“I didn’t think Pat would be our guitar player. I just sent him a tape. And he was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s so poppy’”: How Pat Smear surprised Dave Grohl and joined the Foo Fighters

Dave Grohl wanted to get back making music after the tragic end of Nirvana. He had ideas and had written some songs and put them onto tape. But he needed a guitarist. The big question was, who was he going to get in the band?

Speaking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Grohl describes his headspace in the months following Kurt Cobain’s death.

The manner of Nirvana’s ending sent Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic into survival mode.

“I think that we all wound up in places that felt… I don’t want to say comfortable, but safe,” recalls Grohl. “And so when I went into the studio and recorded that stuff by myself, I felt safe there. And I can’t speak for Krist, but I think at that time it was like we were just trying to get our feet back on the ground. For me, that’s something that I thought, ‘Okay, well, music is the thing that’s going to rescue me.’”

The Foo Fighters frontman believes Novoselic found his feet by taking a step back from music and regrouping. And Grohl didn’t push him. “We didn’t really ever have that deeper, longer conversation,” he says.

If getting a band back together was part of the process for putting his heart back together, Grohl would have to start recruiting. Everyone knew him as the drummer from Nirvana. The last full-length album he released was In Utero and that was Seattle trio at their most confrontational.

The songs Grohl was putting together, none of them sounded like Scentless Apprentice. These were, well, poppy. And he’d have asked Nirvana live guitarist Pat Smear if he wanted to play in this band he was going to call the Foo Fighters, but no way would he say yes.

“The funniest thing is like, I didn’t think Pat would be our guitar player. I just sent him a tape. I sent him one of the early cassettes,” says Grohl, expecting… Well, Pat Smear is a punk at heart. Grohl expected a polite thanks but no thanks. Smear was duly shocked. But his reaction was altogether more positive than Grohl could have hoped for.

“He was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s so poppy.’ And I’m like, ‘Is it? Okay, is that a good thing?’ And to Pat, that is a great thing,” says Grohl. “I was like, and I had already started jamming with Nate [Mendel, bass guitar] and William [Goldsmith, drums] and I was like, ‘Hey if you want to play guitar… I didn’t expect that he would, you know. And then he decided that he would jam with us. And it was great.”

The rest is history. The Foo Fighters returned with their 12th studio album, Your Favorite Toy, which is out now via RCA, their first to feature new drummer Ilan Rubin. Following the death of Taylor Hawkins in 2022, Grohl recorded all the drum parts for 2023’s But Here We Are.

In conversation with Lowe, Grohl reflects on what it’s like to have a back catalog that he felt was almost out of bounds, songs that he was scared to revisit – for any number of reasons but especially the obvious one, that playing something of, say, Nevermind was going to be too painful.

But he says there is nothing quite like those occasions when he, Novoselic and Smear have got together to perform Nirvana tracks.

“It’s such a weird thing to feel afraid to play songs. And for a long time it’s like I was even afraid just to sit down at a drum set and play the opening riff to Smells Like Teen Spirit,” he says “It just seemed sort of forbidden. And so the few times that Krist and Pat and I have gotten together to do it, it’s a trip… the noise that the three of us make together, you don’t really get that noise anywhere else.

“The way that Krist strums his bass lines, the bass that he uses, the equipment he uses, his sense of feel and time, it’s like all of those things combined with Pat like with that crazy Germs/Pat Smear guitar thing. And then some loud-ass drums, when it happens, you’re just like, oh fuck, I remember this. Shit, I haven’t heard this in 35 years. It’s a really beautiful sound and a beautiful feeling.”

You can watch/listen to the full Dave Grohl interview on The Zane Lowe Show on Apple Music.

Jonathan Horsley has been writing about guitars since 2005, playing them since 1990, and regularly contributes to publications including Guitar World, MusicRadar and Total Guitar. He uses Jazz III nylon picks, 10s during the week, 9s at the weekend, and shamefully still struggles with rhythm figure one of Van Halen’s Panama.