“I was just shut down. I remember trying to make m…

In 2009, Louder‘s Paul Brannigan conducted a four-hour career-spanning interview with Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl for a cover feature for MOJO magazine. That interview formed the spine of Brannigan’s Dave Grohl biography, This Is A Call.

Here, for the first time, is the transcript of Grohl and Brannigan discussing the final days of Kurt Cobain, Grohl’s former bandmate in Nirvana, starting with Grohl’s memories of the horror of Cobain’s overdose in Rome on March 4, 1994.

Before the end of Nirvana, did you think it was coming to an end? Could you see another album?
“Honestly, no. 1994 was a bad year right out of the gate. I don’t remember exactly when we started that European tour, but we started in Spain and we had the Buzzcocks out with us and I was really excited. But the last time we’d toured Europe we were still Nirvana, from Seattle, now we were NIRVANA! Things had changed a lot. Kurt had struggled through a lot of stuff and we were trying to come to terms with being this enormous band, I guess.

“That whole year is blurry for me because of how lost I was the whole time. By the time we got to Germany I don’t think Kurt wanted to be there anymore. I remember on that tour, I think it was the first time I felt depression, can’t-get-out-of-fucking-bed depression. It was in Milan, and I so badly wanted to be home. I’d never felt that way. I don’t think I’d ever missed something where it just makes you collapse. I couldn’t get out of bed. And that was a pretty good indication that I wasn’t happy and didn’t want to be there. But I had made the commitment of doing it, and I didn’t want to let anyone down.

“But it wasn’t long after that until I think Kurt felt the same way. The last show we played was in Germany somewhere [Terminal Einz in Munich, on March 1, 1994] and Kurt wanted to go home, so I think he intentionally blew his voice out, so that any doctor in his right mind would look at his throat and go ‘It’s kinda inflamed’… So he intentionally blew his voice out so that we could all go home.

“I had to stay another day to make a video for the Backbeat soundtrack and then the next day I flew home, via Heathrow and San Francisco. So finally I get home, put the bags down, and collapse in bed. And I wake up at 5 in the morning to an emergency phone call. And it’s some guy, going, ‘Dave? Is this really Dave Grohl?’ and I’m like ‘Yeah, who is this?’ And he’s likes, ‘I’m John, I live in Boston and I’m a huge fucking fan, and I just wanted to say you guys are great.’ So I’m like, How did you get my phone number?’ And he said, ‘I just told the operator it was an emergency.’ So I’m like, Okay, that’s cool, just don’t phone back…’

“Five minutes later the phone rings again. And someone goes, ‘Dude, turn on CNN…’ And I see Kurt, in Rome, so… so… so that’s when I knew, (whispers) Oh no, it’s over…”

Kurt had overdosed more than once before then. Did you know about overdose after Saturday Night Live at the time?
“No, we knew about it when we got home. There was…a lot of those… that you just found out about later. In a weird way, it just became this, thing that nobody knew what to do about.”

The elephant in the room…
“Yeah, if you’ve ever known someone who’s battled something like that… you just know that there’s nothing you can do. [Puts head in hands, and wipes away tears] Wow, sorry, I’m kinda emotional about that…”

So you had a few weeks off, and then the theory was you’d start touring again: in your mind was it really going to start properly again?
“Well, the fucked-up thing about that whole situation was… So, I see that, and I’m like, What the fuck? And so Krist [Novoselic] and I get on the phone and then someone says, ‘He’s okay, he’s just in a coma…he’s not dead.’ It was so chaotic and crazy.