(Credit: Julie Kramer)
Sun 13 April 2025 10:30, UK
It’s pretty wild to think that Dave Grohl only knew Kurt Cobain for about three years. At this point, Grohl is, with a bullet, the second most famous person involved with Nirvana, and that separation between drummer and singer only gets closer by the day. Perhaps not for the reasons Grohl intended; however, as everyone who has gotten the ultimate grunge pub quiz question wrong will tell you, he wasn’t the first drummer in Nirvana and doesn’t even play on their first album.
No, Grohl was a replacement for original drummer Chad Channing. He was a fine enough stickman for a band still working things out—good enough for Grohl to give Channing his flowers during his section of the speech for Nirvana’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. There was always a feeling that he was there supporting Kurt and bassist Krist Novoselic, though. After all, he wasn’t the only drummer on Bleach, and that tends to be a bad sign for an up-and-coming instrumentalist.
By 1990, Kurt just couldn’t ignore the flaws in Channing’s playing and that, combined with Channing’s dissatisfaction about being left out of the songwriting process, got him sacked from the group. Within months, they found Grohl and, as Novoselic told Michael Azerrad for his seminal book Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana, “We knew in two minutes that he was the right drummer.”
Cobain was, typically, more catty about it. He said in a 1991 interview with Studio Brussels, “This is the first time we’ve felt like a very definite unit. The band is finally complete because all the other drummers we had pretty much sucked.” With the way Grohl talks about Cobain today, one would assume that his time in the band was all sunshine and roses until the singer’s personal issues began souring everything. That’s not entirely the case, either.
In a 2021 interview with The Big Issue, Grohl discussed his personal connection with Cobain and compared it to his current band, Foo Fighters. He said, “When I first met Kurt and Krist…musically, it was a match made in heaven. But personally, it was a bit off, to be honest. Of course, we loved each other. We were friends. But, you know, there was a dysfunction in Nirvana that a band like Foo Fighters doesn’t have.”
Music became the one form of communication available to them, and, to be clear, that was enough. They didn’t spend their time together at each other’s throats; it seemed more like a brotherly relationship, the kind most dudes in bands have. Very, very rarely, though, they would let that macho posturing slide and be open with each other. The first time that happened came a few months after Grohl joined the band, and it’s clearly a moment that the Foo Fighters frontman looks back on fondly.
In an interview with GQ, Grohl talked about the first tour that he went on with Nirvana, a jaunt around England and Scotland with L7. He revealed, “I had been in the band for a month. I remember being at some underground disco with the L7 girls, Kurt and Krist, and we were all downstairs drinking and dancing to bad 1980s new wave. Kurt came up and said, ‘I’m so glad you’re in this band, man. I’m so glad.’ And I was like, [in comic dork voice] ‘Wow, that was really nice of him! Holy moly!’ It was two and a half years before the next compliment.”
Cobain may have been a difficult person at the best of times, but he really did know what talent he had in Grohl. Moments like that were few and far between, but with the trajectory and tragedy of the Nirvana story, it makes perfect sense that that three-year period would well and truly change Dave Grohl’s life.
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