When the end finally came, that cold, bloody day in April, a single blast from a 20-gauge Remington shotgun removing the top of Kurt’s head and what was left of his mind, Dave Grohl – no matter what he said later – was deeply shocked but no longer really surprised. How could he be? As Charles Cross says now, ‘He was Kurt Cobain’s roommate and at one point one of his best friends.’ By the end, though, ‘he’s an estranged band mate on a ship that’s gonna hit an iceberg and neither he nor anyone else can stop that from happening.’
The European tour at the start of 1994 had been one long cold turkey. Without the regular supply of smack that he could get in the States, Kurt had hooked up with one of those London-based ‘Doctor Feelgoods’ familiar to music and movie stars of a certain celebrity status, who loaded Kurt up with prescriptions for enough opiates and tranquilisers to get him through the three-month tour. But still Kurt wasn’t happy, fighting on the phone daily with Courtney, who was busy gearing up for the promotional campaign for the April release of the next Hole album, Live Through This. Falling out with Krist, whom he begged to let him cancel the dates, complaining of bad stomach pain and nausea, which Krist and Dave now routinely shrugged off, seeing it for what it was: Kurt’s endless yearning to retreat to some darkened room where he could obliterate himself on heroin.
Adding to his misery while he was on the road in Europe was that he was now convinced that Courtney was having an affair with Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins. He knew the two had been an item in the past, sensed that Courtney had never really got over Billy, and was freaked out to find the Smashing Pumpkins were doing four dates in London during the last week of February, and that Courtney had been on the guest list for them all. Not only had she missed Kurt’s twenty-seventh birthday on 20 February, but she was still in London for their second wedding anniversary four days later. As if to make Kurt even more paranoid, Courtney told him matter-of-factly that Billy had invited her to take a vacation in Paris with him. Stories would later emerge that Courtney had secretly gone with Billy to Paris, where the Pumpkins were booked to make an appearance on national TV, but these were later denied.
Whatever the truth, within days Kurt had called his lawyer in America and told her he wanted a divorce. He also found a German doctor willing to write him a medical note explaining he could no longer continue touring because of a mystery voice problem – finally getting his way when the next two weeks of European dates were cancelled. Dave and Krist, who knew exactly what kind of ‘voice problems’ Kurt was experiencing, flew home the next day. They knew when they weren’t wanted. Kurt had stopped hanging out with them anywhere but on stage long ago. Dave and Krist didn’t find Kurt funny any more. Not even on a good day. Pat still did. ‘That’s one reason Kurt liked Pat,’ says Charles Cross. They shared the same twisted sense of humour. ‘Kurt had a friendship and a kinship with him. Kurt never told me that personally but Courtney Love told me that. She said that towards the end of Nirvana, Kurt and Pat were closer than the other members of the band. Just based on that sense of humour.’ Now, though, Kurt made his position even more clear to the rest of the band, relieved to see Dave and Krist go home, but persuading the guitarist to travel with him to Rome where he had arranged to meet Courtney.
‘The longer things went on it seemed to get more and more personal,’ says Anton Brookes. ‘It just seemed to be more them two – Kurt and Courtney – against everybody else. I remember sometimes I’d been out with them and stood with management and the tour manager, and they’d go: “Do you mind going to get Kurt?”’
By the time Courtney, with baby Frances in tow, arrived at the luxurious Excelsior hotel in Rome on 3 March, he had apparently changed his mind about leaving her and bought her several reconciliatory gifts, including a dozen red roses, some rosary beads from the Vatican, a pair of three-carat diamond earrings – and a bottle of the heavy-duty tranquilliser Rohypnol (‘roofies’, in drug parlance, which would become more famous as a ‘date-rape drug’) from one of his London doctor’s special prescriptions. But when Courtney said she was too tired that night to make love, for Kurt it was the last straw.
‘Even if I wasn’t in the mood I should have laid there for him,’ Courtney later confessed to an American writer, David Frieke. ‘All he needed was to get laid.’ Too late. When she awoke the next morning, she found her husband’s body unconscious on the floor, dozens of empty Rohypnol blister packs and over $1000 in cash by his side, and in his left hand a suicide note.
According to Charles Cross, who would become Cobain’s most authoritative biographer, and who knew him well from his days as editor of Seattle’s best-known local music paper, The Rocket, Kurt had tried to get clean in the weeks leading up to the European tour by checking into the Canyon Ranch, a luxury American health spa and wellness centre. There he had been told by one of the centre’s physicians, Dr Baker, that the time had come for him to continue his addictions – that is, allow himself to die – or get clean, i.e. choose to live. A dead-eyed Kurt had replied: ‘You mean, like Hamlet?’ referring to Shakespeare’s tragic hero.
In his Rome suicide note, Kurt wrote: ‘Dr Baker says that, like Hamlet, I have to choose between life and death. I’m choosing death.’ According to Cross, the rest of the note made reference to the fact that ‘Courtney didn’t love him any more’, accusing her of sleeping with Billy Corgan. Over the coming weeks Kurt and Nirvana’s management company, Gold Mountain, would all deny it was a suicide note and that Kurt’s overdose had merely been accidental – like all his other recent overdoses. But given what happened just five weeks later, that now seems an absurd claim.
Rushed by ambulance to the nearby Umberto Polyclinic Hospital, Kurt had his stomach pumped of what was later reckoned to be over 50 of the pale green Rohypnol pills and at least half a bottle of champagne. But he remained in a coma, doctors warning Courtney that he might die, or, worse, wake up a vegetable, or, who knows, make a full recovery. They would have to wait and see. ‘He was dead, legally dead,’ Courtney later claimed. Kurt was then moved to the Rome American Hospital, where he very slowly over the next 24 hours regained consciousness, his first words to Courtney, upon partially awakening: ‘Fuck you.’
Dave, like Krist, now back home in Seattle, claims the first he knew of what had happened was when he turned on the TV and ‘Kurt was being wheeled away in an ambulance.’ Years later, being interviewed for the Foo Fighters’ film documentary, Back and Forth, Dave appeared to buy into the accidental-overdose theory. Kurt, he reckoned, had ‘just made a mistake’, took some pills, drank some vintage champagne, and got carried away with the razzmatazz of being in Rome. But that was Dave in 17-years-later, nicest-man-in-rock mode. Dave who’d by then had so many legal battles with Courtney he was extremely wary of inadvertently opening up any more cans of worms with her name on them.
The Dave Grohl of 1994, however, was frankly appalled, freaked out, ashamed and worried for his own future. Like, what the fuck, dude? We gave you the time off, now this? The day the news broke, CNN actually interrupted their regular broadcast to announce that the Nirvana singer had in fact died in a Rome hospital. Krist got a phone call at home from Gold Mountain confirming it. But that news proved false. Instead, Kurt flew home a week later with his wife and child, to his new $1.1 million mansion in Lake Washington, the most beautiful and exclusive part of Seattle – and a new kind of drug-induced hell.
The next few weeks found Kurt Cobain walking around as though he was already dead. He refused to return to Europe, where promoters had hoped Nirvana would play some rescheduled shows. He even turned down a reported $8 million for Nirvana to headline that summer’s Lollapalooza tour. He didn’t want to rehearse or talk to Dave or Krist. As far as he and Dave were concerned, ‘The band was broken up,’ said Krist. ‘It had sort of split off and it just got really weird,’ said Dave. ‘I don’t do drugs [and] there were drugs around and there was like the people that did the drugs and the people that didn’t do the drugs. And I didn’t do the drugs and so I was just out of that world.’ When you’re a junkie, he shrugged, ‘You don’t care about anyone but yourself, at that point. That’s how it works.’
When Courtney banned drugs from the house, Kurt checked into a sleazy motel and didn’t even bother to use an assumed name. Just paid in cash and began shooting up again. Back at the Lake Washington mansion, his fights with Courtney became so out of control that police were summoned to the place more than once. The second time was because he had locked himself in one of the bathrooms with a load of guns, revolvers and shotguns and was threatening to kill himself. Courtney called 911 but Kurt put on his simple sweet face when they arrived, promising them he was not suicidal. ‘He was so fucked up,’ Krist would tell Charles Cross. ‘He just wanted to die.’
There was an attempt at ‘intervention’ by a professional rehab counsellor just two weeks before Kurt finally did what he’d been threatening to. Courtney and several people from his record company and management office were there. Pat Smear was also there, the only member of Nirvana to be invited. Kurt ranted and raved and called them all hypocrites. At the end of it, Courtney got into a car, taking her to the airport and from there to LA, where she, too, was checking into rehab. The next day Kurt’s mother, Wendy, made plans to fly down with Frances, so the toddler could be near her mother. And Kurt dived off the ledge into the big black hole below, never to return.
When news broke on the morning of 8 April 1994 that Kurt Cobain, singer of grunge superstars Nirvana, had committed suicide at his home in Seattle, loosing off a 20-gauge shotgun into his face, once again Dave Grohl was deeply shocked but very fucking far from surprised. ‘I knew that he had gone,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t know how to feel.’ He added: ‘I don’t think Kurt wanted to become a huge fucking rock star, and I don’t think he could handle how complicated it had all become.’
Seeing the shitstorm that was coming – the endless clichéd headlines written by people who had never even heard a Nirvana record: ‘Tortured Grunge Icon’, ‘Slacker Poet’ or, most frequent and appalling of all, ‘Voice of a Generation’ – Dave dropped right out of sight of the media. The day Kurt died, not knowing what else to do, he and his partner, Jenny, and several other close friends had gone over to Krist’s house. ‘It was such a weird time. We were kids. So it was strange … I couldn’t listen to music. I couldn’t listen to Nirvana. I’d turn on the radio and hear “All by Myself” [by Eric Carmen] and start crying. It was terrible.’
A couple of days later he simply pulled down the blinds and yanked up the drawbridge. Ran away and hid. Who could possibly blame him? Not even Dave though could imagine the endless river of shit he and Krist would be forced to wade through as the years went by and more and more stories emerged about Kurt’s last days, how he’d hated Dave by the end, for daring to speak out about his appalling drug abuse, how he’d even fallen out with Krist, screaming in his face before running off to his drug dealer’s apartment; more and more theories about how Kurt was murdered, by Courtney, by drug dealers, by accident, that he would never have killed himself, even though he’d both threatened and attempted it repeatedly in the weeks leading up to that final, successful attempt; more and more lies about what really was going on by the end of his life and what it really meant for the rest of us. People say it was the same when Jimi Hendrix died, when Jim Morrison died, when Elvis Presley and Sid Vicious died. And so it was in terms of conspiracy theories, of friends and lovers and band mates and fans left behind to wonder what really happened that night – because it was always night – and why?
In the case of Kurt Cobain though, unlike those other mythological rock stars, his death was a deliberate, pre-planned, suicide – the saddest, most tragic, most unforgivable kind of death, and the hardest to understand. Hence, to a large extent, the endless crazy stories that swirl around it to this day. Hence, too, the feelings of anger and betrayal that, in 1994, bedevilled those closest to Kurt in his lifetime, whom he’d now abandoned without even a goodbye.
That last year, says Charles Cross, ‘there were times where the joy was gone. Then there were other times, even in the last few months of Nirvana’s career, where there was an incredible amount of joy. I mean everybody loved In Utero. Dave loved it. He loved to play those songs. They were much more emotionally rewarding for him to play, the In Utero songs, than the Nevermind songs had been. Some of which, you know, the story that Dave told me repeatedly, on Nevermind there are some of those songs where he felt – I don’t want to say fraudulent, but he was playing parts that Chad Channing had created.
‘But there’s a point where once the band became sort of Kurt’s dictatorship, after the publishing deals were renegotiated and it was clear that it was gonna be Kurt calling all the shots, Dave shifted in the band. Both financially, emotionally, and I think things shifted in their friendship. They still had a friendship. They still had a kinship but, you know, Kurt at that point was a train wreck headed towards a wall and nobody could stop him, whether you were his band mate or his friend. Whatever role Dave had, whatever role Krist Novoselic had, which was always far deeper and a longer connection to Kurt, nobody could stop it.
‘So, yeah, that last year was hell for everybody. The relationships were already frayed … [When Kurt died] essentially Nirvana was inches away from being broken up anyway. If Kurt would have lived or not, Nirvana was in all likelihood over. What the band had been was already lost. Even before Kurt died, the Nirvana that people knew and loved on Nevermind was already gone. And Dave sort of knew that and in some sense that’s the beginning of Dave’s solo [career].’
Even before Kurt had died, says Anton, ‘The general feeling was that Nirvana had burnt out … It seemed like every other month or week there was a new “Kurt’s dead” rumour. I remember [the day Kurt died] all too well – it was a Friday afternoon, I was sat in the office and it just became a flood of calls. In your heart of hearts you’re still clinging on to that hope that everything will be fine, it’s just another false alarm. And then their tour manager called me up to say: “He’s dead.”’
Chrissy Shannon, who the same week had left behind the publicity department at DGC to work in A&R, was still tracked down by several journalists looking for a quote. ‘One of them asked me how I felt about it and I couldn’t believe they were asking us such stupid shit … I was devastated and, to make it worse, people kept printing that he couldn’t handle the fame and I had done my best to get him there, so I actually felt really guilty for a while!
‘Was he murdered? I don’t think so. I think he was miserable and in a lot of pain and tied to a crazy woman and he took what he thought would be the fastest route out. I know he loved Frances and I have a sad feeling that due to his bleak outlook on the world and his addiction he felt like he could only be a bad dad. But, who knows, I’ve also read that he had contacted a divorce lawyer and had been talking to Michael Stipe about working on something together in the future…’
No one would ever really know. Not even the other members of Nirvana. Krist was so devastated, not just by the suicide, but by the whole journey to the end of night, that he would never work full-time in a band again. According to Pat Smear, ‘Kurt passed on and my life went back to how it was. I went inward and was a hermit for a while. I didn’t play at all until Dave [Grohl] came by – he was in LA – and dropped off a tape. It was the Foo Fighters album. It was the first thing that got me interested in music again.’
But that was months later and in the immediate ghastly aftermath of Kurt’s death, Dave found himself in a place he’d never been before: a strange, shadow world where for a long time ‘nothing made sense’. Nor would it ever again. Not when he would look back on his time in Nirvana. It’s the main reason why he was not prepared to indulge in those games of ‘what if?’ that journalists are so fond of. Dave didn’t know why Kurt killed himself any more than you did, not really. Dave didn’t know what would have become of Nirvana had Kurt not blown his brains out, other than to recall how the band had in reality already fallen apart long before Kurt took it upon himself to make it official. Like the rest of us, Dave could only guess. The only thing he knew for sure when it happened was that he had been out on his own for a long time before that. That, really, his plans had never changed. Would never change. Another Dave – Bowie – had once famously sung of kicking it in the head when he was 25. But that was never this Dave’s trip. He still saw a future for himself. Of course he did. Why wouldn’t he? Unlike Kurt, who always agonised over silly shit like what the cool punk crowd made of his rock star success, Dave embraced it. As he laughingly told Rolling Stone, ‘I was lucky, because I went back to Washington, DC, and had all my heroes tell me they were proud that I became a fucking corporate rock star! That weight was lifted from my shoulders, right out of the game. I never worried about that.’
Dave now strove hard to put as much distance between himself and the tragic mess of Kurt’s life and disgusting death as he could. He refused to visit the funeral home where Kurt’s body lay prior to his cremation, and made plans instead to escape home to Virginia, and so-called normality. His two and a half years being the drummer in Nirvana had been the longest, hardest, most extraordinary and rewarding of his life. But now Kurt was dead, the dream was over, only the nightmare remained. What was he to do?
The morning after Kurt’s funeral, Dave would later recall, ‘I woke up and I thought, “Holy shit, he’s gone and I’m still here. I get to wake up and he’s gone.” And then my life completely changed for ever.’ As if to reaffirm his own contract with life, to show to himself how much he still wanted to live, Dave married his long-term girlfriend, Jennifer Youngblood.
He wondered if he should reactivate his long-ago teenage dream of becoming a simple session musician, a hired gun paid top dollar to come in and do his sweet thing. And, at first, that’s what he seemed to be gravitating towards. Having played drums on the soundtrack to a new Beatles-related movie, Backbeat, which was released with unerring inappropriateness – at least for Dave – the week following Kurt’s suicide, later that year he agreed to act as Tom Petty’s drummer for an appearance on Saturday Night Live. It was no secret that Petty was so impressed – and Dave so at ease with the rest of the band, so different to the febrile atmosphere surrounding Nirvana even at the best of times – that an invitation to sign on full-time was issued and contemplated for several days. Before Dave finally said no. Then wondered what the hell he’d done.
‘It turned out that [Tom] and the other guys in the band were really big Nirvana fans,’ Dave remembered. ‘So then I was worried that maybe they had watched MTV Unplugged and they didn’t know that I actually played really loud. I agreed to do it, of course, because Tom Petty is an incredible guy, and spent a week with them rehearsing and played on the television show. Within that week and a half, they had managed to make me feel like I was part of the band. And it was the first time I had that feeling since Nirvana. It was just awesome, to have friends you can play music with, to be happy with, you know, to go with to the bar and talk and then go back and play some more. It was just amazing. I was really this close to doing it.’
There was also talk around the same time of Dave joining Pearl Jam. Dave bridled at the rumours but never actually denied them. Same deal with more loose talk about a collaboration between Dave and former Misfits frontman Glen Danzig, replacing Chuck Biscuits, whom, ironically, Dave had revered as a young drummer. Ultimately, said Dave, ‘I didn’t want to be a drummer for hire at twenty-five. By the time I was forty I would’ve been on the Jay Leno show. I was really torn.’ But Dave was already looking beyond that, having his own big ideas. ‘It was play drums with Tom or do something I had never done before. I thought I might as well try something new while I’m young.’
That something new would entail going back and redoing something old. Back in 1990, not long after he’d joined Nirvana, Dave had hooked up again with his friend Barrett Jones to record – ‘for fun!’ – a six-track demo in Barrett’s eight-track studio. These were tracks all written solely by Dave, with Dave playing all the instruments – including the original version of ‘Just Another Story about Skeeter Thompson’. The following summer, he went into WGNS Studios and recorded four more tracks. Again, ostensibly ‘for fun’, though it’s impossible now not to look back on these sessions as Dave’s way of doing something on his own without the extra pressure of thinking they might be of any use to Nirvana.
When the combined cassette tape found its way into the hands of fellow Washington-based indie rocker and arts activist Jenny Toomey, she suggested releasing it on her own small independent label, Simple Machines. By now, Nirvana had hit the big time and Dave agreed on the proviso it only came out as a cassette tape, and absolutely not under his own name, but that of Late!, a name chosen, he said, ‘because I’m an idiot and I thought it would be funny to say to everybody, “Sorry, we’re Late!”’ Titled Pocketwatch, what’s most striking about these tracks now is both the similarity to Nirvana – the signature downtuned guitars and rocket-fuelled drums and deadpan vocals on rockers like ‘Petrol CB’, as well as the same lo-fi, cigarette-lit ballads on tracks like ‘Friend of a Friend’ – and the future echo of how the Foo Fighters would sound, on slightly more sophisticated, melodic rockers like ‘Throwing Needles’.
‘I always tried to keep them sort of a secret,’ Dave would later explain. ‘I wouldn’t give people tapes. I always freaked out about that. I have the stupidest voice. I was totally embarrassed and scared that anyone would hear them. I just wanted to see how poppy or how noisy a song I could write. It was always just for fun. You could do anything you wanted.’ It stopped being ‘just for fun’, though, the day Kurt walked in on Dave at their shared Olympia apartment and caught him noodling around on a tape recorder with the vocals to another track destined for the Pocketwatch tape called ‘Colour Pictures of a Marigold’. ‘We sat there and played it a few times,’ Dave said. ‘I would do the high harmony, he would do the low harmony. It’s funny writing songs with other people – sitting face to face with someone, that’s another trip. I don’t know if he had ever done that either. It was like an uncomfortable blind date. “Oh, you sing too? Let’s harmonise together.”’
When Steve Albini also later heard the tape, he suggested they include ‘Marigold’, as the new Nirvana take was to be known, on the In Utero album. ‘I was terrified!’ laughed Dave. ‘No, no, wait! It was that famous joke: What’s the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band? “Hey, I wrote a song.”’
In the event, Nirvana would place the track on the B-side of the ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ single. ‘To be fair, “Marigold” is quite a throwaway song compared to a lot of the songs Dave has written now,’ Anton points out. ‘It didn’t really give much indication to his prowess as a songwriter.’ What is less well-known, according to Anton, was that both Kurt and Krist were aware that Dave had ‘written some other songs, which Kurt was gonna use on the next Nirvana album. Kurt wasn’t that keen on some of the lyrics. But he liked the songs. And I think that was part of Dave’s learning curve, as a lyricist. He had been behind the master’, and that informed everything he did next ‘as a musician, as a songwriter, as a lyricist and as a performer’.
In fact, some years after Kurt had died, Dave finally fessed up to the fact that he had played Kurt a handful of his own songs, two of which would actually end up on what became the first Foo Fighters album. Speaking on the Howard Stern Show in New York, he said: ‘I played him tapes of stuff and there were a few songs that Kurt liked a lot and wanted to turn into Nirvana songs but for some reason never did. The song “Alone + Easy Target”, Kurt really liked that song a lot. He liked the chorus a lot and I think he wanted to make the chorus into something.’ Hardly surprising, as the chorus sounds like a typical Nirvana move. ‘And then there’s a song called “Exhausted”, that apparently – he actually never said it to me – but he liked the song a lot. He just wanted to write his own lyrics to it. I think he was afraid to ask me if we could do the song but with his lyrics. Which I would have said, shit, sure. Fine. That would be great.’ Dave didn’t push it, though, because how could he when he was in a band with Kurt Cobain, now being hailed as being up there as a revolutionary songwriter alongside John Lennon and Bob Dylan. Nor did Dave exactly broadcast the fact that he was now writing his own songs outside of Nirvana, ‘because I was nervous about it’.
Charles Cross reveals, however, that the band, minus Kurt, actually rehearsed a selection of original Grohl material, at the final Nirvana recording session, in Seattle’s modest Robert Lang Studios, in January 1994, where the last known Nirvana track, ‘You Know You’re Right’, was also demoed. ‘I think there’s a seminal turning point here for Dave,’ he says now. ‘Nirvana has three days, four days, five days of sessions booked. Where they’re gonna begin working on new material. And Kurt does not show for the entire first day. So you have Novoselic, you have Grohl. I think Pat Smear was there. You have these guys just sitting around basically doing nothing. And they worked through some of Dave’s stuff. So that’s when Dave first worked on some of his material.
‘Then of course Robert Lang’s is where Dave [later on] does almost all of the recording of the first couple of [Foo Fighters] records … So that was really a huge turning point. Suddenly Kurt not showing up, Dave is both probably rethinking his career but they’re also just trying to fill time. And Dave began a friendship, a kinship, with Robert Lang, who ran that studio and out of that we get the first two Foo Fighters records, mixed and recorded.
‘If Kurt would have shown up and Nirvana would have continued, maybe it would have gone the other way. Maybe Dave’s solo project would have never have been released. Or maybe it would have been released on a tiny indie label, which was part of his concept for him putting it out. I very vividly remember him telling me he wanted to put it out as a cassette-only release on a tiny punk label. Then Kurt dies and suddenly the whole landscape changes.’
Pat Smear, who more than anybody in Nirvana would play a significant role in helping Dave find his next level as a songwriter also later recalled how, ‘There was one day, after a Nirvana practice, before we’d begun the In Utero tour, where we were sat in Dave’s car, and he played me some of his solo stuff. I guess they were early demos for what would be that first Foo Fighters album, but I can’t be sure. But they blew me away. These were amazing songs, and I remember saying to him, “Man, you should be doing these properly.”’
First though, says Anton, would come a great deal of soul searching. Dave knew it would not simply be a case of just carrying on as though nothing had happened. ‘Look at Krist, God bless him,’ sighs Anton. ‘Krist has never recovered from what happened to Nirvana. When [Kurt] died a big part of Krist died. And Dave could have gone the same way. But even though Dave was close to Kurt he wasn’t as close as Krist. They had grown up together. The three of them were brothers, to an extent. But Kurt and Krist were almost like twins.’
By the late summer of 1994, however, Dave Grohl had made up his mind. ‘Whatever he did next, he knew he was never gonna win,’ says Anton. ‘He knew because of the cult surrounding Kurt there would be people who said, “How dare Dave get on with his life and try and salvage something from the train wreck which was Nirvana.” But when Nirvana went down, Dave retrieved the black box and got on with his life. He licked his wounds and just got on with it. Every so often we’d just look at each other and go, “What the fuck happened?” Even now, you know? None of us really understand what happened and how it happened and how Kurt is dead and he’s not with us. All Dave knew was that, really, he had no choice, he had to carry on.’