E-Mail This Article to a Friend State of Nirvana (continued)

St. Thomas: What about Dave?

Cobain: Dave Grohl is the most well-adjusted boy I’ve ever met. Totally easy to get along with. Everyone loves him. He plays drums better than any drummer I’ve ever heard. He’s great.

Novoselic: Yeah, he’s great. He’s the backbone of the band.

St. Thomas: When did Dave join the band?

Grohl: In 1990 we [Scream] were on tour, doing a tour of America, and we were halfway through the tour in Los Angeles —

Novoselic: Their tour made it as far as Los Angeles and their bass player flew the coop.

Grohl: We got stranded there, and there wasn’t really much to do. So I called up my friend Buzz Osbourne — we’ve known each other for a while. He’s actually the one that introduced [Kurt and Chris] to each other, and he ended up introducing me to the band. And he just said that they were looking for a drummer and that they had seen Scream play in San Francisco and thought that I was really good.

Novoselic: We were just blown away by the whole band, especially the drummer. The drummer was really good.

Grohl: The strangest thing about it was moving up to the Northwest with no money — nothing. I mean I still only have a bag of clothes and my drums. I bought a bed a couple months ago, so I have a room with this futon on the floor. But I don’t have anything, so I didn’t really have to move. Just moving up, leaving your best friends in the entire world. I mean, I didn’t know Chris or Kurt, and I ended up living on Kurt’s couch for eight months. I had every misconception that everyone else had. I thought Seattle was just flannel shirts and blurry Charles Peterson photos.

Cobain: I lived in his little crackerbox hell-hole of an apartment — and I’m quite a slob, as you can see. It was kind of hard for two people to live in this really small apartment with one bedroom and garbage all over the floor, a lot of corn-dog sticks laying around.

Grohl: In a month or two, we were out in the backyard shooting stuff with BB guns and breaking windows at the Lottery building across the street. It was fun. That apartment was really great.

Cobain: It was nice, because Dave turns out to be just as much of a slob as me.

Grohl: We had been practicing in this really weird practice space. This man built a studio in his barn in his backyard. He was in this really bad, like, Howard Johnson’s lounge band. Everything was carpeted with this brown shag carpet — he even had stage lights in there — and he had this massive PA that he just did not know how to use. You’d turn it on, and there’d be this huge hiss. We were practicing a lot; we were writing a lot of material. We’d write songs, they were great for two weeks — "Oh my God, this is the best song ever" — and we’d forget them. So then we said, "Okay, we’ll put them on cassette." So we started recording them on this boom-box thing, and we’d lose the cassettes. I mean we wrote so much material that we just forgot about it, and once in a while we’d pull one out and turn it around.

Novoselic: There were some labels we were impressed by, but we thought DGC would be the best for us.

St. Thomas: Was one of the main reasons because of Sonic Youth?

Novoselic: Yeah, we knew Sonic Youth were happy on there, and we always loved and respected Sonic Youth. And there were all these rumors. Even in Spin magazine, it was printed that we got $750,000, and we didn’t even get a quarter of that. Instead of going for the big dough, we went for the strong contract. More freedom, more percentage points on the record. There’re a lot of clauses that are on there that are in our favor. Now if our record had bombed, we would have kicked ourselves in the butt and said, "Man, we should have took the cash." But we were not in it for the money.

St. Thomas: How did the Nevermind cover come about?

Cobain: One day Dave and I were sitting around watching a documentary about babies being born underwater, and we thought that was a really neat image. Then when we got a picture of a baby underwater, I thought it would look nice with a fish hook and a dollar bill on it. So the image was born.

St. Thomas: What about the back?

Cobain: It’s just a rubber monkey I’ve had for years, and I took that picture.

It’s a collage I made many years ago. I got these pictures of beef from a supermarket poster and cut them out and made a mountain of beef. And then put Dante’s people being thrown into Hell climbing all over it. That’s pretty much it. If you look real close, there’s a picture of Kiss in the back, standing on a slab of beef.

If Courtney and I have a child, we’re thinking of naming it Dante. Dante Conjunctivitis Cobain.

St. Thomas: Why did you pick Butch to produce?

Novoselic: We worked with Butch Vig in the springtime of 1990 when we did that demo I mentioned earlier. He was just easy to work with, laid back, really attentive to what’s going on. He works hard, but he doesn’t work the band hard.

Grohl: It was about time that the band recorded something.

Cobain: The studio was called Sound City, the board and the room were really old. The board was from the early ‘70s.

Novoselic: All the dinosaurs have recorded there. Fleetwood Mac, Cheap Trick. . . .

Cobain: There’s nothing more disgusting than the late-’80s/early-’90s slick sound. You just can’t escape it, no matter how retro and old you try to be, no matter what kind of equipment you use, you still can’t help but sound new.

Novoselic: We got a warm sound out of that place. It had been two years since Bleach. It had been a while since the band had gone in and recorded a full LP, so it was more like "Wow, okay, we’re in the studio. Let’s just get this done, let’s just do it."

We made the record we wanted to make. We didn’t want to make the number-one record. We didn’t want to make a hit record. It would have been the same record if it was on Sub Pop. It probably wouldn’t have sounded as slick. But I hear the song on the radio, next to some other total mainstream music, and it sounds a lot rawer. That’s what we wanted to do. It was like a fine line. It’s a major-label release, but make it raw enough to where we didn’t totally compromise.

Grohl: There wasn’t really any massive analyzing. It was like, let’s put down the drums and bass, and then put down the guitar, and then eventually get to the vocals. Just that kind of approach. Like, okay, let’s just get it done. We didn’t spend six months and five million dollars on it. We tried to hash it out as quickly as possible.

St. Thomas: There are a lot of gun references on Nevermind. I’m thinking of "Come as You Are," "Smells Like Teen Spirit," and "In Bloom."

Cobain: I went shooting with my friend Dylan a few months ago. God, it was weird because I’d never shot a gun before, and it reminded me of how totally violent those things are. They could rip right through you. I guess I’m opposed to guns, just because they’re a violent tool. But then, so are butter knives. I’m not one of those anti-NRA people. Obviously, I don’t like rednecks. I don’t like macho men. I don’t like abusive people. I guess that’s what that song ["In Bloom"] is about. It’s an attack on them.

St. Thomas: What about "Smells Like Teen Spirit"?

Cobain: This friend of mine and I were goofing around in my house one night. We were kinda drunk, and we were writing graffiti all over the walls of my house. She wrote, "Kurt smells like Teen Spirit." And earlier on we were kinda having this discussion on teen revolution and stuff like that. So I took that as a compliment. I thought she was saying I was a person who could inspire. I thought it was a nice little title. And it turns out she just meant that I smelled like the deodorant. I didn’t even know that deodorant existed until after the song was written.

Grohl: My father says this to me: "I know why you guys have sold so many records. The video shows a bunch of kids trashing a gymnasium." And I mean, that sort of works. "Nirvana: spokesmen of the Lost Generation. They’re telling you to go out and destroy your local gymnasium." I don’t see it that way. I don’t want the responsibility of being a spokesman for anything. I can barely hold my own. I guess it’s flattering. And I guess it’s great that it actually gives people a feeling of breaking out and telling anyone and anything just to fuck off.

St. Thomas: What about "Come as You Are"?

Cobain: The lines in the song are really contradictory. One after another, they’re kind of a rebuttal of each line. It’s kind of confusing, I guess. It’s just about people and what they’re expected to act like.

St. Thomas: And "Something in the Way"?

Cobain: That song wasn’t even written until a week before we went into the studio. And I knew I wanted cello on it, but after all the music was recorded for it we had kind of forgotten about putting cello on it. We had one more day in the studio and we decided, "Oh geez, we should try to hire a cellist, and put something in." We were at a party, and we were asking some of our friends if they had any friends who played cello. And it just so happened one of our best friends in LA plays cello. He came up with something right away. It just fell like dominoes. He couldn’t play the notes perfectly, so we had to run it through the computer and bend the notes, the pitch of it, to make it sound okay.

St. Thomas: Where did the so-called hidden track "Endless, Nameless" come from?

Grohl: There were songs on the record, and then we had this eight-minute-long noise thing.

St. Thomas: But it wasn’t on the first pressing.

Grohl: No, because it kinda got screwed up, but we made sure it was on the rest of the pressings.