If Nirvana had been able to carry on for a few more years, chances the major spotlight still wouldn’t have been aimed at Dave Grohl. He may have been an animal behind the kit, but outside of playing shows, Grohl seemed like the scrawny member of the band who would usually fade into the background once Kurt Cobain got onstage. However, Grohl did have a voice in the band, and when it finally came time for him to take centre stage, he was mortified.
By the time Nevermind took over the world, though, change was already in the air for Nirvana. Since Cobain had hated that the band got big so fast and wanted to go back to the traditional way of making art-rock records, that meant loosening the reins and letting the other band members take a stab at writing.
It’s not like Grohl’s first attempts to write with Nirvana were the next answer to The Beatles or anything. He had come up with the riff for ‘Scentless Apprentice’, but even in that case, Cobain was more likely to call him out for how the riff sounded than consider it one of the greatest in their catalogue.
There was one song hidden in Grohl’s back catalogue called ‘Marigold’, which the band had taken a liking to. Originally released on the album Pocketwatch by Grohl’s side project Late!, the song is a much more downtempo look at what Nirvana was doing at the time, almost putting a classic rock spin on their grunge sound.
Although Grohl had no intention of giving the material to Nirvana, the song leapt out to Steve Albini when making In Utero, who pushed for it to be on the record. Since Cobain was the resident genius of the band, Grohl didn’t think that there was any room for him to make the case for his simple little song.
When talking about it later, Grohl remembered being taken aback when the band liked the song, saying, “I think it might have been Steve [Albini] who said, ‘Marigold’ should maybe be on the album,’ I was terrified…Obviously, it didn’t make In Utero. I’m glad because the album retained the integrity of Kurt’s vision. But I was incredibly flattered. ‘Really, you like that?’”.
The song would eventually be released as the B-side to the single ‘Heart Shaped Box’, but it was the first that most people heard of what Foo Fighters could sound like. If you listen to the first Foo Fighters album, ‘Marigold’ could have been an unintended bonus track, sounding not too different from a song like ‘X-Static’.
When Grohl eventually got his other band together, though, he refused to even play the song live, usually telling the audience to shut up whenever they requested it. Then again, if you were trying to separate yourself from a band like Nirvana, would you want people yelling out requests that reminded you of your old band?
Besides his one song for the band, though, Grohl had the basic sketches of tracks like ‘Exhausted’ that Cobain wanted to rework to turn into Nirvana songs. Grohl may have understood the golden rule of the drummer not writing songs, but sometimes a song can stand on its own no matter who wrote it.
