Why Dave Grohl never considered Nirvana legends: “Half of me thinks it was just hype”
When they cement rock into musical history, Nirvana will probably be given a prime spot among the all-time greats. The world was coaxing by just fine listening to hair metal, then in one fell swoop, Kurt Cobain turned up with music that made every single teased-hair band seem irrelevant by comparison. We should probably credit Nirvana for helping us not take shit from plastic bands anymore, but Dave Grohl didn’t think that the band should be given their flowers too much.
Then again, it’s easy for Grohl to take Nirvana’s fame with a grain of salt. For all of the adulation that Cobain got in the guitar player/singer role, there was a good chance that you could pass by Grohl on the street in 1992 and not know that he was the dude from Nirvana. The man practically had his hair in his face the whole time he was onstage, so all photos may as well have shown Cousin It behind the drums.
If Grohl hadn’t worked in Nirvana, Cobain’s songs probably wouldn’t have been half as good as they were. Though the drumming legend usually credits original drummer Chad Channing for making songs like ‘In Bloom’ work so well, his performance usually elevated a song like ‘Territorial Pissings’ from a decent punk thrash about to one of the greatest songs in the grunge canon.
During their inception, Grohl wasn’t looking for any congratulations for his efforts, telling Classic Albums, “There was hardly any career ambition at all. We knew there was no way that we were going to be the biggest band in the world. We just wanted to play”.
Even when fans tend to define the words “alternative rock” to people, Grohl is still a bit hesitant to call his own band iconic, saying, “Every time you open a magazine about alternative music, there’s always pre-Nirvana and post-Nirvana, and I don’t get it. Half of me thinks that it was just hype. I was in the band, so I’m not going to sit around and say, ‘Yes, we were legends for a good reason’ because that’s exactly what we were against”.
For a band like Nirvana to arrive in the middle of the era of Poison and Whitesnake, the fact that they got by on just the power of their songs is enough to call them legendary. If you were to take a band like this, only known for wearing flannel shirts and making some pretty catchy songs, into a label meeting, they would have probably laughed their ass off if you said they were going to take over the world.
That’s the entire reason they worked. The whole point of the grunge movement was that you didn’t see any posing when Nirvana got onstage. You were seeing a band that looked like the kind of guys you went to high school with and didn’t want anything else but to make rock and roll music.
If anything, Cobain’s status as a legend was why he had a complicated relationship with fame, usually shying away from the spotlight despite it being so hot on his face. It’s easy to shower the band with praise now, but as far as Grohl and Cobain were concerned, they were just another band.
