Former Nirvana-drummer-turned-Foo-Fighters-frontman,
Dave Grohl, only knew singer and songwriter, Kurt Cobain, for about three and a half years
before Cobain passed away in April 1994. But in that short period of time, they changed
each other's lives. We're here to explore the truth about their complicated relationship.
Dave Grohl was an East Coast guy in a punk band called Scream when,
in 1990, the band played a show in San Francisco that would change his life forever.
According to Ultimate Classic Rock, Cobain and some friends went to check them out
and were impressed by Grohl's drumming. Though Nirvana already had a drummer and had put out the
album "Bleach," they felt they needed a different drummer to get the sound they were looking for.
Grohl played like a boss, so Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic invited him to a
Seattle recording studio to play. Novoselic said in the biography "Come As You Are":
"We knew within two minutes that he was the right drummer. He was a hard
hitter. He was really dynamic. He was so bright, so hot, so vital."
Just like that, Grohl had a new band and Nirvana had a new drummer.
In a 1991 interview with Studio Brussel, Cobain said:
"Krist and I have been playing together for about four and a
half years now with a few different drummers. Dave has been in the band
for about a year. 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."
In February 2021, Grohl told The Big Issue that he agreed that he and the rest of Nirvana connected
very well musically — but otherwise, they probably wouldn't have been hanging out. Grohl 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."
Grohl and Kurt both came from broken homes, but the coming-of-age experiences that shaped
them were strikingly different. Grohl described to The Big Issue that he had a
"happy" childhood with an awesome single mom who supported him in his ventures.
Cobain's parents split when he was 9, leaving him feeling disillusioned and angry as a teen.
He bounced around the homes of relatives and friends, sometimes
sleeping under bridges. He experimented with drugs and some minor vandalism.
Grohl elaborated about his relationship with Cobain to The Big Issue, saying:
"Back then we were young, and the world was just so strange. But that emotional
dysfunction in Nirvana was relieved when we put on instruments. If the music hadn't worked,
we wouldn't have been there together. I truly believe that there's some people you can
only communicate with musically. And sometimes that's an even greater, deeper communication."
Grohl and Cobain definitely meshed musically and had good times together, but as time wore on,
the bandmates had less and less in common — mostly because of Cobain's severe addiction
to heroin. He'd even suffered a few overdoses — one as recently as the month before his death.
According to Grohl's 2021 memoir "The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music," Grohl got a call that
Cobain had overdosed and died in March 1994, only to find out it was a false alarm. Still,
in the moments in between hearing the news and finding out the truth, he was fully devastated.
Grohl wrote of his thoughts at the time:
"He was gone. The shy young man who had offered me
an apple upon our first introduction at the Seattle airport was gone. My quiet,
introverted roommate who I'd shared a tiny little apartment with in Olympia was gone.
The loving father who played with his beautiful baby daughter backstage every night before each
show was gone. I was overcome with a more profound sadness than I had ever imagined."
Grohl went on to say that because of Cobain's near-death experience he, quote,
"built his walls higher." According to Firstpost, Grohl recently said:
"There are some people in life that you emotionally prepare
yourself to lose [...] like some sort of defense mechanism. But it doesn't work. It never works."
In 2011 Dave Grohl told Howard Stern of his
relationship with Cobain and the band. As he described it:
"It got weird toward the end."
He said everyone was "split off" from each other,
and tried to explain to Stern what he saw as the underlying issue. For one thing,
Grohl said that he doesn't do drugs and hadn't since he was about 20 years old.
"You know, there were drugs around, and there was, like, the people who did the drugs,
and then there were the people who didn't do the drugs. And I didn't do the drugs,
and so I was just out of that world, you know."
Grohl said around the time of Kurt's death the
issues had gotten to where they all needed time apart. He said:
"I think at that point, it was important that we take a break. I think everybody felt that way."
For Cobain, in his last days, it might have felt like the world was closing in on him.
He had a drug problem, but also, his marriage to Courtney Love was on the rocks. His suicide note
is filled with lines about not being able to find happiness like he used to, being overly sensitive,
and feeling guilty for not being able to truly appreciate the life he created for himself.
After the devastation of Cobain's death, Dave Grohl briefly lost his desire to play music,
something that's been his passion since childhood. He told The Big Issue:
"But it came back. And thankfully, just as I had hoped, it healed me. To me,
music has always been about life. It was the thing I most loved about life, more than anything else.
After Nirvana, I needed it to keep me alive. and it's the reason why I never stopped."
Nearly three decades since Kurt Cobain decided to end his life,
Grohl has moved on, but he says that he still thinks of his friend and bandmate often.
Grohl switched to guitar in his band Foo Fighters but, as he wrote in his new memoir:
"It's when I sit down at a drum set that I feel Kurt the most. It's not often that
I play the songs that we played together, but when I sit on that stool, I can still picture
him in front of me, wrestling with his guitar as he screamed his lungs raw into the microphone."
Grohl also told People:
"I think about him all the time. I just had a dream about him two nights ago.
I only knew Kurt for about three and a half years,
but in that time we went through multiple lifetimes. Kurt's songs touched the world."
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts,
please call or chat online with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
at 1-800-273-TALK (8255). Or Text HOME to the Crisis Text Line 741741