Dave Grohl recently told Apple Music about fearing he would be fired by Nirvana. Below is our transcription.
“Well I mean I joined Nirvana, I was their fifth drummer, right? They’d had a team of drummers before me and some of them were more, I don’t know, more in the band than others. So when I joined the band, I didn’t know Krist [Novoselic] and Kurt [Cobain] at all. And when we first met and started playing, it was clear that when we got together to play that it worked really well, and we sounded what most people know now to sound like Nirvana. We sounded like that.
But you just meet these people and then it wasn’t long… It was almost exactly a year from the time I joined to the time Nevermind came out. And then once it came out, it was like things happen so quickly. The band got really big.
But every band I’d been in before then was with friends that I’d known for a really long time. And so there’s some security in that. So when you join a band where you don’t know anyone and you’re just starting to get to know each other, and it sounds great when you play music, you’re just starting to get to know each other, but there’s not a deep personal connection. And then the band becomes really huge really quickly.
You’re just so nervous that you’re going to either get fired or it’s going to stop. I didn’t want to get fired basically. And so I was doing my best to keep this thing from going away. So there was this real insecurity that I had, “I’m not good enough. They’re going to find somebody else.”
