The world hasn’t seen much of Dave Grohl since the death of now-former Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, who passed away on March 25 (although Grohl did pop up at Paul McCartney’s Glastonbury performance in June). Now, he has sort of made his return to TV, via an interview on MSNBC’s The Beat With Ari Melber; The conversation just aired on July 20, but was filmed prior to Hawkins’ death.
At various points during the 25-minute chat, Melber showed Grohl interview clips of himself and his former Nirvana bandmates in the early ’90s, getting Grohl’s reactions to his younger stuff and using what he said as launching points for conversation.
The first clip was of a 1991 Nirvana interview with MTV News, in which Grohl, who was 22 years old at the time, speaks about previously independent bands signing to major labels. After the clip, Grohl laughed and quipped, “First of all, I don’t know if I had hit puberty yet. Listen to my voice! What was that? What the heck was that all about?”
He then talked about the band’s relatively low level of ambition at the time, saying he would live off of inexpensive gas station corn dogs and didn’t want much more than that. That proved to be a perfect transition into the next clip, of a 1993 MTV News interview in which Grohl laments getting too much mustard on a hot dog he bought from a hot dog stand.
In the final clip, another snippet from that same 1993 interview, Kurt Cobain talked about being happy to start collaborating with Grohl more on songwriting. To that, Grohl responded, “It always takes me back to that famous drummer joke: ‘What was the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band? ‘Hey guys, I have a song I think we should play!””
He continued, “I had a studio in my basement and I would go down into my basement, record songs really just for me, like an experiment, some sort of creative outlet where I’d play guitar and bass and drums and sing, and they were fully formed songs. But in Nirvana, I was perfectly happy just being the drummer of Nirvana. It was a great, great band to be the drummer of. And I did show Kurt my songs sometimes, but I mean, it’s… [laughs] it’s not easy to show one of the greatest songwriters of our generation your silly demo you did in your basement. So I kind of kept it to myself.”
Check out the full The Beat interview above. Also check out the original ’90s Nirvana interviews in full below.
