In a recent live conversation, Dave Grohl revealed that Kurt Cobain was not a control freak creatively when recording with Nirvana. Alternative Nation transcribed his comments.
“You know, I think that as a songwriter, you want the world to acknowledge or appreciate, celebrate your work. I mean, [Kurt] was an amazing songwriter and it was so, it seemed so easy for him to write an amazing song, they’re so simple.
And when we wrote the songs together, there wasn’t any deep conversation, like, ‘I think that the chorus and the middle eight should be twice before we go back to the bridge.’ We wouldn’t talk. I knew the chorus was coming when I saw his foot getting close to the distortion pedal.
So I just go- voices drum patterns- and then that was it! Like I swear to God, that’s how it worked. Listen to the records; it’s not fucking rocket science.”
In a new Forbes interview, former Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg said Cobain was a ‘control freak’ when it came to his art. Goldberg recently published the book ‘Serving the Servant.
“Well, after Nevermind became a very big hit, he would sometimes say that he thought it was produced too commercially. He would certainly say that to journalists. And I could never figure out if he really meant it or not, because he completely controlled everything about that record, as he did all his records.
But I think that it took on another meaning, and it was so successful, and it certainly was no accident that he worked with a different engineer and a different producer for other records, even though he never had a bad word to say about either of the guys that did that record, personally—and he appreciated its success.
But that’s part of the public record… I think he was pretty happy in general with his art: he controlled it; he was a control freak; he worked on it, he thought about it a lot; and I think that he was proud of his body of work. This is a guy who released an anthology of his earlier work when he was 24-years-old, when Incesticide came out. So he had a real sense of his value as an artist.
