Credit: Far Out / Alamy
Wed 19 August 2026 3:00, UK
Nirvana always worked best as a unit rather than just the Kurt Cobain Experience.
No one would have been upset if Cobain rebranded the band in his own image, but when you look at the way that any power trio works, each one of them has to support each other perfectly, or the entire operation is going to collapse. All of them had to have equal weight for any of the songs to work in the studio, but if you were to ask Cobain, the band was always meant to be a four-piece instead of their power trio setup.
Then again, bringing in another member was bound to cause some sort of friction whenever they played. Part of what made Cobain a great guitarist was hearing him hold up both sides of the musical spectrum in that regard, and hearing him choke out his guitar every single time he played a solo made for some of the most gloriously raucous performances of their career. So if you need to replace something like that, bringing in Pat Smear was really your best hope.
Smear had already had the habit of making a guitar sound like it was about to explode every single time he played it, and when you look through a lot of their live performances, he was practically made to be in the band. But his getting the gig only came from a lot of trial and error as the band tried to work out who was going to join them. Dave Grohl was the newest member of the band by the time they worked on Nevermind, but bringing in Jason Everman didn’t always seem like the right fit.
You almost feel bad for Everman knowing that he would eventually join Soundgarden and be given the boot as well, but for a brief moment in time, Ben Shepherd seemed to be a likely candidate to join the group on guitar. Hiro Yamamoto was still working fine in Soundgarden when working on records like Louder Than Love, and given the off-kilter way that Shepherd played every time he featured on Soundgarden tunes, it’s not surprising what Cobain saw in him.
And according to biographer Corbin Reiff, there was a good chance that Cobain would have asked Shepherd to join the band if he had found the time, saying, “I know [Kurt] had a lot of admiration for Chris and admiration for Soundgarden. Ben Shepherd, Soundgarden’s bassist, toured with Nirvana. He was supposed to be the second guitarist, but he just ended up working the merch table for a while, and he was really close friends with them.”
That said, it does seem like everything worked out for the best when Shepherd got the gig in Soundgarden. When looking at his bass style, he was the perfect person to replace Yamamoto, and given his nature of playing more hard rock-style riffs, there’s a good chance that Nirvana would have never let him feature that sick breakdown that he played on ‘Spoonman’ or the strange way that he played around with the chords on the song ‘Fell on Black Days’.
Further reading: From The Vault
And how the hell would he be able to work off of the rest of the band members as well? Dave Grohl could practically work with anyone that he could find, but when it comes to Krist Novoselic’s bass tone, it was bound to be difficult trying to figure out what to layer over top of that. It helped that Cobain played straight power chords, but if you were going to develop an idea, Shepherd was going to need more information to get his point across.
There was a lot more that Shepherd had to offer, but if he managed to join Nirvana, he was only going to be a piece in the larger story of Cobain’s life. He had the potential to go much further than anyone else had ever gone, and while Shepherd loved to be a team player and share his love for everything that his friends were doing, there’s a good chance that he would have had to deal with a lot of pain if he had known that Nirvana weren’t long for this world.
