Dave Grohl tends to pull double duty as guest and musical act when Foo Fighters perform on a late-night show, and that’s what happened last night: The band took to Late Night to perform “Chasing Birds” and Grohl sat down for a chat with Seth Meyers. Meyers, being a former Saturday Night Live cast member and writer, often steers his Late Night conversations towards SNL when applicable, which yielded a great story about the time Nirvana was the musical guest a week that Charles Barkley hosted.
Grohl reminisced about shooting promos for the September 25, 1993 episode with Barkley, saying, “I remember our bass player, Krist Novoselic… Krist Novoselic is 6’8″, OK? The bass player for Nirvana is very tall. And I remember when we were doing the promos on the Thursday before the show, I remember seeing Krist tower over Charles Barkley and thinking, ‘This is getting weird. Now this is officially weird.'”
Meyers quipped that that gives him a greater appreciation for Barkley’s rebounding abilities, considering he’s not even taller than the tallest guy in Nirvana. He then told Grohl a story Barkley told him about that episode and the Nirvana song “Rape Me,” saying, “I remember him regaling us with stories of the first time he hosted and saying that he was in his dressing room when Nirvana… when you guys were doing your songs, and he said, ‘I was sitting there and I was like, ‘Are they saying ‘rape me?”'”
In a 1994 Rolling Stone interview, Kurt Cobain explained that the controversial song is about karma, saying, “I’ve gone back and forth between regretting it and trying to defend myself. Basically, I was trying to write a song that supported women and dealt with the issue of rape. […] It’s not a pretty image. But a woman who is being raped, who is infuriated with the situation… it’s like ‘Go ahead, rape me, just go for it, because you’re gonna get it.’ I’m a firm believer in karma, and that motherf*cker is going to get what he deserves, eventually. That man will be caught, he’ll go to jail, and he’ll be raped. ‘So rape me, do it, get it over with. Because you’re gonna get it worse.'”
Above, watch Grohl’s full interview and check out Foo Fighters’ performance of “Chasing Birds.”
