News The Foo Fighters album fans “resented” Dave Grohl for
For a brief moment in 1994, it felt like rock and roll had officially died. Although the genre had gone through a creative rebirth with Kurt Cobain leading Nirvana into the next decade, his death left a massive void in the rock world that no one would have been able to recover from. While Dave Grohl may have risen like a phoenix from the ashes, he admitted that one of his most celebrated works with Foo Fighters got as much scorn as it did praise.
In the wake of Cobain’s death, Grohl wasn’t sure where he would go next. When talking about that time, Grohl remembered wanting to get as far away from music as possible, thinking it would only remind him of the pain that came with his friend’s passing. Once he saw a man on the other side of the world wearing a Kurt Cobain shirt, the drummer knew that he would either have to pick himself up on his own or continue wallowing for the rest of his life.
Rather than try to continue finding gigs as a drummer, Grohl decided to take a handful of his favourite songs and record them on a cassette at a studio a few miles up the road from his house. Much of the demos would become the foundation for the first Foo Fighters record, with the rest of the band being brought in later to fill out the rest of the band on the road.
Even though Grohl also had the opportunity to play with Tom Petty on Saturday Night Live, he knew that he would feel creatively fulfilled if he worked on achieving his dreams of being a rock star. As he took to the road, Grohl found himself dodging just as many haters as supporters.
Instead of playing into his celebrity status, the band’s inaugural tours saw Grohl playing alongside giants of the punk rock underground, supporting Mike Watt of Minutemen fame and Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder, touring with his side project, Hovercraft. As much fun as Grohl may have had touring the club circuit, he realised how many people hated him for starting another band.
When talking about those early years in the documentary Back and Forth, Grohl remembered how much hostility was thrown at him by old Nirvana fans, saying, “There were people who really resented me for starting another band. Like, ‘How dare you fucking start another band?’. A lot of people would tell me, ‘Why would you continue to make music that sounds like Nirvana?’. I was like, ‘What do you mean? Like loud guitars and melodies and cymbals crashing and big-ass drums?’. That’s what I do, I was in that band, what do you want me to do, fucking make a reggae record?”
Even though Grohl’s music stood out as more uptempo than his old outfit’s at times, the spectre of Cobain proceeded to follow him around. During the various press junkets for the album, Grohl often had to fend off questions about Nirvana, with many outlets asking him if any of the songs from the record had to do with Kurt Cobain.
As time went on, though, Grohl would establish as a sonic force to be reckoned with, taking the basis of the grunge sound and bringing it into stadiums with singalong choruses like ‘Monkey Wrench’ and ‘Everlong’. Grohl may have had to try and run away from Nirvana’s legacy as fast as he could, but that initial resentment transformed him from the former drummer of Nirvana to one of the greatest living legends in rock and roll today.
