Dave Grohl Recalls the Day After Kurt Cobain Died
Dave Grohl recalled how he struggled to deal with the death of Kurt Cobain as the adjustment process began the day after his death.
The Nirvana frontman died on April 5, 1994, and that led to Grohl’s career with the Foo Fighters. In a new interview with the BBC, the drummer discussed the first steps he had to take.
“I didn’t really have a plan,” he said. “When everything’s sort of turned upside down and shaken up like that, you just wake up every day thinking, ‘Who am I, where am I, what am I doing?’ ... I remember the day after Kurt died, how strange it felt to wake up knowing he wasn’t with us anymore and that I had another day. Like, okay, so what am I going to do with today? I believe it was then that I started to realize, ‘Oh, okay, you have to do everything once again. Meaning like, I have to make a pot of coffee and this is my first pot of coffee since Kurt’s gone. I have to go upstairs and get dressed. This is the first thing I’ll wear since Kurt has been gone. It goes like that. I honestly don’t know what I did. It was months and months and months.”
While the Foo Fighters gave Grohl his second taste of success, he said he struggled with feelings of self-consciousness as he learned to front his own band. “Like, ‘I know I don’t sound good, but how do I look? How do I hold my guitar? Do I do it like this? How do I move?’” he recalled asking himself. “I wasn’t ever in the moment, I was just so afraid. And then something clicked, where I was, like, ‘You know what? I’m not wasting this moment on being nervous, or scared. I’m gonna walk out there like Julius fucking Caesar.’”
In January, Grohl revealed a recurring dream about Cobain. “They always give me this initial burst of happiness and joy, because Kurt is always in them,” he said. “I do believe there’s an energy to those dreams that makes them more than hallucinations.”