Grohl Unleashes Emotions As A Foo Fighter Singer Talks About His Growth Since Demise Of Nirvana

To appreciate how fulfilled David Grohl is today the man who wrote, sang and played nearly every note on one of the most acclaimed rock albums of 1995, “Foo Fighters” is to understand how empty he felt in April 1994.

That month, Grohl’s band mate and friend in Nirvana, Kurt Cobain, killed himself. And throughout the bleak summer that followed, the Nirvana drummer wondered if he would ever play music again. It was a private struggle, however, because in the media saturation that followed Cobain’s death, the three surviving members of Nirvana - drummer Grohl, bassist Krist Novoselic, guitarist Pat Smear - were conspicuous by their silence.

Now that “Foo Fighters” has gone on to sell nearly a million copies, and the band of the same name - singer and guitarist Grohl, Smear, bassist Nate Mendel and drummer William Goldsmith - has gelled into the hottest concert ticket of the spring, Grohl is finally addressing what happened in the last two years.

In a recent interview, Grohl, 27, described how, after Cobain died, he would spend weeks at home in Seattle too numb to do anything, spending his time “watching ‘Jenny Jones’ in the morning, drinking coffee at noon and closeting myself in the house at night.”

“Right away, people were asking me to join their bands,” Grohl says. “It was so presumptuous… . I was so confused, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. Every time I tried something, I’d have immediate second thoughts. I couldn’t go full-on into anything.”

While the world clamored for Cobain gossip, the Nirvana survivors retreated into private mourning and gritted their teeth. Their views on the sudden demise of their band remain closely guarded.

“Practically every time something’s written about it, Krist and I will get on the phone and scream,” Grohl says. “But you have to realize that one of the things that Nirvana represented was true soul and being a real human being. One of the things about the music that was so powerful was the honesty and the integrity. So why on Earth would anyone think we’d come out and change and join this tabloid circus mentality? I’ve made a pact that till the day I die, I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever tell anyone the way I feel about this. It’s no one’s … business. And I feel terrible about it, because I have as many unanswered questions as anyone else. But, c’est la vie.”

Grohl is a bright, cheerful conversationalist. But like Novoselic, who has emerged in the post-Nirvana guise of a political lobbyist fighting for artists’ free-speech rights in Washington state, he hardens when the death of one of his closest friends is broached.

“I’ve really changed my mind about a lot of things since Kurt died, about heroes and celebrities,” he says. “When it comes down to it, you’re talking about a human being. People try to ask me questions about Kurt in interviews and I say, ‘How long have I known you? I met you five minutes ago and I don’t know you. Say your best friend died and I met you five minutes ago, do you think I’m going to ask you about it, and then go tell everybody? You know, (expletive) you.”’

Grohl says he was able to cope by throwing himself into his music, recorded with producer Barrett Jones down the street from his house in Seattle in October 1994. He worked so quickly on recording vocals and overdubbing guitar, bass and drum parts that he had no time to feel sorry for himself, or anyone else for that matter.

“These 15 songs, you have to understand there was not too much soul-searching involved,” he says. “I wrote the lyrics really quickly, and the recording schedule did not allow for a lot of sitting around and brooding about things. It was quick, painless.”

If there’s a shortcoming on the “Foo Fighters” album, it is the slightness of some of the oblique lyrics. They read as if Grohl were determined to keep the Cobain-aholics from reading too much into them, and the singer also notes that most of the dozen songs that made the final cut on the album were written before Cobain killed himself.

Instead, the record’s emotional power comes from the music itself, the canny way in which Grohl’s boyish voice rides the rough currents of overdriven guitar and walloping drums. In the way it melds melody and mayhem, noise and nuance, the soft and the shattering, “Foo Fighters” evokes Nirvana. But Grohl does more than just sound like his old band, he evokes its brilliance with the way he packs pop hooks into every cranny of the arrangements. The music doesn’t just assault the senses, it’s bursting with so many well-executed ideas that it dazzles them.

“When Nirvana became popular, people would ask me (he adopts a pompous British accent), ‘What’s the recipe for this new kind of music?’ and I’d think, ‘Gee, haven’t you heard of Husker Du?”’ Grohl says. “To me it’s sort of natural, playing loud, fast, melodic pop music. That’s the kind of thing that I’ve always loved. I don’t want to go in and record a reggae album for the sake of not wanting to sound like the ‘loud, melodic pop’ of Nirvana. I mean, what else am I going to play? It’s the kind of music I’ve listened to since I was 12 years old.”

The 12-year-old Grohl, then living in Virginia, got his punk-rock baptism in the unlikeliest of locales - Evanston, Ill. Each summer the Grohls would visit relatives in the Chicago suburb, but the 1982 vacation had particularly far-reaching implications for the aspiring rock musician.

“I’d been in neighborhood bands playing Who, Zeppelin, Rolling Stones and Beatles songs,” Grohl says. “The only punk rock I had been exposed to was either on ‘Quincy’ or ‘CHiPS.’ So all of a sudden here comes my (15-year-old) cousin Tracey down the stairs and she’s got bondage pants on, and her hair was cut short and black and I was just blown away. She showed me her record collection, with hundreds of singles of bands I’d never heard of before, and fanzines. I was just amazed and intrigued by this underground network that you could join, and the intensity of the music that you could play along with. You didn’t have to be Eddie Van Halen to play along with a Bad Brains song.”

The same week, Tracey took young Grohl to see his first all-ages punk show - Naked Raygun and Rights of the Accused at Cubby Bear - and he was hooked. Still in his teens, Grohl answered an ad back home and was rewarded with his dream job: drummer for the legendary Washington, D.C., hard-core punk band Scream. He played and toured with them for five years until the group disbanded.

In 1990 he got the call from Nirvana, and instantly established that he wasn’t like all of the group’s other drummers, that is, a fill-in, a stop-gap or simply a problem. Though Grohl, Cobain and Novoselic instantly hit it off musically, with Grohl’s huge yet savvy rhythms and tireless energy pushing the group’s sound to a new plateau, the drummer had no inkling that the group’s 1991 “Nevermind” album would become one of rock’s milestones.

“I slept on Kurt’s floor for eight months before we actually went down to record ‘Nevermind,”’ Grohl says. “Three of those months we didn’t have a window in the living room, and this was during the winter. It was the first time ever in my life that I’d been so far away from anyone or anything that I knew.”

After “Nevermind” was recorded, he says, the group’s ambitions remained modest: “We wanted to not have to sell our equipment for food.”

The harsher and more adventurous 1993 release, “In Utero,” solidified Nirvana’s standing as a commercial and artistic force unlike any other this decade, and Cobain’s death ensured its myth even as it devastated those closest to him.

“I have difficult days, and I think sometimes life sucks,” Grohl says. “Sometimes there are nights when I question myself about what I’m trying to do here. There are nights when I think about going to trade school and becoming an arc welder or something. But in the end, playing rock music and being in a rock band are about the most fun things I can ever imagine doing. This is one of the few things in life that I have extreme passion for. There are obstacles everywhere, but you have to climb over them.”

And there is satisfaction in that. Satisfaction in finding a band in which he insists he is not the leader, but a collaborator who happens to sing and play guitar. “The confidence I have is drawn from the power of the people I’m playing with,” he insists.

It is a feeling that has enabled him to, if not forget Nirvana and Kurt Cobain, at least set them to one side so his life could not only continue, but thrive.

“As proud as I am to be associated with Nirvana, and a lot of times I wish it never ended, at the same time I have tried to disassociate myself from it,” he says. “Beyond being in Nirvana, the most difficult part of this is being seen as a musician rather than just as this drummer guy.”