The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music

by Dave Grohl

we began the final preparations to make our thousand-mile trek down to Los Angeles. A few more rehearsals, a few more boom box recordings of new song ideas, and we were good to go. Well, almost good to go. We needed gas money. We hastily booked a last-minute show at a small club in downtown Seattle called the OK Hotel, hoping that it would pull enough dough to fill our tanks and get us to Sound City without breaking down on the side of the highway. It was April 17, 1991, and the small room was thankfully packed with sweaty kids waiting to hear their favorite Nirvana songs. “School,” “Negative Creep,” “About a Girl,” “Floyd the Barber”—these were all familiar to the die-hard fans who adored Nirvana’s first album, Bleach, so we delivered them with our usual manic abandon, beating our instruments to within an inch of their lives as the crowd sang every word. Just like every other Nirvana show I had played, it was practically transcendent. But, rather than just stick with the trusted back catalog, that night we decided to try a new song that no one in that room had ever heard before. A song we had written over the winter in that cold little barn in Tacoma. Kurt approached the mike and announced, “This song is called ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’” Crickets. He then launched into the opening riff, and as Krist and I broke into the song, the room absolutely exploded. Bodies bouncing, people on top of people, a sea of denim and wet flannel before us. Reassuring, to say the least, and...