Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [122]
He was quiet and not very confrontational and very reclusive, so you’d hear things through the grapevine and interviews, but one thing I knew he was upset about was that we were not buying a lot of advertising for Nirvana in particular. We tended to run group advertisements, and we were really pushing Sub Pop more as a label. It was a more cost-effective way of advertising, and I felt that he was truly missing the big picture, because we were so effective at garnering press. Literally a year and a half after he was sleeping under bridges, he was on the front cover of Melody Maker in England. I’d say that’s pretty effective label promotion.
DANNY GOLDBERG (Gold Mountain Entertainment founder/president; Nirvana/Hole manager; Atlantic Records president; Warner Bros. Records chairman/CEO; Rosemary Carroll’s husband) The first meeting I had with Nirvana, Krist did most of the talking. Kurt didn’t do much talking, and Dave Grohl did no talking. I asked at one point if they wanted to stay on Sub Pop. Kurt, who had been quiet up until then, just said, “No, definitely not!” He wanted to be big. They committed to us after the first meeting.
DAN PETERS They go down to L.A. and come back, and Kurt calls me up, and I go, “Hey, what’s up with the U.K. tour?” He goes, “Yeah, that’s why I’m calling. Well, we got another drummer. That guy Dave, from Scream.”
“Ah, all right,” I go. “That’s cool.” I was kind of taken aback, but really relieved, because, like I said, Mudhoney had this unique bond, and I felt nothing like that playing with Nirvana. But in hindsight, I’m like, Aww, Jesus.
MATT LUKIN Crover kind of spoiled Nirvana. Dan’s more tippy-tap—we always used to make fun of Dan and call him Tippy Tap—while Dale’s more thunk-thunk-thunk. Grohl’s more of a beater, like Dale.
DAN PETERS What I was bummed about was that all they had to do was just be honest—don’t be pussies. Communication on those guys’ part was not all that happening. I found out that Dave had been up there in Tacoma practicing with those guys for a while. He was probably more prepared to do that show I played than I was.
SLIM MOON Scream’s show at Gorilla Gardens in 1984 or 1985 was one of the best shows I ever saw. Years later, I convinced Kurt to go up to Tacoma to go see Scream. I was tapping my foot because I was so anxious to get to Tacoma and see this awesome band Scream. I was talking them up, and when we got there, they were this really bad Van Halen. It was not at all the same band I had seen. They were just awful.
Kurt went on this crazy tirade all the way home about how much he hated Telecasters. Scream’s choice of guitar became symbolic of everything he hated about them. We didn’t even talk about the drummer. So it was funny that we lambasted Scream and just talked about how much we hated them, and a year later or something, Scream’s drummer was his new drummer.
BUZZ OSBORNE I was friends with Dave Grohl when he was in Scream. Dave has a really good sense of humor. Really severe black humor. Actually, he had some pretty great stories about Scream’s black bass player. I think that those stories would have been good regardless of what color he was.
Dave called me when I lived in San Francisco. The Nirvana guys were in town, so we went and saw Scream play. It’s been written that I took them there to see Dave Grohl play, but that’s not true. I was going to go anyway.
CRAIG MONTGOMERY We had Dale play drums on a tour, the tour with Sonic Youth. And the Melvins let us stay at their house in San Francisco for a couple days before the tour started. We went and saw Scream at the I-Beam. Kurt saw Dave play and he said, “That’s the kind of drummer we need.”
BUZZ OSBORNE A couple of weeks later, I got a call from Dave, and he was in L.A., stranded. The bassist