Here's How Kurt Cobain Really Felt About Dave Grohl
Amongst the wedding photos taken on February 24, 1992, Dave Grohl stands somewhat awkwardly between Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain who is staring off camera. It's awkwardly posed as such photos tend to be, but as Grohl was one of eight attendees, indicating at least some level of intimacy between the singer and drummer.
However, in 2005, Grohl revealed to Rolling Stone that he felt a similar kind of awkwardness as part of Nirvana: "I don't think I've ever told anyone this, but there were times when Kurt was really unhappy with the way I played drums. I could hear him talking about how much he thought I sucked. But he'd never say it to me."
Upon hearing this, Grohl immediately decided to quit the band, according to New York Daily News. He called the band's manager, Alex McLeod, but McLeod managed to calm him down enough to stay. The issue, Grohl went on to explain, was that by the time he had joined Nirvana, which was only eight months before their breakout album Nevermind, the band had already gone through five or six drummers whilst Cobain and Krist Novoselic went back all the way. Drummers for Nirvana simply came and went.
Oh well, whatever, nevermind
That is, they came and went until Grohl finally came. An unearthed interview from 1991 with Studio Brussels, a Belgian radio station, catches Cobain explaining that with Grohl the band for the first time felt like an actual unit. Moreover, this is because "all the other drummers we had pretty much sucked." However, Cobain had a control freak streak in him, and might have meant that the band felt like a unit because Grohl followed what he wanted. Had Cobain not died in 1994, it's quite possible that Novoselic and he would still be recording albums together, but Grohl would have headed in his own direction.
A mildly amusing afternote to this is that once Grohl formed Foo Fighters, he grew just as particular about drum tracks, though he might have been nicer about it. After he had played almost every instrument for the band's debut album, he had the original drummer, William Goldstein, do 96 takes over the course of thirteen hours for one song on the next album. Talking to the Miami New Times in 1998, Goldstein commented that "It just seemed that everything I did wasn't good enough for him, or anyone else. I think that everyone at the label wanted Dave to play drums on the record." Sometimes it's not personal. It's just the artist's perfectionist aspects coming to light.