In 1991, Nirvana released their most commercially successful album, Nevermind , an iconic record that changed the band's history forever. Reaching the level of the greats in music was not a painless process, as Dave Grohl .
At the time, the band was playing shows in small venues, all sharing a small van to get to the events, when "Smells Like Teen Spirit" premiered on MTV and became a hit. In Courtney Love , that sealed Kurt Cobain , who committed suicide in 1994.
In a recent interview with Vulture , Grohl recounted how things began to change for the group after the music video's television debut. “We didn’t really know much about it because we were stuck in a van with a U-Haul trailer (…). I remember the night the 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' video premiered on MTV on 120 Minutes. Kurt and I used to share a room. We knew it was going to be on the show,” he narrated. “That night, we realized we’d gone from a band in a van with U-Haul to a band in a van with U-Haul on fucking TV. But we were moving so fast at that point. I don’t think we realized what was happening until months later. The only thing we noticed was the number of people at the shows.”
READ ALSO: Dave Grohl admits he's still processing Kurt Cobain's death: "I have dreams where we're in Nirvana"
With tickets sold out for small clubs with a capacity of 200 people, the band noticed another 200 fans trying to get into the shows. With their resounding success, some tensions began to arise between the members in the following years, and Cobain even considered firing Dave Grohl, but later opted to keep the drummer.
For Grohl, Cobain's last year of life, between 1993 and 1994, was the most turbulent. “Honestly, you’d wake up every day not knowing what was going to happen next. We were on shaky ground for a number of reasons, the biggest being that the sudden rise to fame in that band was traumatic. I can’t speak for Kurt, and I generally don’t because he’s not around to speak for himself. Each of us dealt with it in different ways, but ultimately it’s a difficult thing to navigate,” he continued. “We had avoided conventional commercial appeal and were perfectly happy in our world behind the fucking shadows. Then we became one of them. How do you process that? There was a lot of chaos inside and outside the band. You had to hold on for your life and hope the journey wouldn’t stop.”
READ ALSO: Nirvana: the relationship between religion, grief and the search for meaning in “Lithium”
