(Credits: Far Out / Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Dave Grohl‘s career is best viewed in two distinct halves: his youthful days at the heart of the grunge scene, drumming with Nirvana, and his more recent exploits with rock colossus Foo Fighters. These two very distinct entities have adopted very different sounds, attitudes, and fans, with Foo Fighters leaning further into Grohl’s own musical tastes, drawing from classic and mainstream rock, whereas Nirvana were heavily indebted to grunge, punk, and alternative rock. However, there is certainly some crossover between the two distinct bands.
It was Nirvana that first thrust Dave Grohl into the limelight when he joined the ranks of the Washington outfit back in 1990. By that time, Kurt Cobain’s outfit had already unleashed their masterful debut album Bleach. However, while the record typified the sound of Seattle grunge and firmly established the energy and attitude of Cobain’s songwriting, it didn’t garner much attention. Arguably, the inclusion of Grohl behind the sticks provided the band with the push it needed to break those grassroots grunge sounds into the musical mainstream.
After signing to a major record label, DGC Records, Grohl and the band began working on their magnum opus album, Nevermind. Inevitably, this album quickly gained momentum and spread all across the globe, introducing Cobain, Novoselic, and Grohl to levels of fame and notoriety they had never previously encountered, or even dreamed about.
In the wake of this unparalleled success, Grohl began to experiment with various side projects and songwriting endeavours, almost as an escape from the unavoidable mainstream attention of Nirvana. One such side project was entitled Late!, with which he released the cassette Pocketwatch in 1992.
Although the tape marked something of a departure from the usual sound of Grohl’s work in Nirvana, one song, ‘Color Pictures of a Marigold’ found favour with Nirvana’s producer Steve Albini. “I think it might have been Steve who said, ‘Marigold’ should maybe be on the album,’” the songwriter recalled in 2013.
“I was terrified,” Grohl continued. “It was that famous joke: ‘What’s the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band? Hey, I wrote a song.’” Luckily for the drummer, the song never made it to Nirvana’s next record, In Utero, but it did see the light of day as a B-side to Nirvana’s ‘Heart-Shaped Box’. Although it is far from being the most notable effort in the band’s discography, it does stand out as being the only Nirvana track written and composed entirely by Grohl.
Less than a year after Nirvana released that re-recorded version of ‘Marigold’, Kurt Cobain tragically took his own life, bringing a definitive end to the story of Washington’s grunge heroes. As Grohl entered a new phase of his musical journey as the guitarist and frontman of the Foo Fighters, he moved away from the raw grunge sounds of Nirvana and opted for something a little more expansive and arena-filling.
Despite looking back with fond memories on his time in Nirvana, Grohl has rarely revisited the music of the grunge trio. However, for the 2006 live album Skin and Bones, Grohl and Foo Fighters recorded an acoustic version of ‘Marigold’, making the track the only one to have been recorded by both Nirvana and Foo Fighters.
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