Despite having performed Nirvana songs on special occasions — Dave Grohl maintains he's not comfortable ever singing the late-Kurt Cobain's lyrics in public. He told Classic Rock magazine, “I wouldn’t feel comfortable singing a song that Kurt sang. I feel perfectly at home playing those songs on the drums. And I love playing them with Krist (Novoselic) and Pat (Smear) and another vocalist. I still have dreams that we’re in Nirvana, that we’re still a band. I still dream there’s any empty arena waiting for us to play. But I don’t sit down at home and run through 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' by myself. It’s just a reminder that the person who is responsible for those beautiful songs is no longer with us. It’s bittersweet.”
Grohl went on to recall first bonding with Kurt Cobain upon joining Nirvana in 1990: “When I first joined the band it was so much fun. I lived on the couch in Kurt’s living room, we rehearsed in a barn, we set up our gear and played those songs and people bounced around and got hot and sweaty. I really loved the connection and the appreciation that Nirvana’s audience had with the band.”
Dave Grohl told us a while back that he and Kurt Cobain could always bond over hard rock: “Kurt had the same love of (death metal band) Celtic Frost and (hardcore act) Black Flag, and I've listened to this music for 20-something years and my passion for it has never died, and the thing that kind of bugs me about that Nirvana metal thing is that, y'know, we never set out to do anything really. We just wanted to play music, and we kind of became the poster boys for that whole turnover.”
