Dave Grohl teamed up with Matt Wilkinson on Apple Music to chat over the time period from his early days in Nirvana to the release of the first Foo Fighters album.
The interview airs on Saturday (July 4), exactly 25 years after the debut of the self-titled Foo Fighters album (July 4, 1995).
Grohl admitted that when he joined Nirvana and they became “really huge very quickly,” he was still unsure that he wasn’t good enough for the band.
“Well I mean I joined Nirvana, I was your fifth drummer, right?” he said. “They had had a drummer team before me and some of them were more, I don’t know, more in the band than others. So when I joined the band, I didn’t know Krist and Kurt at all.” When we met and started playing, it was clear that when we got together to play it worked really well, and we sounded like what most people know now to sound like Nirvana. We sound like this. But you only know these people and then it wasn’t long. “
“It was almost exactly a year from the time I joined the era Never mind he left. And then once it came out, it was like things happened so fast. The band got really big. But every band he had been in before was with friends he had known for a long time. And then there is some security in that. So when you join a band where you don’t know anyone and you are starting to know yourself, and it sounds great when you play music, you are starting to know yourself, but there is no deep personal connection. And then the band gets really huge really fast. You are so nervous that you will be fired or will stop. I didn’t want to be fired basically. And so he was doing everything possible to prevent this from disappearing. So there was this real insecurity that he had: ‘I’m not good enough. They’re going to find someone else, ‘”Grohl explained.
After Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994, Grohl was in mourning and, for a time, he wasn’t sure about going back to music.
“I started getting calls from people asking if I wanted to play drums with them or join another band, and I just didn’t see that happen at the time,” he said. “And he always came home from touring and recording songs by himself, but that feeling was gone. I really didn’t want to write or even listen to music, much less join a band and play one. So it was weird, when your life has just been pulled out from under you like that. I don’t think anyone really thought much about what came next. You were trapped in that moment. So eventually, I just got up off the couch and thought, ‘Okay, I’ve always loved playing music and I’ve always loved writing and recording songs for myself, so I feel like I need to do it by myself. ”
Looking back when the first Foo Fighters album came to fruition, Grohl says he would give his Nirvana bandmates credit for that.
“I would dedicate [that album] Krist and Kurt because even to this day, the Nirvana experience was probably … I mean I don’t mean … I have children. I cannot say that it is the most important event in my whole life. But it’s safe to say that we wouldn’t be here right now talking about this if it wasn’t for my time in Nirvana. And I had learned many lessons from Kurt, I learned many lessons from Krist. It was a great honor to be in that band and it was very devastating when it ended. But we have that catalog of music that we made together and that experience changed not only us, but much of the world in which we live. So I think that was probably the most formative period of my life. I went from being a messy teenager to being in this huge band. And then it all ends and he tries to build life again with the lessons I learned through all of that, “he said.
Grohl continued: “There are some journalists who say, ‘How dare you play music after Nirvana?’ I’m like, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ We try hard to get it right. Instead of jumping on a tour that was opening for a massive band of sand at the time, we thought, ‘Okay, let’s get in the truck and do it like we always have. Let’s start as we always started, ‘and that seemed comfortable to us. And when doing any promotion or press, we didn’t make a video from the beginning, we tried to moderate all that because it was scary in some way. I knew I was walking on the board on this. I knew it was going to be examined and I knew there would be comparisons and things like that. And yes, I mean it was tough. But it wasn’t that difficult. I mean it was like someone screwed you up, just say, “F — you, mother.”
Watch some preview clips below and listen to the full interview on Saturday at 7am PST here, or order it later on demand on Apple Music.
