(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sat 18 April 2026 20:00, UK
Dave Grohl probably didn’t realise what he was getting into when he first signed on to be a member of Nirvana.
The Seattle legends were already becoming a hot commodity in the underground scene, but the thought of three random guys in flannel becoming one of the biggest bands in the world was going to be a bit of a stretch in a world that was still dominated by hair metal. But even when they were making Nevermind, Grohl remembered that there were a few songs where they didn’t exactly know what they were working with until the record was finished.
Then again, it’s not like Grohl had that much time to contribute when he first joined. A lot of the songs that ended up on Nevermind had been worked out by the band when Chad Channing was still on drums, and while Grohl was the one giving it his signature power, a song like ‘In Bloom’ does include drum fills that were Channing’s ideas that Grohl copied note-for-note when he got behind the kit.
But when you listen to the power that he has behind every single strike, it’s not hard to see why Kurt Cobain needed to work with him. He was the band’s resident John Bonham, and even if he was playing one of the gnarliest punk songs ever, tracks like ‘Stay Away’ and ‘Territorial Pissings’ are some of the most raucous songs that the band ever came up with, thanks to what Grohl was doing.
So you’d think that ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ would have been the frontrunner right out of the gate, right? Well, no. Not at all, actually. Even though the song literally changed the rock and roll scene overnight and birthed an entire generation of disaffected kids, Grohl remembered that the band were considering ditching the song when they first laid it down because they thought it sounded too similar to the Pixies.
It does have all the hallmarks of Black Francis’s musical style, but the thought of them nearly discarding the whole thing is crazy to look back on, with Grohl recalling, “We almost threw it away because we thought it sounded too much like the Pixies. We thought, ‘God this is the biggest Pixies rip-off ever.’ But people seemed to latch onto that more than anything else, so I’m convinced that if the Pixies came out now with their first album, people would be calling them the new Nirvana.”
The quiet-loud dynamic is definitely something that they borrowed from the underground legends, but the primal scream that Cobain had was something no one else could have replicated. This was a cry from the next generation that they didn’t want to hear corporate rock and roll anymore, and the rest of the world seemed to follow suit from the moment that the video premiered on MTV.
But while all credit must go to Cobain for making such a timeless melody, the real reason why the song worked so well is thanks to Grohl’s way of constructing the song. His massive drum fill leading into the song has gone down in history at this point, and even at the time, producer Butch Vig remembered pacing around the room in excitement the minute that he heard the drums come roaring in on the song.
Everyone would have had an inkling that the song was going to become a massive hit, but the fact that they weren’t that convinced at the start really shows what an overnight sensation the band was going to become. No one saw them coming at all, and while everyone was working on their moves, trying to be the next Axl Rose, Cobain was proving that all you needed to succeed was a lot of drive and a few roaring guitars.
