Nirvana Rejected Bizarre Axl Rose Party Offer

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Former Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg revealed that Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl, and Krist Novoselic rejected an offer to perform at Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose’s birthday party. Goldberg, who recently published the book ‘Serving The Servant,’ told the story during a recent Yahoo video interview. Alternative Nation transcribed his remarks.

Axl Rose probably knew what happened. And then later on, he asked him to do some birthday party and of course Nirvana’s not going to do a birthday party for Axl Rose. And you know, Kurt’s whole thing about being a feminist and you know this was a time when Gun’s N’ Roses had a song that was on one of their big albums that had referred to ”expleitive” and you couldn’t have something more offensive to somebody like Kurt than that. So they were just culturally in different camps at that time. And then after the Vanity Fair article came out, Axl Rose said something very rude, you know that Kurt and Courtney should be in jail or something like that. It was pretty gross.

in a newly released excerpt from ‘Serving The Servant,’ Danny Goldberg discusses Kurt Cobain brutally rejecting an offer to meet Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose at a Nirvana show in 1991.

“In Los Angeles, where Geffen was headquartered and much of the media was based, we wanted to make room for more people to see them so an underplay didn’t make sense. October 27, a month after Nevermind had been released, Nirvana headlined at the Palace Theatre, which had 2,200 seats, the biggest place Nirvana had headlined up until that moment, and the show quickly sold out. The band had been consistently playing great shows and this was no exception.

Backstage afterward, Eddie Rosenblatt told me that he had come with Axl Rose and asked if he could bring him into the dressing room to say hi to Kurt. When I conveyed this request, Kurt grimaced and said he really didn’t want to meet the Guns N’ Roses singer. I didn’t want to put Geffen’s president in an untenable situation, so I suggested to Kurt that he and I leave the dressing room and then I’d give Rosenblatt a couple of passes. That way it wouldn’t be like we were excluding them, just that Kurt couldn’t be found.

Kurt nodded and I walked outside, delivered the passes to Rosenblatt, and asked if he and Rose could wait five minutes for Nirvana to ‘change clothes.’ Then I went back in and grabbed Kurt and we ducked out a back door. Rosenblatt never gave me shit about it afterward so the charade worked on some level, but I doubt it left Rose with a great taste in his mouth.”