It’s been almost 33 years since Dave Grohl joined Nirvana. Back in 1990, Grohl played his first-ever show with Kurt Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic at Olympia, Washington’s North Shore Surf Club — and recently rediscovered footage of the show still holds up.
At Nirvana’s first show with Grohl, the band played through Nevermind tracks like “In Bloom,” “Stay Away,” and “Breed,” and Bleach‘s “About a Girl,” “Floyd the Barber,” “Negative Creep,” “School” — and during the encore — “Scoff” and “Love Buzz.”
Back in 2018, Grohl reflected on joining Nirvana in an interview with VisitSeattle, where he explained how he ended up in Emerald City. After Grohl visited for the first time while on tour with his then-band Scream, he heard Nirvana was in search of a drummer and they were interested in him after seeing him perform live. He ended up flying out to Seattle to meet Cobain and Novoselic. “I remember getting off the plane, and Krist and Kurt meeting me at baggage claim,” Grohl said. “It was like having the children of the corn pick you up from the airport.”
He then got to see Nirvana perform live with a different drummer and recalled, “[It was] trailer park kids with greasy long hair wearing clothes that they bought at the Salvation Army. There were flannels. I still dress like the kids I saw at the gig that night,” said Grohl, who adds, “It already felt like there was some sort of movement, but it was unintentional.”
“I’m happy that I got to spend those few years in Seattle where the city just exploded,” Grohl said. “The experiences that I had at that age, which is a really impressionable age, shaped so much about the person that I am now.”
Novoselic once said that he and Cobain knew immediately Grohl was Nirvana’s drummer. “We knew within two minutes that he was the right drummer,” Novoselic told Michael Azerrad for the band’s biography Come As You Are, per Ultimate Classic Rock. “He was a hard hitter. He was really dynamic. He was so bright, so hot, so vital. He rocked.”
After Cobain’s death by suicide on April 5, 1994, Grohl worked on new music in an attempt to process everything. That became Foo Fighters’ first album in 1995.
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Grohl’s Foo Fighters is releasing a new album June 2 — their 11th full-length studio release, But Here We Are, which will be their first since the death of drummer Taylor Hawkins last year. A press release calls But Here We Are a “brutally honest and emotionally raw response to everything Foo Fighters endured over the last year,” as well as a “testament to the healing powers of music, friendship and family.”