookes, not John Silva, not Dave Grohl, and quite possibly not Kurt Cobain himself.

In the first week of August Cobain and Courtney Love checked into the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in LA; Love to prepare for the imminent arrival of the couple’s first child, her husband to receive treatment for narcotics addiction. At 7:48 a.m. on 18 August Love gave birth to a baby girl, weighing in at 7 pounds and 1 ounce; the couple named her Frances Bean, after Frances McKee of The Vaselines. But even on this happy occasion there were dark clouds overhead. In a 1995 interview with
Spin
magazine’s Craig Marks, Love claimed that Cobain summoned a drug dealer to the hospital that same day, and had the dealer inject drugs into his morphine drip, after which he OD’d: ‘He like totally died,’ she said. In an interview with
Rolling Stone
’s David Fricke in 1994 Love also claimed that her husband brought a gun to the hospital on 19 August, and the couple weighed up the pros and cons of a suicide pact. Clearly these were troubled times.

On Friday 28 August Dave Grohl and Chris Novoselic showed up at the Richfield Avenue site to check out John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd, and noisy New Yorkers Cop Shoot Cop and The Lunachicks; of Kurt Cobain there was no sign. On the Saturday night, 29 August, the band had a fraught, uncomfortable rehearsal in London, and it slowly dawned on Grohl that this might be the end of the line.

‘We rehearsed once, the night before, and it wasn’t good,’ he recalled. ‘I really thought, “This will be a disaster, this will be the end of our career for sure.”’

Reading 1992 was to be more than just a gig for Nirvana. Not only was it the biggest payday of their career – the trio commanding a $250,000 appearance fee as the final band on the final night of the festival’s 20th anniversary staging – but the entire main stage bill on Sunday 30 August had been built around them, a measure of just how much power and respect they commanded at the time.