(Credit: Alamy)
Rock ‘n’ roll was all about rebellion. Punk was about laughing at that wobbling rebellion and cutting it down with a razor blade. Grunge was something closer to utter disdain for the entire world, a rejection of everything. It makes it strange, then, that the last thing that Dave Grohl wanted to do when he was in Nirvana was disrupt the peace.
Since Kurt Cobain already had a knack for writing songs that spoke to people on a visceral level, Grohl didn’t want to even begin making songs that would encroach upon his territory. While he was perfectly happy playing the drums, one song tended to squeak by and become one of Grohl’s first official lead vocals.
Using a handful of chords and a simple melody, ‘Marigold’ was the only song that Nirvana ever recorded that featured Grohl as the primary songwriter. It’s not entirely unusual for bands to share songwriting credits. After all, The Beatles would routinely have the songwriting credits of Lennon-McCartney on their tracks despite the fact that often only half of that partnership was truly involved.
But it was time for Grohl to step up and enjoy some of the spotlight. Having provided backing vocals behind Cobain for most of Nirvana’s classic material, Grohl was already used to being behind the glass, sounding a lot tender compared to Cobain’s shout.
Even at this early stage of songwriting, it’s easy to see Grohl’s knack for melody, always knowing which note to fall on and weaving his way between different keys while still rooting himself down to the ground. Although the song never got an official release on an album, it ended up getting tucked away onto the B-side of the Nirvana single ‘Heart Shaped Box’.
According to Grohl, the fact that he wrote songs was nothing but good news for Cobain. Since the majority of the music fell on Cobain’s shoulders, he had the idea of restructuring some of Grohl’s ideas into future Nirvana songs. While that next Nirvana project would never materialise after Cobain’s death, Grohl wasn’t done writing songs.
Taking the bits and pieces of tracks that Cobain had liked, Grohl turned those songs into tracks like ‘Alone + Easy Target’ and ‘Exhausted’ from the first Foo Fighters album. Although Grohl didn’t want to be known as ‘the guy from Nirvana’ at his shows, it started to get a little bit awkward when the rest of the fans caught on to who was behind the mic.
As Pat Smear recalls in Back and Forth, ‘Marigold’ became a favourite thing for Nirvana fans to heckle the band with, explaining, “No one had heard the songs yet, so there was this song called ‘Marigold’ that Nirvana had made with Dave on vocals. So out of nowhere, you would just hear someone scream ‘MARIGOLD’, and we never played it. How awkward that must have been for Dave.”
That would be a massive sore spot for Grohl throughout the first few years of Foo Fighters as well, with every single question relating back to his time in Nirvana. When talking about his previous band, Grohl was always reluctant to speak about it, with bassist Nate Mendel recalling, “For me, it was always kind of a touchy subject. At this point, Kurt had only been dead for a year, and I didn’t want to talk about it. Every interview question was about Nirvana. You can imagine what they were. Take any song off the first record: ‘Is that song about Kurt Cobain?’”.
As time passed and wounds healed, Grohl finally was comfortable to address his previous band, even penning the song ‘Friend of a Friend’ off of In Your Honor about Cobain. Once the band started the touring circuit in small theatres as part of their acoustic set, Grohl even brought ‘Marigold’ into the setlist, finally bringing his journey full circle. He may have started in a dingy basement, reluctantly showing songs to Cobain, but Grohl had turned into a living legend on his own, playing the same songs that got him started.
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