Dave Grohl played Nirvana’s “All Apologies” with Warren Haynes on Sunday at the Orange Peel in Asheville, and Grohl told Rolling Stone that paying tribute to Kurt Cobain and hearing the fans sing his words drove him to tears.
“Warren said, ‘Do you want to do ‘All Apologies’? That used to be thin ice and delicate ground for a long time, for good reason. That’s something that had to be handled gently,” says Grohl. “When he mentioned that song, my initial reaction was, ‘I can’t do that. I shouldn’t that.’ But then I think about the people that the song means so much to and has been a part of their lives — that joy and love should be shared. And then, as we were playing it, the audience starts to sing along, and I’m crying my eyes out onstage trying to keep it together — what a beautiful moment. And who am I to keep people from that beautiful moment?”
In the video below, while Grohl is in the back, you can see the other musicians onstage look back at him at the moment he is talking about when he teared up.
He discussed the unpredictability of the show, which included his 23-minute song “Play”.
“It takes a certain kind of spirit — or a certain kind of confidence or stupidity — where you brazenly walk into [something like] this,” says Grohl. “Before this show, Warren and I were sitting backstage with no idea of what we were going to do. I didn’t know if we were going to do the ‘Play’ thing. I didn’t know if we were going to do covers. [It was], ‘Well, what do you know?’ ‘I know ‘this,’ do you know ‘that’?”
