The last time that Dave Grohl was a guest on The Howard Stern Show in February, he spoke about getting together with his surviving Nirvana bandmates to jam and record new music. Recently, Grohl returned to the program to promote Foo Fighters’ upcoming Madison Square Garden concert. While there, Stern again got Grohl talking about those Nirvana get-togethers.
Grohl suggested that the material he, Krist Novoselic, and Pat Smear (a touring member of Nirvana) have recorded together may never get released, or at least it wasn’t designed for an audience outside of themselves:
“Krist Novoselic is a pilot, he flies his own plane. He lives up in the Pacific Northwest and whenever he comes down to Los Angeles, you know, we always love to see each other and we’ll have dinner. Last time he was here, I made dinner for us and we hung out. Pat’s always around and the three of us, you know, we like to be together, we like to see each other. If there are instruments around or a studio that’s available, we’ll just get together and kind of jam, you know? We don’t, like, run through a big ol’ Nirvana setlist, but we do like to just fool around, and sometimes, as we’re fooling around, songs happen. And if we’re in a studio, we’ll record them. We’ve recorded some stuff that’s really cool, but we’ve never done anything with it. I think to us, it’s just more friends jamming around. It doesn’t seem like any big official reunion or anything.”
Stern then asked if Grohl handles vocal duties during these jam/recording sessions and Grohl said, “No, I’m just playing the drums. We don’t have a singer. We kind of record these instrumentals and just mess around. It’s very casual. There’s no pressure on us to do something that the world will have to hear. It’s more really just for fun and a lot of it’s really cool. It reminds you that when the three of us get together in a room and start playing, it sounds like it did, it sounds like it used to. When you put the three of us in a room, it makes that noise, it still does. […] It sounds like Nirvana. We just make that sound when we play together. It’s really cool.”
Watch Grohl discuss getting together with his Nirvana bandmates below.