Metal Hammer 2003
The Strange Journey From Kurt To Killing Joke
Washington DC band Scream formed in '81 around vocalist Peter Stahl, brother Franz on guitars and Skeeter Thompson on bass
and vocals. They have been unfortunate in that history has relegated
them to the status of a Nirvana footnote, but at the time Scream
were one of Dischord's best bands, building a solid following on the
East Coast. They were typical of the more melodic end of hardcore
popular in the mid 80s, influenced as much by novelty punk acts as
the Dickies as they were by Ramones, or Bad Brains. Dave was first
and foremost a fan - when he joined in '87 the band had recorded
two albums and several EPs which Grohl had learned note for note.
"I got the audition and they asked,'What do you wanna play'. So I
said,'Oh, how about 'Still Screaming" and they went,'Which song?' so
I said, 'the wholething!"
Scream took the well worn path of piling everything into a transit
van and playing wherever they could set up the gear, playing
supports to bands even more obscure than they are today. For the
young Grohl it was a dream come true. like any lad who runs away
from home to join the modern equivalent of the circus/pirates.
Dave lied about his age. He was 16, the rest of the band were in
their 2Os.lt was illegal for him to be in many of the venues that
they played. It's sometimes wrongly said that Scream supported
Nirvana at an early show, though Dave did meet with both Krist
Novoselic and Kurt Cobain while Scream were playing in Washington State in the late 80s.
Steve Albini said that any record Grohl drummed on would be worth listening to, though the album Dave co-wrote with Scream - 'Fumble' - isn't their best work and it's to Dischord's credit they've never tried to use it as a cheesy cash-in, The band split in LA when Skeeter
Thompson left the van en route to a show leaving Grohl stranded. The Melvins' Buzz Osbourne came to the rescue and helped Dave pay to relocate to Seattle to join his next band...Nirvana.
NIRVANA; '90-'94
THERE'S STILL MORE UNRELEASED MATERIAL TO COME...
Like it or not, no matter how big the Foo
Fighters are, Dave Grohl will always be the
drummer from Nirvana. Maybe it's a label that
could equally well be tagged onto Chad
Channing, Greg Hokanson, Mike Dillard, Aaron
Burckhard or Bob McFadden (or even Dale
Crover from The Melvins and Dan Peters from
Mudhoney who also did some stand-in slots)
But they are all Pete Best and Dave is (sort of)
Ringo Starr.
Next year is the tenth anniversary of Kurt
Cobain's death: expect to read the same old
Nirvana story trotted out yet again by every
magazine from the broadsheets on down to
Carp Fishing Monthly. Grohl has for the most part
become Nirvana's unofficial spokesman, though
as he's quick to point out it is a position that he
has neither sought nor is particularly
enthusiastic about.
  "I don't think I talk about Nirvana half as
much as Courtney does," he says. "And I've never
felt it was my place. I always tell people that the
only surviving member of Nirvana is Krist
Novoselic. I remember once someone was
holding forth about Nirvana and Krist simply
said,'Well how many Nirvana shows were you
at? I was at them all.' And that's pretty much the
truth. Because of my position with the Foo
Fighters, I end up having a microphone put in
front of me more often and I'm usually asked
about Nirvana. That's how it is. I'm the most
available member."
  Where do you draw the line about Nirvana?
  "Well what more is there to say really?" he
says wearily."Ultimately, the music is all that
you have to listen to. You can pick up some
cheap biography and get the inside scoop..."
Is there any more music to come?
  "Oh yeah, there's more basement demos, old
live shows, college radio recordings, things like
that. Most everything that was recorded when I
was in the band has come out. There's a few
things, I don't know exactly what. The bulk of it
is from the beginning, which for me is most
interesting. Everybody knows Nirvana from '91
onwards. Nobody knows Nirvana from '86 to '91
and that was the foundation of what Nirvana
became with 'Nevermind'. To see the foundation
of that conventional rock format come from
something fucked up - it was coming from the
Butthole Surfers and Scratch Acid and Creedence
Clearwater Revival, music that the majority of
Nirvana fans aren't familiar with. So it's great to
hear it go from point A to point B, how the melody starts creeping in. That's interesting, the
fact that there were five other drummers in
Nirvana before me. There's some pretty cool shit
to come. They were very creative people."
  Can you listen to Nirvana now?
  "Yeah, it took me a while. I haven't listened
to any of those albums all the way through for
five years now, but I hear it on the radio. When
the unreleased Nirvana track came out last year ['You Know You're Right'] and it started hitting
the radio, that was sort of strange. Driving
through Los Angeles and seeing these posters
saying "The new Nirvana single" I had a chuckle,
I almost imagined that being another band. And
when we first started mixing that song, it was
definitely strange for Krist and me to be in the
studio hearing that song again..."
  Krist seems to have escape the glare. He
rarely does interviews.
"You have to understand that Nirvana was
the only band that Krist had ever really
been in. In fact, I believe it was his first band, so
to see your first band go from there to THERE!, it
would be difficult to pick up and start over. Krist
has been playing music all the time. It's hard to
speak for Krist because I know that Sweet 7S
and Eyes Adrift are bands that he takes a lot of
pride in. I don't think he thinks he's disappeared;
I think he believes he got it right. I don't think
he was entirely comfortable being in 'the
biggest band in the world; I think he's more all
about what he does now - flying plane and playing music with friends." [FYI Krist Novoselic
passed his amateur's pilot license in '02 and is
able to fly small single-engine planes.]
  "Krist embodies what Nirvana was about. He
hasn't changed a lick. If you've met Krist and
you've had a dose of his wickedly offbeat
humour and his 'eccentric' lifestyle, you have a
better understanding of what Nirvana was all
about. It was never a conventional rock band. It
was something...weird."
  It's odd though that the merchandising of
Kurt,the cult of personality and the carefully
marketed nostalgia for Nirvana, through MTV,
have stripped the band of their original anti-
corporate rock meaning.
  "That's why you just have to go back to the
music. I've always felt that everything but the
music is secondary. Nirvana didn't want to
become part of that world. It happened. We
didn't change the band to become part of it so
all of that was irrelevant to us. I mean, I was 22
years old and I thought it was hilariously funny.
We were fucking scamming the world. How on
earth could anyone think that we deserved to
be this huge band... have you seen us live? It
was funny. All of that - MTV, magazines, critic's
choice - was all irrelevant. All that was
important was the three of us playing music.
And I don't think we wrote one bad song.
Everything we did when we were together was
fucking great."
QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE; '02
DRUMMING GUN GETS HIRED
The mutual admiration between Josh Homme/Nick Oliveri
and the Nirvana camp goes back a long way. Grohl was a
huge fan of (their pre-QOTSA band) Kyuss and played 'Blues For
The Red Sun' three times a day when it came out. Kyuss for their
part paid tribute to Nirvana in the form of 'Day One' a secret
track on 'And the Circus leaves Town' the band's final album
released in '9S.
Grohl had acknowledged them as his favourite other band in
numerous interviews and secured support slots for them on the
Foo Fighters' '00 tour.
When QOTSA came to record 'Songs For the Deaf' towards the
end of '01, Grohl took up his sticks once more. He came within a
whisker of actually joining full time.
"Taylor and I would sit around and discuss who the next
drummer in Queens ought to be" he says. "As it turned out I was
in QOTSA for four or five months. And it felt good. It was a split
hair decision. I'm not so career minded that I have a plan... I
mean, if Linkin Park called me up and asked me to record with
them I'd probably say no. But while we were recording with the
Foo Fighters and we were getting stuck trying to deliver this
thing to a schedule and I just said Fuck it, I'm going to go off and
play with Queens Of The Stone Age for a while and see how I feel
when I get back. I worked out, I got fit. It was great. The thing is
that I don't have to do this career thing. I'm free to do what I
want to do. I mean I loved playing with these guys, being just
the drummer in the band."
Grohl got upset when he arrived in the UK for shows with QOTSA
and was immediately asked about the future of the Foo Fighters,
cancelling all interviews, fuelling speculation that his own band
were finished.
"I said I would come back when we started to need each other
again. I also had something to prove to myself. I couldn't just
play drums, I had to be better than I have ever been. I told them
(Queens) to go ahead and book shows and I rehearsed solidly
every day, working out and getting fitter than I've ever been. It
had been eight years since I had done it."
In retrospect, the world would not be a worse place if Grohl had
joined Queens: the shows he played with them were jaw
dropping and - despite attempts in some quarters to stoke up a
backlash - 'Songs For the Deaf' is the band's best album yet and
still one of the best releases of the decade thus far. Interestingly,
future collaborations are not ruled out though there aren't any
immediate plans.
"Behind a kit is where he fuckin' should be" Josh Homme said at
the time. "Dave's an amazing player; he played his fuckin' ass off."
PROBOT; '01 - '03
THE CONCEPT METAL PROJECT
Dave as we have noted is still at heart a bit of a fan boy. His
tastes may have widened but he's still thrilled to discover
new music. In many ways the Probot project is the ultimate
expression of this. It began life as a series of instrumentals
recorded in Dave's basement at his old house in Virginia. He
heard the over wrought Santana album 'Shaman' featuring a
police line-up of corporate rock hags from Chad Kroeger to
Placido Domingo making guest appearances. Grohl thought it
would be funny to parody this using the creme de la creme of
the underground, a who's who of his black metal/death
metal/doom metal heroes.
The tracks were recorded and sent off in a digital format to the
artists along with money for a studio; they then went and
recorded their parts and sent it back to Grohl. It's been talked
about for a while but now looks as though it'll be out this year.
"Probot is done. There's one track that I need to find a vocalist
for. We were thinking of Dio but that's not gonna happen now.
It's gonna come out this fall on a small independent metal label
(Southern Lord). I get asked about Probot every fuckin'
interview. It's got to the point where I'm afraid that people will
expect something of it that it's not. It's not the same world; it's
not the new Metallica album. It's me with Lemmy, and Cronos
and Snake and Eric Wagner and Wino...it's a cool record. There are some fast tracks,
the Cronos track "Centuries Of Sin" is old school fast thrash metal.
the Lee Dorrian track "Ice Cold Man" is slow and has a dirge to it.
The Snake track "Dictorsaurus" is kinda reminiscent of an old Voivoid
track. The King Diamond track "Sweet Dreams" is slow. The Mike Dean track "Access Babylon"
is sort of like an old school metal hardcore crossover song. It moves in a lot of different ways. It isn't about me; I'm just having the time of my life in a fantasy camp being able to create something with these people I listened to for years when I was young. I still do, I liked the last Trouble record that came out, I love that kind of music. If it came out on a major label then the emphasis would probably be on me because they
wouldn't understand where any of the other people were
coming from. But Gregg at Southern lord knows what the fuck
the Probot thing is all about, about a specific five year period 85-
90 in underground metal. I mean it won't be so obscure that you
can't buy it anywhere, but I can't imagine how many people will
really get it. And it's a great excuse to have a record party."
Will there be a Probot show?
"I dunno. That would be a...cunt to try and organise but I'm
sure we could work something out."
KILLING JOKE; '03
DAVE'S LATEST COLLABORATION
When Nirvana recorded 'Come As You Are' and released it as
the second single from 'Nevermind' there was a certain
amount of apprehension in the band's camp because of the
undeniable similarity between it and the riff from Killing Joke's
song 'Eighties' Although it never came to a court battle, both
sides were aware of this. In the book, Eyewitness Nirvana: The
Day-Dy-Day Chronicle, manager Danny Goldberg said:"Kurt was
nervous about 'Come as You Are' because it was too similar to a
Killing Joke song, but we all thought it was still the better song.
And, he was right, Killing Joke later did complain about it."
It is then with a certain amount of irony that Dave Grohl plays
drums on the new eponymous Killing Joke album, the band's
first new material since '96's 'Democracy' which is produced and
mixed by former Gang of Four guitarist Andy Gill. They had
recorded some tracks with System Of A Down drummer John
Dolmayan, but Grohl now appears throughout the album.
"While we were in Europe last fall, someone gave me a call and
said that Killing Joke were interested in my playing some drums.
I suppose they had read in an interview that I was a Killing Joke
fan - that was the first punk rock t-shirt I bought, from Wax Trax
Records in Chicago, 13 years old, I bought the first album and the
t-shirt and then 'Requiem' became the soundtrack to my life-
and maybe because I had played drums on the QOTSA album
they thought I was doing session work! But I said, 'Absolutely, I
don't have much time but send out some music and if I hear the
songs I can whip 'em out in the studio in a few days: They sent
me six songs that were complete apart from the drums and they
were great, man - huge anthemic, beautiful, orchestral, political
Killing Joke masterpieces. The best that they've done in a long
while, and I was a fan of'Democracy; but they have a new sense
of urgency or something. And it's funny' cos I got the album last
October... how prophetic it was. Songs like'Total Invasion', Jaz
really had his ear to the ground."
Jaz met Dave in Auckland while the Foo Fighters were there for
the Big Day Out and joined them onstage for a version of
'Requiem'. "I got a call from Jaz saying in this crazy voice,'Dave
you fucking bastard! let's have a drink!' so we arranged to meet
in the hotel bar. He lives on an island off the coast of New
Zealand - he has four passports and moves around every 90 days
to avoid paying any taxes - and said he'd jump on a light aircraft
and come over. I've never seen Killing Joke live, I was a fan of
their records, and I was wondering if I would recognise him. I've
seen photos and videos, but I've never met him. I'm surrounded
by businessmen in this hotel lobby when in walks this man
dressed as a priest. And one look at those eyes and that nose, I
knew it was him. We spent the next six hours getting fucking
pissed out of our minds! It was amazing, like the best first date
of our lives. We talked about UFOs, and implants and
corporations and the control of money. It was a blast. Here's this
wild man dressed as a priest standing on the table screaming at
these businessmen calling them murderers. It was better than
any Killing Joke concert."