(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sat 14 February 2026 18:00, UK
It’s hard to think of Kurt Cobain as being the demanding type every single time he walked into a Nirvana rehearsal room.
Every single interview he gave made it seem like he didn’t care about anything, but when you listen to his records, there was a lot more method behind the madness whenever he constructed his tunes. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ didn’t come together by mistake, and before the band hit the big time, Cobain had an agenda for what he wanted the band to be well in advance.
Or at least he had a version of what the band wasn’t going to be. The biggest names out at the time were people like Guns N’ Roses and Metallica, and even though Cobain may have loved those catchy riffs, there were bound to be a few lyrics that didn’t sit well with him. He wasn’t into music for the misogynistic angle that Axl Rose was working with, so he was going to go in the polar opposite direction whenever he worked out his tunes.
But even for an album that was as unpolished as Bleach, you can hear the beginnings of the band that they would become. There are more than a few riffs that are indebted to bands like Melvins and Flipper, but in between the more dissonant tunes, ‘About a Girl’ was something different. From the strumming chords to the sing-along melody, this was a Beatles song in disguise, and it was only a matter of time before Cobain started capitalising on everything.
Then again, it took more than Cobain to make Nirvana a powerhouse. While it’s easy to put the rest of the band on the side every time you talk about them, Dave Grohl might be the unsung hero. I know that sounds ridiculous considering how well he’s made out with Foo Fighters, but there’s a good chance that Cobain wouldn’t have gone anywhere if Chad Channing was still with the group.
Nirvana already had a notorious habit of dropping drummers at the rate that most people dropped acid in the 1960s, but Channing had his own set of problems. He was a fairly decent drummer and could lay down some heavy grooves like what he came up with on the opening to ‘In Bloom’, but when you compare his power to what Grohl would be doing in the band, it was like night and day.
Almost any other drummer would have pissed to miss out on one of the greatest bands of all time, but when they decided to part ways, Cobain remembered it being purely because of creative differences, saying, “He has his own unique style and it’s appropriate for a lot of the songs that we wrote but not for what we really wanted to do. We just wanted to move into more of a pop world and his style just didn’t fit. I think he sensed for quite a few months that we weren’t totally happy with his drumming.”
It also didn’t help that Channing eventually wanted to see if he could work some of his own songs into the band’s repertoire as well. Say what you want to about how well Grohl’s songwriting works in Foo Fighters, but he at least had the good sense of getting the hell out of the way and let Cobain write the hits every single time they started arranging tunes like ‘Heart Shaped Box’.
It must sting having to be the Pete Best of grunge rock in many respects, but it’s not like Channing has harbored any ill will towards his bandmates. He was more than happy to have been a member of one of the greatest rock and roll bands of all time, and nothing can take that away from him as long as he lives.