On 11 October 1990, a scruffy 21-year-old sat behind a modest drum kit at the North Shore Surf Club in Olympia, Washington. He wasn’t yet a global rock icon or the frontman of Foo Fighters. He was simply Dave Grohl, the new drummer for Nirvana, and this was his first night on stage with Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic.
Grohl was no wide-eyed novice. By 21 he was already a veteran of the Washington D.C. punk scene, having spent years battering the drums in Scream. The connection that changed everything happened through Buzz Osborne of Melvins, who brought Cobain and Novoselic to a Scream show in 1990. They saw immediately what Grohl could bring to their band: power, precision, presence. “He was a hard hitter,” Novoselic later told Michael Azerrad in Come As You Are. “He was really dynamic. He was so bright, so hot, so vital. He rocked.”
Grohl, though, didn’t exactly fall to his knees in awe. “I remember being in the same room with them and thinking, ‘What? That’s Nirvana? Are you kidding?’” he told Q in 2010. “Because on their [Bleach] record cover they looked like psycho lumberjacks, but I was like, ‘What, that little dude [Cobain], that big motherf***er [Novoselic]? You’re kidding me.’ I laughed, I was like, ‘No way.’”
Still, something clicked. He packed up his drums and moved to Seattle that September. Within days, he was rehearsing with Nirvana in a damp, grim rehearsal space, “either Mudhoney’s or Tad’s,” as he later recalled. There was no grand announcement, no formal offer. Grohl just kept showing up, and Cobain simply started telling people they had a new drummer.
On 11 October, the trio stepped onto the stage at a sold-out 300-capacity Surf Club and ripped through a 20-song set. The power went out three times at the start, but it didn’t matter. By the end of the night, everyone in the room, including Grohl himself, knew they’d stumbled into something combustible. “Within one minute we knew that this was the right thing to do,” he told Uncut in 2021. “It doesn’t happen often. There are only a few times in life when things lock in perfectly.”
Someone had the foresight to film the set, preserving the birth of what would become a seismic force in modern music. Just a year later, they would record Nevermind, and rock history would never be the same.
