A long-standing narrative surrounding Nirvana is that frontman Kurt Cobain despised the spotlight and never intended to become a massive rock star. The band’s fiercely anti-establishment image and the singer’s apparent discomfort with celebrity only fueled this assumption. However, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl recently shared an anecdote that complicates that historical view.
During a recent appearance on Apple Music 1‘s “The Zane Lowe Show,” the drummer reflected on the trio’s trajectory prior to the explosion of their breakthrough sophomore album, Nevermind. When host Zane Lowe asked if the late singer was truly built for the massive success and accolades the band usually receive, Dave Grohl recalled a pivotal meeting with a major record label in New York.
“That is a really good question… [I] always go back to when we flew to New York to talk to record companies to sign a deal before Nevermind came out,” Dave said (via Loudwire).
“We sat down in this high rise, major label office with this super powerful executive who was sitting behind a giant oak desk and listening to the song on stun volume. Me, Krist [Novoselic] and Kurt [were] on the other side of the desk in these low chairs, it looked like we were being punished at school or something,” he continued.
According to the drummer, the executive directly asked the band what they wanted to achieve with a new record deal. Kurt Cobain‘s response was blunt: “We want to be the biggest band in the world.”
While Dave Grohl assumes everyone in the room laughed off the remark at the time, he confessed he still wonders about the singer’s true intent behind the bold statement. “To this day I think about it,” he admitted.
The frontman’s public stance on fame was notoriously conflicted. In a 1993 interview, he expressed a clear distaste for the celebrity lifestyle, suggesting he would have preferred Nirvana to remain an underground act.
“Cult bands seem to have a very steady lifestyle. They don’t have the hassles of being a celebrity and they’re almost guaranteed to sell the same amount of records and play to the same people every time,” the vocalist stated at the time.
“I kinda envy bands like the Pixies or Iggy Pop, people who have had pretty much the same fans or people who can appreciate the music on that level, because they don’t have to deal with all the other bulls**t that gets in the way.”
Before signing with Geffen subsidiary DGC Records in April 1991, the band released their debut album, Bleach, through independent Seattle label Sub Pop, selling roughly 40,000 copies initially. The unprecedented mainstream explosion of Nevermind, which famously dethroned Michael Jackson‘s Dangerous from the No. 1 spot on the charts in January 1992, catapulted them to global superstardom. It subsequently boosted Bleach to over 1.7 million U.S. sales, making it Sub Pop’s best-selling release of all time. Their rapid ascent also opened the commercial floodgates for contemporaries like Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, and Pearl Jam.
Despite the band’s punk-rock ethos, some of their peers argue they actively pursued their massive success. In a documentary exploring the Seattle grunge scene, Melvins frontman Buzz Osborne offered his own unvarnished perspective on their rise.
“They worked toward becoming rock stars, regardless of what they said,” Buzz told Loudwire at the time. “That’s what they wanted to do. They plugged themselves into the same venues, managers, record labels as anyone else — as Motley Crue.”
