According to Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad, some of Cobain’s comments about Grohl seemed like envy.
Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain is said to have harbored feelings of jealousy towards band member Dave Grohl. This emerges from a recent interview with Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad, in which he talks about his 1993 book “Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana”.
The hosts of the “Rolling Stone Music Now” podcast ask about a passage in the book in which Cobain describes a guitar part written by Grohl in “Scentless Apprentice” as “empty.” “To be honest, I thought the comment was a little condescending,” Azerrad said.
The author also goes into more detail about another passage. In it, the Nirvana frontman is said to have called Grohl the “most balanced boy in the whole world”. This also seemed like an ambiguous statement to the biographer. “I think Kurt was making fun of the fact that Dave was pretty normal. [Grohl] is a popular and even-tempered guy – he really is. And I think Kurt made fun of it partly because he wasn’t a freak like Kurt. He was jealous. I think he was a little jealous of Dave because Dave got the hang of things,” the biographer continues.
Dave Grohl himself said in 2005, after he had been successful with the Foo Fighters for over ten years, that he suspected that Cobain had some problems with him. “There were times when Kurt was very unhappy with the way I played drums,” shared Grohl. “I heard him talking about how bad I was. But he would never have told me directly.” But he doesn’t seem to hold it against the late singer, as Grohl recently described Cobain as “the greatest songwriter of our generation.”