When Kurt Cobain set out to create what would eventually become Bleach, he was still living in Aberdeen, Washington, and working as a janitor.

His guitar playing, coupled with his introspective songwriting, was attracting attention, however – especially when a nascent Nirvana, comprising Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic, and drummer Chad Channing, turned Shocking Blue’s Love Buzz into their live showcase track.

A dozen letters to labels later, Sub Pop head honchos Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman decided to take a chance on a very desperate Cobain, who accepted a less-than-ideal deal that saw the band absorb all the recording costs.

Recorded in four sessions in late December 1988 that spanned roughly 20 hours, Bleach is pure rawness. It cost the band – or, rather, Jason Everman, a musician, soldier, early Nirvana fan, and briefly the band’s second guitarist – $606.17, which he fronted.

“We literally tracked it all in three days,” producer Jack Endino told Cobain biographer Charles R. Cross in an interview published in Guitar World in June 2005.

Their rehearsals carried a similar DIY spirit, as the band honed Bleach in an Aberdeen hair salon owned by Novoselic’s mother, which could only be used after hours.

“The place closed at eight, so we’d start rehearsing then and playing until eight in the morning, when it opened again,” recalled Channing.

Perhaps one of the most underrated elements of Bleach-era Nirvana is Novoselic, who not only served as a reliable friend for Cobain but also stood out as a noteworthy bassist who perfectly complemented the rising face of grunge’s angular guitar playing.

When Cobain brought forward the riff for School, Novoselic told him, “That is the most ‘Seattle’ fucking riff I’ve ever heard in my life.”

Despite the band not living in Seattle, the city’s sludge metal scene of the ’80s and early ’90s, spearheaded by the Melvins, served as a clear influence and gave them a much-needed sense of aspiration early in their career.

Novoselic even went as far as to say that “School is the ultimate grunge song,” and thus, consequentially, the ultimate Seattle song.

Bleach, released on June 15, 1989, did not chart upon initial release, and Cobain in particular was frustrated by Sub Pop’s lack of promotional efforts.

Things started to shift after the British music press began touting the band as rising stars, and Bleach became a staple on many US college radio stations.

Then, following the release of their many-times-Platinum album Nevermind in 1991, Bleach finally received the widespread attention it deserved and became a cornerstone of the grunge movement.

In more recent news, the backline used on Nirvana’s Bleach tour hit the auction block just two months ago.

When Kurt Cobain gear hits the auction block, it tends to fetch a pretty penny, and the grunge icon’s Bleach-era touring backline could be the next lot to do so.

For evidence, before the mega bucks auction of Jim Irsay's humongous and historic gear collection earlier this year, his MTV Unplugged Martin D-18E and Smells Like Teen Spirit Fender Mustang, which originally sold for a collective $10.5 million, were the world's two most expensive guitars.

Granted, there are some outliers: his 1989 Takamine acoustic, featured in one of the most recognizable photos of the late guitarist, was estimated to sell for ‘just’ $500,000 last year. Still, there’s an aura that surrounds Cobain-themed bidding wars.

This lot is expected to turn a few heads. It features black-and-silver-paneled Fender Twin Reverb combo amps, each kitted out with JBL speakers, and a Marshall 4x12 speaker cabinet. For good measure, bassist Krist Novoselic’s Ampeg SVT has also been thrown in.

The amps are being sold off via London’s Denmark Street Guitars today (April 10). Posting on Instagram, it tempts those with cash to spare to bid on its auction to “own a piece of grunge history,” although there is no mention of expected prices; it’s an open book.

As MusicRadar points out, Bleach – Nirvana’s ear-gratingly raw debut album recorded for just $600 – was recorded with a Utah speaker-leaden ’67 Fender Twin. Cobain pivoted to a slightly different flavor for the proceeding tour.

Released in the summer of ‘89 (not to be confused with the Bryan Adams song), Bleach initially sold a respectable 40,000 copies, but when the polished powerhouse that is their sophomore album, Nevermind, dropped two years later, the record enjoyed a retrospective glow-up. It's since been certified Platinum in the US, UK, and Australia.

Live tracks from the tour were included in the record's 20th-anniversary deluxe edition, suggesting that this backline was put through its paces at – among many other shows – the Pine Street Theatre in Portland, Oregon, on February 9, 1990. Their set included Love Buzz, About a Girl, and their Vaselines cover, Molly's Lips.

Cobain once described Bleach as “straight-ahead garage grunge”, and its raw, abrasive textures, coupled with Cobain's lyrical themes of alienation, societal standards, and mental health, made for a powerful statement. Machine Head would go on to cover the hammerblow track Negative Creep, giving the song a thrashy makeover.

The auction takes place today (April 10). Interest can be registered by emailing sales@londonvntageguitars.com.

And don’t worry, Aaron Rash has already been informed.

Back in 1991, just before Nirvana suddenly broke huge on MTV, rock fans and musicians alike were in a bit of a holding pattern – mainstream '80s hard rockers (see Guns N' Roses) and muso shredders were hanging on for dear life, and more aggressive funk-rockers (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fishbone, Faith No More) were going along for the ride.

So when grunge first hit it big, in the name of Nirvana, I did what many others did: I scoffed, ignorantly, and looked away. If I'd been paying closer attention, I would have noticed a genre that was redefining rock, and the hidden gem of a melody-driven trio in which influences as disparate as the Beatles and Black Flag somehow coexisted to create songs every bit as classic as Led Zeppelin's finest.

While guitarist and singer Kurt Cobain was the band's primary songwriter and drummer Dave Grohl added huge drive and dynamics to the sound, bassist Krist Novoselic was responsible for more of Nirvana's success than you might think.

This tall, gangling Washingtonian made the most of the melodic opportunities presented to him by virtue of being in a power trio, with space not just for his bass parts to move around, but also to lend melody to the chords and riffs.

Cobain's thick sludge easily took up the space of two guitarists; Drummer Dave Grohl brought a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist's perspective to his boulder-heavy grooves; and there was Novoselic holding it all together while generating counter-melodies of his own.

“I was really fortunate that I got to work with Kurt,” Novoselic told Bass Player, “He was such a talented songwriter and he had a real ear for a hook, so as far as I was concerned playing bass with him was super-easy.”

Novoselic's picked playing style gave his basslines a staccato presence that cried out to be mixed high in any given Nirvana song: see Lithium for example, where his almost funky line carries the vocals along with great character.

Closer scrutiny of Lithium reveals a purposeful, song-oriented, melodic bassline that employs an unexpected reharmonization as a key factor. Since many Nirvana tunes used the same basic chord progressions for both quiet verses and heavy choruses, it was up to Novoselic to create a line that filled out Cobain's often thin and clean verse sound.

Tone was a major part of it, and by using a pick on a Gibson Ripper bass guitar through an Ampeg SVT-400T head, he achieved a meaty punch with just the right amount of edge and attack to complement the guitar in both clean and dirty sections. Armed with the right sound, Novoselic created three distinct lines for Lithium and pounded them into rock history.

Novoselic's drop-D-tuned bass comes crashing in for the chorus. First, he follows Grohl's kick-and-snare pattern along with Cobain's first three power chords, throwing neat little register and rhythmic hooks into beats three and four.

Then at 00:45, in the song's defining bass moment, he substitutes the 5th for the root in two successive changes, hammering eighth-note F's under a Bb5 and eighth-note G's under the C5 chord.

Cobain's vocal “yeaaaaah” on an F for the entire bar increases the tension, mirroring the bass for the first half of the bar and screaming against it in the second half before everything resolves to A.

This harmonic tension repeats throughout the song's verses and subsequent choruses, and it's a huge part of Lithium itself.

Novoselic plays a repetitive line in the second verse, using the same 5th-as-root reharmonization as before. The four-bar verse phrase is played exactly the same thrice over, and then varied on the fourth repetition to set up the chorus.

To achieve this, Novoselic descends under the G5 at 01:31 to set up the notes we’ve been waiting the whole song to hear: roots under the Bb and C power chords at 01:33. That's the stuff of pure pop and song-oriented thinking, and it's what separated Nirvana from so many other bands at the time.

During the bridge, Cobain throws down G and Bb power chords every two beats for 16 bars, and it's up to Novoselic to provide the harmonic movement. He doesn't disappoint, ascending a pure G minor pentatonic scale for the first two bars, and descending a G blues scale for the next two.

Once again, he plays it exactly the same three times through, and then plays a variation in the fourth ending to set up the C and A chords that serve as a bridge back to the main progression.

Like any good pop song, the rest of the tune simply hammers (or, better put, bludgeons) home the three main sections. Cobain practically hands the whole song over to Novoselic at 02:33 for a bass interlude, and lets him carry it all the way into the heavy chorus at 03:14.

Finally, true to form, Novoselic rips off a lick in the second half of the final bridge to let us know that the tune is heading for home.

Saturday Night Live! celebrated its 50th anniversary last Friday (February 14) with a Homecoming Concert that saw Nirvana reunite for the second time in two weeks – but this time they drafted in another guest musician to front the band.

For the show, Pat Smear, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl linked up with underrated electric guitar player Post Malone, who helped the band through an infectious rendition of Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Introduced by actor/comedian Adam Sandler, the quartet put on one of the celebratory concert’s standout performances, which has drawn plaudits from artists and Nirvana fans alike.

For the show, Post Malone brought grit and angst to the vocals, and proved once again he is one of the guitar world’s most under-appreciated talents as he absolutely tore through the main progression.

He was also given the chance to flex his familiarity with the fretboard of his Gibson Les Paul, blasting through the lead hook as a Gibson CS-6-toting Smear duly took on rhythm duties.

Post Malone is certainly no stranger to Nirvana’s catalog – he previously performed a 15-song set of Nirvana classics during lockdown – nor is he out of touch with the wider guitar world.

After all, while many may be quick to point to his rap, hip-hop, and R&B background, the singer-guitarist has continually proven himself to be a criminally underrated player, one that’s wholly dedicated to his six-string craft.

Last summer, for example, he surprised Bonnaroo with a pyro-fueled guest spot alongside Billy Strings. Previously, he's nodded to his rock roots with covers of Alice in Chains’ Them Bones and Eric Johnson’s Cliffs of Dover in a guitar battle with Andrew Watt. Oh, and he’s apparently written a “phat jam” with Tom Morello.

“A special rendition,” writes broadcaster Peacock of the performance on Instagram, and many spectators are in agreement.

“How crazy would an actual tour be with this lineup,” writes one fan. “This is my dream lineup for a Nirvana reunion tour,” gushes another. “Sick!” offers Machine Head’s Robb Flynn.

As mentioned, it was the second time in two weeks that Nirvana reunited with the help of guest musicians to fill the role of the late Kurt Cobain. On January 30, the band teamed up with St. Vincent, Kim Gordon, Joan Jett and Violet Grohl for an unannounced FireAid performance concert.

Last night (January 30), a remarkable assembly of all-star musicians came together in LA for FireAid, a massive benefit concert that aimed to raise money for those affected by the devastating fires that tore through Los Angeles earlier this month.

The bill was stacked enough as it is, but one of the biggest performances of the night came from a band that wasn't even on it: Nirvana.

The three surviving members of the group – guitarist Pat Smear, bassist Krist Novoselic, and drummer Dave Grohl – played four Nirvana classics, each with a different singer in the captain's chair.

The band started off with a ferocious take on Breed, featuring St. Vincent accessing her inner punk growl.

Naturally, the alt-rock A-lister also, with a sleek, black-finished version of her Ernie Ball Music Man signature guitar, highlighted the performance with a noisy, free-spirited solo that would almost certainly have made Kurt Cobain proud.

Wielding one of her favored Jazzmasters, Sonic Youth legend Kim Gordon then took the reins for School, a scrappy highlight from the band's debut album, Bleach, using the offset's whammy bar for all it's worth.

After that it was Joan Jett's turn, for a break-neck version of the band's ultimate thrasher, Territorial Pissings, for which Jett used her sticker-adorned Gibson Melody Maker.

The mini-set was then rounded out by a powerful All Apologies with Grohl's daughter, Violet, on vocals, and Gordon returning to the stage to fill in for Novoselic – who picked up the accordion – on bass.

But for Lorde, it was the same group of frontwomen the surviving Nirvana trio played with at their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction performance in 2014.

“We thought, ‘Wait, it has to be all women,’” Grohl told Rolling Stone of the lineup of singers that same year.

“‘Don’t even ask anyone else. If we can fill the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame performance with these incredible women singing Nirvana songs, then we’ll have achieved our own revolution.’ It also added a whole other dimension to the show. It added substance and depth, so it didn’t turn into a eulogy. It was more about the future.”

“Joan Jett, who formed the Runaways, changed rock & roll for women,” Grohl continued. “Kim Gordon, from Sonic Youth, was this beacon of light in the predominantly macho, male underground punk rock scene. St. Vincent is a wicked musician that’s pushing boundaries now.”

Jimmy Haslip, drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, and guitarist Robben Ford are studio-savvy musicians whose musical connections date back to the 1970s. Back in 2001, they decided to record as a trio for the first time. In only three days of basic tracking they put together a set of 10 eclectic tunes that featured eye-popping musicianship and, particularly in Haslip's bass parts, lots of space.

“We wrote the songs with space in mind, actually,” said Haslip, who produced Jing Chi. “I like to open up spaces to allow other instruments to speak melodically or rhythmically. Thinking in these terms provides plenty of room to have a musical conversation – in other words, it leaves room for each musician to make a statement. This is a prime rule in playing successfully within an ensemble.”

Haslip is a lefty who plays a left-handed 6-string bass guitar with the strings reversed – his low B string is where the high C is normally located and vice-versa. On all of the Jing Chi tracks he played his old pre-Gibson Tobias, a prototype of sorts for the Tobias Killer B, which Haslip helped design. He changed basses only once, pulling out a Roscoe 6 for the Go Figure bass solo.

Haslip split his signal and went into two Dis: a stock Cabletech direct box and a Westlink DI. He recorded the Cabletech signal direct to Pro Tools, while the Westlink's signal went to an SWR Super Redhead amp with the tweeter turned all the way down, which was mic'd in a studio closet.

Back in June 2002, Jimmy Haslip offered up a track-by-track tour of the album.

1. The Hong Kong Incident

“This was a first take. The unison lines Robben and I play in the A sections create a lot of energy as well as tension. Then it opens up for the solo section, which we built primarily on my bassline.

“I've always been inspired by Larry Graham; that octave figure I play (at 1:46) constituted a form for Robben to solo over and Vinnie to play off of. We opened up the outro vamp and set it up for Vinnie to improvise until we dynamically bring down the music for a spacious, trippy ending.”

2. Stan Key

“A funky little tune that started with a loop and sequence Vinnie had in his computer. He had an interesting idea to record some tweaked snare drumming, and we added that on the end, which gave the song an interesting fadeout.

“At first I didn't have a good handle on what to play, but eventually I came up with a line based on an arpeggiated-picking, almost folk-guitar technique I use: I pick the lower notes with my index and middle fingers, and I use my thumb to pop high notes. I use that for much of the tune's groove section.”

3. Tengoku

“We improvised the intro, which sets up the unusual progression that's built on an Oriental-sounding scale. Again, we opened up everything with a jam on my bassline. It's all in 4/4, but it's rhythmically altered.

“My muting technique involves my fretting hand; in my case it's my right hand. When I'm muting like this I use only my index finger to fret the notes. Plucking the strings aggressively results in an intense thumping sound, like tuned bass drums. I can also mute the strings to the extreme to create dead notes whose sole purpose is to reinforce a rhythmic drum pattern.”

“We decided it got kind of redundant for me to start out with that bass figure and play it for the whole song. I ended up messing with it throughout the tune until the end, when I finally get to the original bass figure I wrote (at 7:40).

“We recorded the tune in one take. The form was basically improvised, and we cued each other visually. It was an experiment, but we like the way it worked.”

4. Crazy House

“This bassline was inspired by my listening to James Brown for many years. A lot of my roots are in R&B, and that comes out from time to time in a song like Crazy House, which sounds almost like an old Bar-Kays groove.

“This jam happened out of the blue after a short discussion about an idea and a form. We liked it so much that we just kept it intact. Vinnie and I added some samples that gave the simple jam session a nice dimension.”

5. Going Nowhere 

“Robben wrote this one, so I played what he wrote pretty much verbatim. I wanted it to sound more synth-like, so I used muting. I also mixed the bass a little hotter than usual; I wanted to accentuate the instrument's percussive nature to bring out the synth-like quality.

“Playing-wise, I was inspired by Jack Bruce's early work with Cream. I like the simplicity of the progression and the groove, and I also like Robben's positive, colorful imagery in the lyric.”

6. Go Figure

“During a jam Robben started playing this chordal pattern; it sounded familiar, but we weren't sure what it was. Than it hit us – it was the Goldfinger theme!

“This tune has my only solo on the record. I actually wasn't thinking of taking any solos on this recording; I just wanted to establish a strong groove, as I feel comfortable in that role and don't feel the need to solo on everything.

“I wanted a slightly different sound for the solo, so I chose my Roscoe 6-string. The Roscoe has a baritone-guitar-like sound, and I thought it would make for a nice change of pace. Plus, I've been playing that bass on most of my live gigs and thought it would be the most comfortable to use as a solo instrument. I thought of using a fretless, but I chose to stay with the fretted sound.”

7. Man in the Ring

“This song reminds me of a unique interpretation of the ZZ Top sound. We were jamming and Vinnie was playing a hip groove in seven, and I joined in and found this little bassline that repeats.

“This tune was hard to feel; I wanted to play something solid, so that if Vinnie started displacing eighth-notes – which he does regularly – I could hold everything down and not lose the pocket. That got pretty hairy during Robben's solo. At one point I really didn't know where one was, but I was totally focused on what I was playing. I knew where I was and trusted Vinnie to know where one was, and fortunately it worked out.”

8. In My Dream

“This ambient piece was inspired by many hours of listening to Radiohead. You can hear a slightly different bass sound on this track: I wrote the tune on my Akai MPC 2000 home workstation and then transferred the tracks to Pro Tools. But I wanted to emulate the synth-bass sound from the demo, so I played my MTD 6 again with a muted technique.

“We kept the original synth bass during the mix, but I featured the electric bass with the synth sound just shadowing the line. We also used a bit more compression on the bass to make it pop out.

“For the bridge I got the swells on the long, sustained notes with a volume pedal, and I overdubbed some picked notes as well. On the fade/vamp I play the bassline an octave lower than the synth to give the ending some serious girth.”

9. Train Song

“I came up with a slightly altered I-IV-V blues. I wanted it to be like a Cream tune, but then Robben wanted to put on some Spanish guitar, so it became more of a flamenco Cream song! I play just a simple blues-rock bass part. Our engineer, Rich Breen, treated the acoustic guitar with reverse delays, which created an unusual environment for the melody sections.”

10. Aurora

“Vinnie came up with this one, which has a serious Led-Zeppelin-meets-Frank-Zappa unison riff up front. The body of the tune kind of reminded me of Nirvana, so I tried to imagine what Krist Novoselic might play.

“Vinnie thought he could build a solo around the unison figure at the end, so we constructed a form for him to blow over. I thought it would make for a powerful, surprise ending to an eclectic body of work. If you listen closely, you can hear Vinnie's reaction.”

Nirvana fans attending the FooVana gig last week were treated to a special guest appearance from Krist Novoselic, who joined the Foo Fighters/Nirvana tribute act to play a handful of the band’s songs.

FooVana were performing at Georgie's Garage & Grill in Vancouver, Washington, on Thursday, July 18. Novoselic’s presence was teased ahead of the gig, as the band posted an image of the bass player on their Facebook with the caption: “Show’s about to start! Oh yeah that’s right… Somebody else is here!”

The Nirvana legend accompanied the band for three of the Seattle icon’s hits – Blew, Lithium, and Smells Like Teen Spirit – as the tribute band suddenly got that much closer to the real deal.

Notably, it was the first time Novoselic had played Blew live for three decades, with the Nirvana co-founder telling the audience: “The last time I played that song was 30 years ago”.

FooVana’s guitarists were armed with a Dave Grohl Epiphone DG-335 and a Fender Jaguar, respectively, as they looked to nail the vibes and tones of both bands. Novoselic, meanwhile, opted for his signature Gibson RD bass.

Novoselic recently said he loves Gibson basses “because they're so dense”, as he unveiled his new band The Bona Fide Band with a rendition of Nirvana’s first-ever single.

Between that band and 3rd Secret – his project with Soundgarden's Kim Thayil and Matt Cameron – he's keeping himself plenty busy, but not too busy so that he didn't have time for this surprise celebration of Nirvana's everlasting legacy.

Nirvana bassist and co-founder Krist Novoselic's new group, The Bona Fide Band, have just played their first few shows in the Washington area, including Kurt Cobain's hometown Aberdeen. As fitting for the occasion, they paid tribute to Cobain with their own rendition of Love Buzz, a song that launched Nirvana's career.

The Bona Fide Band, which, aside from Novoselic on bass, consists of vocalists Jillian Raye and Jennifer Johnson from the grunge supergroup 3rd Secret, former Screaming Trees drummer Mark Pickerel, guitarist Kathy More from The Kathy Moore Super Power Trio, debuted at Easy Street Records in Seattle on June 20. The band performed at the Make Music Day celebrations in Aberdeen, Washington a day later.

While their set heavily skewed towards tracks from the 3rd Secret's repertoire and Novoselic's former band Giants in the Trees, the band covered psych-rock band Shocking Blue's Love Buzz.

This performance served as a nod to Nirvana, who famously released a cover of Love Buzz as their debut Sub Pop single in 1988. A slightly different mix later appeared on Nirvana's debut album Bleach.

Speaking of his new band and this performance to Seattle's KOMO News, Novoselic said he formed The Bona Fide Band partly to raise awareness of his new political party, the Cascade Party.

“It's moving. I'm really looking forward to playing in Aberdeen, and that's on June 21st on World Music Day. We're just going to make music and try to make people happy and entertain people.”

“If it brings back memories and feelings for people, that's the magic of music,” he asserted. “We're not going to contaminate that with politics. We're not going to make these political speeches.”

For the occasion, Novoselic brandished an Alpine White Gibson Thunderbird bass. In a 2011 interview with Bass Player, he commented on his career-long affinity for Gibson basses, particularly the Gibson Ripper he used during his Nirvana days.

“I’m six foot seven,” he commented, “which is lucky, because it’s a big bass. Check one out when you go to a music store. Try it on, because it’s big and heavy, it’s a big gun, but it’s got that sustain that I really like. You just let the note ring. That’s probably why I stuck with Gibson basses the whole way through, because they’re so dense.”

A new four-part docuseries, Geddy Lee Asks: Are Bass Players Human Too?, is set to premiere on Paramount Plus on December 5th – and you can watch the first trailer below.

Highlights include snippets of Lee fishing with Les Claypool, flying a plane with Krist Novoselic, and surfing with Robert Trujillo. “The idea for this show was born out of interviews I did for my first book, The Big, Beautiful Book of Bass,” says Lee. “I was struck that these accomplished musicians also lived incredibly interesting, multifaceted lives offstage.”

The series follows Lee as he travels to the homes of four bass legends: Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic, Metallica’s Robert Trujillo, Primus’ Les Claypool, and former Hole and Smashing Pumpkins bassist Melissa Auf der Maur.

“I’m trying to show the world that a bass player can do many things,” Lee says in the trailer. “Join me as I try to answer one really important question: are bass players human too?”

Another neat takeaway from the trailer that’s bound to get bass guitarists raving include Trujillo’s rendition of Portrait of Tracy on what appears to be Jaco’s Bass of Doom. Trujillo helped the Pastorius family to recover Jaco’s infamous 1962 Fender Jazz Bass back in 2010.

As well as glimpses of Lee trading bass licks with Auf der Maur, the trailer also pays tribute to Lee’s world-conquering curiosity, with the Rush frontman stripping his coveralls following a tour of Claypool’s “Rancho Relaxo” home in Sonoma County, before defiantly asking, “Is this what they call good TV?”

Aside from the new series, Geddy Lee is also gearing up for a book tour in support of his upcoming memoir, My Effin’ Life, which is set to arrive on November 14th. The tour starts in New York City on November 13th, and runs through to December 7th in Toronto. See below for a full list of dates.

• November 13 – New York, NY @ Beacon Theatre
• November 15 – Philadelphia, PA @ The Met Philadelphia
• November 17 – National Harbor, MD @ The Theater at MGM National Harbor
• November 18 – Boston, MA @ Orpheum Theatre presented by Citizens
• November 19 – Cleveland, OH @ State Theatre at Playhouse Square
• November 21 – Montréal, QC @ Théâtre Maisonneuve
• November 23 – Vancouver, BC @ The Centre in Vancouver
• November 24 – Seattle, WA @ Moore Theatre
• November 26 – San Francisco, CA @ The Masonic
• November 28 – Los Angeles, CA @ Orpheum Theatre
• November 30 – Denver, CO @ Paramount Theatre
• December 03 – Chicago, IL @ Auditorium Theatre
• December 04 – Detroit, MI @ The Fillmore Detroit
• December 07 – Toronto, ON @ Massey Hall

Geddy Lee Asks: Are Bass Players Human Too? premieres on Paramount+ on December 5th. My Effin’ Life is out 14th November via HarperCollins.

On the surface, you wouldn't think Nirvana – with their anarchic live performances, and the crunchy distortion and blistering volume of their studio recordings – had much in common with the Beatles.

The Fab Four, however, were a major influence on Nirvana's frontman and electric guitar player, Kurt Cobain, from his childhood through his development of Nirvana's world-altering catalog.

“I remember years ago asking [Cobain's hometown friend] Eric Shillinger, ‘How successful do you think a band could be if they mixed really heavy Black Sabbath with the Beatles?,” Cobain once recalled to journalist Michael Azerrad. “What could you do with that?”

If only Cobain could've seen – decades later, and almost 20 years after his tragic death in 1994 – all three of his Nirvana bandmates create, and perform, an original song with Paul McCartney.

2012 was an especially unlikely time for McCartney to join forces with the grunge legends, fresh as he was off the back of that year's Kisses on the Bottom, a stately album that saw the Mount-Rushmore-of-pop songwriter tackle standards of the '30s, '40s, and '50s – a far cry from Territorial Pissings, for sure. 

And yet, 2012 was also the year that saw McCartney, Dave Grohl, Pat Smear, and Krist Novoselic create Cut Me Some Slack, a blues-grunge howler that featured McCartney riffing – and even, for the first time, showing his slide guitar skills – on one of the strangest guitars he's ever slung over his shoulder.

McCartney first played Cut Me Some Slack – a studio version of which would be released on the 2013 Grohl-led Sound City: Real to Reel album – live at the 12-12-12 Hurricane Sandy relief benefit concert at Madison Square Garden. 

His mini-set was loaded with Beatles, Wings, and solo classics, for which McCartney – among other instruments – used a couple Gibson Les Pauls, and, of course, his trademark Hofner bass guitar.

For Cut Me Some Slack, though, McCartney was armed with a “Resofiddle,“ a “paint can lid resonator“ cigar box guitar built by Matty Baratto, a luthier whose incredible clientele list includes – aside from McCartney – Prince, Josh Homme, Joe Perry, Jack White, Slash, Keith Richards, Zakk Wylde, and Johnny Depp, among many others.

According to Baratto, it was Depp who got the Resofiddle (and a Baratto wine box guitar amp, featuring a 6” Jensen speaker, to go with it) into the Beatle's hands. As soon as McCartney picked it up, it led his playing in entirely new, and fascinating, directions.

In an interview with Guitar World, Baratto recounted meeting McCartney, and the latter's wonder at the Resofiddle, and where it took him, artistically. 

“You know, I've never played slide before, but it just started doing things on its own,” the Beatle told Baratto. “I didn’t even have to try, the sound... it just did things.“

“As a guitar maker,” Baratto tells Guitar World, “you don’t really need much more of an endorsement.”

“I never, in a million years, would have thought that I’d [one day] be talking about Resofiddles one-on-one with one of the most influential musicians ever,” Baratto says. “But there I was, listening and feeling like I was watching from above in a dream state – just hoping to remember everything.”

Baratto – who, before starting his own company, cut his teeth at Ibanez's LA Custom Shop from 1994 through 1999 – outfitted his four-string (tuned D, A, D, F#) Resofiddle with a lipstick pickup and brass nut. 

Just days after the 12-12-12 concert, the Resofiddle (examples of which would eventually go on display at the Grammy Museum, after Cut Me Some Slack picked up the 2014 Grammy for Best Rock Song) made another prominent appearance during McCartney and Nirvana's performance of Cut Me Some Slack on Saturday Night Live. 

The considerably more intimate SNL stage allows for some killer, up-close looks at the cigar box four-string, particularly its beautifully retro body.

Baratto says that he told McCartney, “I always wanted to be on SNL.” To that, the Beatle smiled, playfully hit the luthier on the shoulder, and said, “You were all over it, man!” 

As a founding member of Nirvana, bassist Krist Novoselic helped create some of the most beloved and endearing guitar music of all time. While Kurt Cobain was the band’s primary songwriter and drummer Dave Grohl added huge drive and dynamics to the sound, Novoselic made the most of the melodic opportunities presented to him by virtue of being in a power trio, always a bassist’s dream.

However, he never hogged the limelight or indeed the full frequency range; his basslines were definitely an important part of each song’s melodic content and often an actual hook, but the songwriting remained the trio’s main focus rather than each members playing skills. Or as Krist once told BP, “I’ve approached bass playing as a bridge between the rhythm section and the guitar/vocal melody.”

Today, we’re looking back at the five basslines that made Krist Novoselic so essential to Nirvana. 

1. About A Girl (Bleach, 1989)

Novoselic delivers a warm, almost metallic bassline on this early classic, when Kurt Cobain was still referring to himself as ‘Kurdt Kobain’ and which was released at a time when people thought that Extreme and Warrant were like, totally cool dude. For 1989's Bleach, Novoselic deployed a variety of basses, including a Fender Jazz, an Ibanez Black Eagle and even a borrowed Hohner.

2. Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nevermind, 1991)

An anthem for a generation of slackers it may be, but Smells Like Teen Spirit is usually underestimated as a performed piece of music. It devolves during its verses to Novoselic’s simple four-note bassline. It’s the simplest pattern of eighths possible, and Novoselic performs it with total skill, playing microscopically behind the beat to lend it extra weight. The solidity of this classic bass guitar part is still gobsmacking to this day.

3. Lithium (Nevermind, 1991)

“I’m so happy,” lied Kurt Cobain over Novoselic’s snappy, almost cheeky bass part – one of those little licks that you tend to hum to yourself without ever really realising that it actually exists. His choice of notes is generally economical; you won't hear any extended runs despite Kurt dropping out before the song’s final verse, at which point Novoselic carries the entire arrangement.

4. On a Plain (Nevermind, 1991)

Perhaps more than any other song recorded by Nirvana, On a Plain sounds like big-hair arena rock, from it’s full-fat opening chords to the fists-aloft chorus. Novoselic's tone here is crunchy and warm, with sufficient top to give it definition, but a world away from the traditional, scooped metal bass sound that stood for everything that Nirvana were against. Keep an ear out for that nifty three-second bass solo after each chorus.

5. Serve The Servants (In Utero, 1993)

After the happy-clappy stadium sounds of Nevermind, Nirvana sought a darker place from which to operate, and found one with In Utero, one of the most lyrically miserable albums ever recorded. Sonically, it was a heavier, subtler experience than its predecessor, with Novoselic laying down a bass part that coupled perfectly with Cobain’s riffage on this opening cut.

Nirvana - The Bass Guitar Collection is available on amazon.

It’s impossible to deny the sea-change brought about by Nirvana’s Nevermind. Even if grunge lasted no longer than vocalist Kurt Cobain himself, who drew a line under his career in the most permanent way possible in April 1994. The album's enormous presence also drew attention to the melodic pick playing of bassist Krist Novoselic, which cried out to be mixed high in any given Nirvana song. "I was really fortunate that I got to work with Kurt: he was such a talented songwriter and he had a real ear for a hook, so as far as I was concerned playing bass with him was super-easy."

Cobain once described his songwriting as a combination of his favorite influences – the Beatles and Black Sabbath – and purportedly asked engineers to make him sound like John Lennon. All of which made Paul McCartney a pretty solid choice to front a Nirvana reunion at a charity concert at Madison Square Garden in December 2012.

Speaking from the stage before introducing Dave Grohl, Pat Smear and Krist Novoselic, McCartney said: “So recently, some guys asked me to go and jam with them. So I showed up ready to jam, and these guys kept saying they hadn't played together for years. The penny finally dropped and I finally understood that I was in the middle of a Nirvana reunion.”

The Nirvana bandmates performed Cut Me Some Slack – the original song they had recorded for Grohl’s Sound City documentary. So what was it like collaborating with a living legend? “Incredible,” said Novoselic. “Dave had sent me an email asking if I wanted to record with Paul McCartney in L.A., and I said, 'Dude, I’ll walk there from Washington if I have to.' So I flew down and we were standing around figuring out what to do, and I kept thinking, please don’t make me play bass guitar, please don’t make me play bass. That’s like being asked to do karate with Bruce Lee – you’re going to get your ass kicked. 'Yep, I’m going boxing. Who’s your sparring partner? Muhammad Ali. Good luck with that!'” 

“So of course he asked me to play bass. Paul had this slide guitar that he was playing, and Dave was playing drums, but it wasn’t working for us. Then I realized we were playing in D, so I did the old grunge trick and I drop-tuned my bass to D. I played some riffs, and boom! Paul got into it, Pat Smear was feeling it, and Dave laid down some serious grooves. Then Paul shot me a riff and I shot him a riff and everything started clicking perfectly. We had the old band back together, and we had this cool left-handed guitarist, who was actually Paul McCartney, and he was doing vocals. I had to pinch myself. We ended up winning a Grammy for that song, too.”

Cut Me Some Slack was an immediate hit with critics and won a Grammy award for Best Rock Song in 2014. “There was speculation that Nirvana was reuniting, with Paul taking over for Kurt, but it was just fun,” says Krist. “He said he liked my basslines. Paul McCartney said that! You can put that in a pull quote.”

Despite taking home two awards for New Artist and Alternative Video for Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana’s night at the 1992 MTV Awards was largely one to forget for bassist Krist Novoselic.

Having already found himself in the middle of a fracas with Guns ‘N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan, the Nirvana bassist went on to accidentally knock himself out with his bass. Lauded as the worst bass guitar throw in rock history, the resulting head wound eventually led to a shared glass of champagne with Queen’s Brian May.

“Oh, that was mega!” says Krist Novoselic. “We started playing this song and my amp just didn’t work. So I thought, ‘I’m gonna do this bass toss and walk off’. Well, the bass got caught in the TV lights, and then boom! It fell on my head. So I storm off stage, and these paramedics come and take a look at me and put a bandage on and I had to sign all these release forms so I’m not gonna sue anybody. It was in front of 200 million people, right?" 

Having been signed off by the onsite paramedics, Novoselic was surprised to receive some additional treatment from Queen guitarist Brian May.

"So I’m all annoyed, right, and I’m like ‘What the hell!’ and behind them there is this amazing fellow, with a glass of champagne. It’s Brian May! Just standing there politely. He says ‘Here you are, my good man’ and he hands me this glass of champagne.

"I was like ‘You’re Brian May! How are you?’ and he said, ‘More importantly, how are you?’ Moments later Dave Grohl burst in. He'd been looking all over for me, only to find me enjoying a calm glass of bubbly with Mr. May."

Anyone familiar with Nirvana’s albums, or even solely with Nevermind – their biggest seller – will know that Novoselic made a point of laying down simple, effective bass parts with a tone to die for.

“I’ve learned that countless people have learned to play bass from listening to those records," he says. "They’re simple, melodic basslines, which is what you need when you’re starting out.”

30 years later, it’s impossible to deny the sea-change brought about by Nirvana. Even if grunge lasted no longer than Cobain himself, who drew a line under his career in the most permanent way possible in April 1994. These songs are his lasting legacy.

“I was really fortunate that I got to work with Kurt: he was such a talented songwriter and he had a real ear for a hook, so as far as I was concerned playing bass with him was super-easy.”

Julien's Auctions is having one heck of a sale next weekend (November 11 - November 13).

We've already reported on the dozens of guitars Steve Vai is selling as part of it, plus Don McLean's Vincent Martin 00-21 acoustic guitar, and Kurt Cobain's played, smashed, and signed 1973 Fender Mustang, both of which are also being put under the hammer by Julien's that weekend.

Now, Julien's has added another five guitars to the sale, each of which were signed by performers at the two recent Taylor Hawkins tribute concerts.

First among the offerings is a Gibson Trini Lopez signature guitar – the longtime six-string of choice for Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl – that's been signed by Grohl, one-time Nirvana bass guitar player Krist Novoselic, and a number of other performers at the concert. 

A 2012 model, the guitar was signed at the second of the two Hawkins tribute concerts, at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles, California. The signed instrument also comes with a 360 degree digital representation of the guitar, packaged as an NFT.

As of press time, bidding for the guitar – which is valued between $6,000 and $8,000 – currently sits at $6,000.

Also on offer is a 2000s-era EVH Frankenstien replica signed at the LA Hawkins tribute show by performers including Grohl, Novoselic, Stewart Copeland, Kesha and Joan Jett.

Valued at between $3,000 and $5,000, the guitar also comes with a 360 degree digital representation packaged as an NFT. The current high bid for the guitar, as of this writing, is $3,500.

Also part of the lot is a 2021 Manson John Paul Jones signature bass that was signed – at the first of the Hawkins tribute shows, at Wembley Stadium – by Novoselic, Elliot Easton, Jones himself, and a number of others who played at the event.

The bass is also packaged with a 360 degree digital representation NFT, and is valued at between $3,000 and $5,000. Bidding for the four-string currently sits at $2,250.

Slightly different from the rest of the group is a Fender Nile Rodgers signature Hitmaker Stratocaster.

This particular Stratocaster doesn't feature any autographs at the moment, but Rodgers will – if the buyer so desires – sign the guitar personally to its new owner upon its purchase, and record a brief video message for them as well.

Valued at between $6,000 and $8,000, bidding for the Hitmaker sits at $700 as of this writing.

Last but not least is a 2022 Brian May Red Special guitar, signed at the Wembley show by performers including Grohl, Copeland, Kesha and Brian Johnson.

The Red Special has an estimated value of between $4,000 and $6,000, and also comes with a 360 degree digital representation NFT. Bidding for the instrument currently sits at $2,250.

The Icons & Idols: Rock ‘N’ Roll auction, to give it its full name, will run from November 11 through November 13 in person at New York City's Hard Rock Cafe and online.

For more info on the auction, visit Julien's.

The Los Angeles tribute to late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins took place at the city’s Kia Forum last night (September 27), and the six-hour all-star show featured a raft of highlights, including a partial Soundgarden reunion.

Soundgarden members Kim Thayil and Matt Cameron were joined by Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic, Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl and Pat Smear, and The Pretty Reckless vocalist Taylor Momsen for a pair of covers.

With Grohl, Smear and Thayil on guitars, the all-star lineup tackled two singles from 1994’s classic Superunknown album: The Day I Tried to Live and Black Hole Sun. Both performances have been captured in snippets of fan footage.

Thayil turned to his go-to guitars on the tracks – an EEBBBB-tuned Gibson Firebird and Guild SG in drop D – while Pat Smear opted for a Les Paul, and Dave Grohl was on – what else? – his Gibson Trini Lopez.

The performance is somewhat bittersweet given Taylor Hawkins tackled The Day I Tried to Live at a tribute concert to late Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell in 2019.

Momsen has sung with Thayil and Cameron on several occasions, first at the Cornell tribute and subsequently on The Pretty Reckless’s most recent album. More recently, Thayil guested with the band on a live rendition of Soundgarden’s Loud Love.

Thayil, Novoselic and Cameron, meanwhile, currently perform together in Seattle supergroup 3rd Secret.

Other highlights from Tuesday night’s set included reunions from the likes of Them Crooked Vultures, the James Gang and the surviving members of Rush, plus performances from Def Leppard, Nancy Wilson, Queen, Joan Jett, Elliot Easton, Alanis Morissette, Alain Johannes, Pink, Kesha and many more.

Wolfgang Van Halen, who wowed the world with dead-on renditions of Hot For Teacher and On Fire at the London leg, this time tackled Van Halen classic Panama.

Kim Thayil, his Soundgarden bandmate and Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron and Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic have formed a new supergroup, 3rd Secret.

The band also features Bubba Dupree, guitarist for D.C. hardcore vets Void and Cameron side-project Hater, plus vocalists Jennifer Johnson and Jillian Raye, who also feature in Novoselic’s Giants in the Trees.

3rd Secret announced the band and surprise-released their self-titled debut album simultaneously on Monday night. It was recorded and mixed by legendary grunge producer Jack Endino, and it’s available to hear on streaming services now.

The record certainly delivers on the promise of its lineup, with sinewy, off-kilter riffs and the odd frenzied solo from Thayil. But there’s an altogether folkier acoustic thread running through the album, too, which nods to landmark grunge recordings such as Alice in Chains’ Jar of Flies and Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged.

It seems 3rd Secret have already made their live debut, with a secret show at Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture, revealed in a photo shared by Cameron on Instagram.

Last year, Thayil and Cameron collaborated on The Pretty Reckless single Only Love Can Save Me Now, and the guitarist has frequently expressed a desire to work with his Soundgarden bandmates again following the death of Chris Cornell in 2017.

“I think it's very likely that Matt and Ben and I will play together,” Thayil said last month. “The three of us have an interest in doing new things. We certainly like working together.”

In the meantime, the new supergroup have launched a charmingly old-school website at 3rdsecret.com, where you can keep up to date with their future activities.

The following interview was first published in Bass Player magazine in 2011.

“I’m never in any bass magazines!” snickers Krist Novoselic, legend for an entire generation of grunge fans. Why should this be, we ask ourselves? Perhaps it’s because his old band Nirvana have been defunct since 1994, when the singer Kurt Cobain ended his life in tragic circumstances – or maybe it’s because Novoselic is best known these days not for his bass playing, but for his political writings and activism. 

Gibson recently unveiled Novoselic’s new RD bass, a tasty, retro-looking instrument, and unlike so many signature models, it seems that it didn’t take too many prototypes to complete. 

As the man himself tells us, “It didn’t take long to do, because it’s just a reproduction of an RD with a new look. They built them in the ’70s, and now you can buy a new one. What I did was, I shipped my standard RD to Gibson in Tennessee and said, ‘I really like this thing, but the pickups are kinda dull’ so they put a new Seymour Duncan Hot Stack on there. They made the headstock elongated and the fretboard is made of sustainable wood, too. I played it – and they nailed it first time.”

What we at BP find hard to believe is that no bass manufacturer has offered Novoselic a signature model before, even though his old band’s biggest albums – Nevermind and In Utero – had made him a household name by the mid-’90s. 

“No, I’ve never been asked!” he confirms. “I was blown away when Gibson approached me, because I really loved that bass. Even if they’d just reissued it rather than made one for me, I would have bought one. 

“You can’t even find these old basses on eBay: They go really fast on there, for like 2,500 bucks. You can buy this new RD and keep it your whole life, it’s like a member of the family. You don’t have to bid on eBay for one, and it doesn’t have someone’s sweat all over it!”

Novoselic was also known back in the Nirvana days for playing a Gibson Ripper, a hefty instrument to say the least. “I’m six foot seven,” he explains, “which is lucky, because it’s a big bass. Check one out when you go to a music store. Try it on, because it’s big and heavy, it’s a big gun, but it’s got that sustain that I really like. You just let the note ring.

“That’s probably why I stuck with Gibson basses the whole way through, because they’re so dense. I played a blonde Ripper on Nevermind. I had two that got stolen, actually: the blonde one sounded different from my other black one. You just gotta try them out and see what works for you.” 

Anyone familiar with Nirvana’s albums, or even solely with Nevermind – their biggest seller by some distance – will know that Novoselic made a point of laying down simple, catchy, effective bass parts with a tone to die for. 

Those basslines have influenced a whole host of players, he tells us: “I’ve learned that countless people have learned to play bass from listening to those records. They’re always coming up to me and saying, ‘Those records taught me how to play.’ They’re simple, melodic lines, which is what you need when you’re starting out.”

Does he listen back to his old recordings and cringe, or do those bass parts still sound good all these years later? “Oh, I’m happy with them, there’s no cringing there at all. 

“We were a collaboration: Dave [Grohl, drums, now of the Foo Fighters] and Kurt had to like the bass parts, too. So it’s all great. They came together really well. I still approach bass playing with the idea of, ‘What does the song need?’ Like, if it’s a heavy, dark, grinding song, or a pop song that needs some melody, or whatever. 

“I was really fortunate that I got to work with Kurt: he was such a talented songwriter and he had a real ear for a hook, so as far as I was concerned playing bass with him was super-easy.

“My unsolicited advice for bass players is that you’re not chained to the guitar: you’re chained to the kick drum, right? But listen to what the vocal melodies are doing. If you can accentuate that and play off that, you’re adding a dynamic to the band and to the song, and if you’re lucky and it comes together, it sounds big.”

Big was indeed what Novoselic’s bass sounded like, and in many ways he occupied a dream situation for any bassist – a power trio with plenty of space not just for his parts to move around, but also to lend melody to the chords and riffs. 

“I had lots of room for the bass,” he affirms, “and Nirvana had these hard/soft, loud/quiet dynamics which required lots of octave parts and parts that were higher on the neck. I’d go down to that E string when the big chorus came – boom!” 

This reminds us of On A Plain, the Nevermind song on which the other band-members mute after each chorus for Novoselic to play a three-second descending riff.

“Oh yeah!” he recalls. “In On A Plain, the E string is drop-tuned to D, so I rotated between the D string and the drop D. There you go. It was a real simple riff that the vocals were wrapped around, so I wanted to do something to bounce it up a little bit.” 

Is Novoselic the same bass player today as he was in the heady days of 1991? “I think so,” he muses. “I’ve been doing the same things lately as I used to do. I’ll tune in to whatever the riff is, and play with dynamics and do different things. I played on the Foo Fighters’ new album [Wasting Light, 2010]: I went in and I played lead bass, because Nate Mendel is the bass player in the Foo Fighters, so he played the lower bass.

“When I showed up they said ‘Oh Krist, you’re going to play lead bass,’ I’m like ‘Okay’ and they had this Gibson Ripper there. I plugged in a Rat distortion pedal and said, ‘Great, roll the Pro Tools’. They said ‘No’. I said, ‘What do you mean, no?’ and they said, ‘We’re making this on tape, dude, remember we told you?’ And I was like, ‘You mean I gotta do the whole take?’ and they were standing there with their arms crossed, saying ‘Yep. Can you still do it, Krist?’ It was a separate-the-men-from-the-boys situation!”

Anathema this might be to Nirvana’s resolutely anti-establishment stance, but did Novoselic ever venture into thumping and plucking? “I never did,” he says, as we expect.

“It was Flea from the Chili Peppers who brought that back. I never did any funk playing myself: I come out of the school of John Entwistle and Geezer Butler, and of course Paul McCartney. Those are the big three for me, along with Mike Mills from R.E.M. 

“I just played just rock bass, without any kind of funk in it. I remember in the early ’80s when the Chili Peppers were raging: you’d have these dudes with a five-string and a Gallien-Krueger amp. I would play through an Ampeg with a 2x15” cab: old-school.”

Asked how Novoselic got into bass in the first place, he embarks on a nostalgic train of thought. “When I was living in Aberdeen, Washington and playing with Kurt,” he begins, “he had this Mosrite Univox guitar and a nice Peavey tube amp, so I got a Fender Mustang guitar and used it as a bass. We knew this person who had this cheap ’60s Japanese bass and a cheap amp called a PMF. 

“He was kind enough to let me borrow it, and then we found this drummer Aaron Burckhard, and we were among a group of youngsters who would hang out with the Melvins’ drummer Dale Crover. They rehearsed at his parents’ house, and we’d hang out on the back porch and listen to them rehearse. They were very disciplined and would play every day for hours. We wouldn’t bother them: we would just sit and listen.”

He continues, “The Melvins were so focused, so Kurt and Aaron and I took that ethic and started playing like that. We said, ‘We’re gonna be like the Melvins, we’re gonna be tight and play a lot’, and Kurt was such a prolific artist that he’d be off drawing something, or doing some kind of sculpture, or some kind of weird collage, and he’d write songs. 

“He was always compelled to express himself, and that’s how the band started. I just fit in as a bass player – Kurt was really inspired by Greg Ginn and Black Flag. He wasn’t like a technical riff guitarist; he just made this kind of abstract sound. 

“I just fell into playing bass: I had this black Ibanez for $300, which was a good bass. We were working and I bought a bass amp, so I had my own setup, and I just fell into this Ibanez. We were playing in a trio so I had a lot of latitude, but I tried to keep it nailed down: I let the drummer and the guitar player go off while I kept it tethered to the ground.” 

Many a grunge fan would love to have been at Nirvana’s rehearsals in those far-off days. Did Novoselic ever throw in a few complex fills to push the songs along? “I guess, yeah! A lot of it was just scales, though. It depended on what was going on in the band. We would have these rehearsals and just make up songs.

“I don’t know why we didn’t have a tape recorder there, or a multi-track or something. The songs that were after Nevermind and before In Utero... we would pull those songs out so fast, and Kurt would make up a vocal, and so many of those things were lost. We were just making stuff up because we really liked playing together.”

Nowadays Novoselic is studying for a law degree. “Yes, that’s my goal,” he nods. “I go to school. In fact, I’m going to be on TV on a political commentary show this afternoon. I still play bass, I was doing it last week, but it’s just a helping hand these days. I have my bass set up in the living room over there, I still have that same Hiwatt head that I used on In Utero. That’s hooked up to a new 8x10”. It shakes the whole house.”

It would be remiss of us if we didn’t ask Novoselic if he has ambitions towards public office. “No, I’m never going to do that, I don’t need a job!” he states emphatically. “I’m into transformational politics. In the United States, things are really out of whack – people are protesting all around the country. 

“I was sceptical at first, but these Occupy movements have really captured the imagination of the establishment as a movement, so the next thing those people should do is run for office. That’s what you do in a stable democracy, right?” 

But you can’t take Novoselic out of politics, just as you couldn’t take the politics out of Nirvana, in the final analysis. “I have so many blessings,” he says. “I got to play with Dave Grohl and Kurt Cobain. I don’t want to run for office – you have to go to all these meetings. Forget it! 

“People gotta get together. Twitter, Facebook... the social networking thing. Can you imagine if you won the election with 99 percent of the population? That would be a commanding lead...” Let’s hope he changes his mind about running for office. President Novoselic? Sounds good to us. 

Foo Fighters electric guitar player Pat Smear recently told Howard Stern that he and his former Nirvana band mates, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, still sometimes get together in private to run through some of their old band’s tunes.

Now, in another new interview with Stern, Grohl has revealed that the trio not only jam together on old material, but have also recorded some “really cool” new music.

“Krist Novoselic is a pilot, he flies his own plane,” Grohl said. “He lives up in the Pacific Northwest and whenever he comes down to Los Angeles, 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 just, we like to be together. We like to see each other and if there are instruments around or a studio that’s available, we’ll just get together and kind of jam, you know?

He continued, “We don’t, like, run through a big old Nirvana setlist but we do like to fool around and sometimes as we’re fooling around, songs happen. And you know if we’re in a studio we’ll record them. So we’ve recorded some stuff that’s really cool. But we’ve never done anything with it… it’s more just like friends, jamming around, it doesn’t really seem like any sort of like big official reunion.”

As for whether he handles vocals on the jams, Grohl said, “Well, no I’m just playing the drums. We don’t have a singer. So, it’s like, 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 we put the three of us in a room and it makes that noise, it still does.”

A Kurt Cobain-owned and -played Marshall guitar cabinet, which featured in Nirvana’s Live and Loud video recorded at Pier 48 in 1993, has been sold by Iconic Auctions for a huge sum of $93,274.

Cobain’s cab, which has been heavily photo and video matched, comes equipped with Celestion V30 speakers and is adorned by faint “Kurt” and stenciled “K3 Music Bank – Vintage” lettering on the back.

The iconic piece of music memorabilia was sold as part of the auction house’s Amazing Music Auction (Vol. 1), alongside an array of other items, including a blue Stinger Strat-style six-string, which sports the signatures of each Nirvana member, and a handful of Cobain’s hair.

That’s right – six strands of Kurt Cobain’s hair, provided by the woman who cut it in 1989, went up for auction, and fetched a cool $14,145. That’s over $2,000 per hair.

The original listing for the hair read, “This one-of-a-kind artifact is entirely fresh-to-market and is accompanied by an impeccable lineage of provenance including photos of Kurt posing with the woman who cut his hair, scissors in hand, and a fantastic shot of the hair actually being cut.“

In the guitar department, the Kurt Cobain-, Dave Grohl- and Krist Novoselic-signed axe, which came with a letter of authenticity from James Spence Authentication, was also sold, fetching a grand total of $62,183.

Eric Clapton’s Slowhand at 70 and 2014 World Tour Custom Shop Stratocaster recently hit the auction block, with Iconic Auctions selling the sunburst six-string for over $200,000.

Dave Grohl and his daughter Violet appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on April 27 to perform a cover of X’ s 1980 song, Nausea, and they brought along a few friends – Grohl’s former Nirvana bandmate, Krist Novoselic, ex-Slayer (and current Suicidal Tendencies, Misfits and Dead Cross) man Dave Lombardo and Foo Fighters producer Greg Kurstin – to help them out.

Grohl and his 15-year-old daughter originally recorded the cover for Grohl’s new documentary, What Drives Us.

In addition to the Foo Fighters frontman on electric guitar and Violet on vocals, the Kimmel performance saw Novoselic on bass, Lombardo behind the drum kit and Kurstin adding keyboards.

What Drives Us, which features interviews with the likes of Slash, St. Vincent, the Edge, Lars Ulrich and X’s Exene Cervenka, will be streamed on the Coda Collection via Amazon Prime Video on April 30.

Said Grohl in a statement, “This film is my love letter to every musician that has ever jumped in an old van with their friends and left it all behind for the simple reward of playing music.

“What started as a project to pull back the curtain on the DIY logistics of stuffing all of your friends and equipment into a small space for months on end eventually turned into an exploration of ‘why?’ What drives us?’ ”

For more on What Drives Us, head to Coda Collection. And for more Grohl (because there’s always more Grohl), check out his new collab with Mick Jagger, his new book, The Storyteller, and Guitar World’s recent Foo Fighters cover story.

We’ve seen Foo Fighters front man Dave Grohl and electric guitar player Pat Smear reunite with their former Nirvana band mate, bassist Krist Novoselic, onstage several times.

Now, in a new interview with Howard Stern, Smear revealed that the three musicians sometimes get together in private to run through some Nirvana tunes as well.

Foo Fighters stopped Howard Stern’s Sirius XM show on Thursday (February 11) to promote their recently released 10th studio album, Medicine at Midnight.

Asked by Stern if he ever missed playing with Nirvana, Smear, who joined in 1993 for the In Utero tour, replied, “Every once in a while, me and Krist and Dave get together and we do play as if we’re Nirvana. So I don’t have to miss it – we do it. If we’re in the same town together, or whatever, we’ll get together and jam.”

Smear also added that the most recent get-together took place at the house where the Foo Fighters tracked Medicine at Midnight. Chimed in Grohl, “We actually recorded some stuff.”

Outside of the occasional private jam session, Grohl and Smear acknowledged that it often hurts too much to look back on Nirvana and revisit the music. However, Grohl revealed that he had recently gone on a drive with his daughter, and was surprised that she knew all the words to Come As You Are when it came on the radio.

“I never played that record,” Grohl said. “We don’t talk about Nirvana and stuff, and she’s singing every word of the song. That, to me, that feels good.”

The Foo Fighters also performed a three-song set during their Stern appearance, including a cover of Mountain’s Mississippi Queen, which they played in tribute to Leslie West, who passed away at the age of 75 in December. You can check it out above. 

“I’m never in any bass magazines!” chuckles Krist Novoselic, legend for an entire generation of grunge fans. Why should this be, we ask ourselves? 

Perhaps it’s because his old band Nirvana have been defunct since 1994, when singer Kurt Cobain drew a permanent line under his career. Maybe it’s because Novoselic is best known these days not for his bass playing, but for his political writings and activism.

Either way, that may all be about to change. Gibson have recently unveiled Novoselic’s new RD bass, and unlike so many signature models, it seems that it didn’t take too many prototypes to complete.

As the man himself tells us, “It didn’t take long to do, because it’s just a reproduction of an RD with a new look. They built them in the 70s, and now you can buy a new one. What I did was, I shipped my standard RD to Gibson in Tennessee and said, ‘I really like this thing, but the pickups are kinda dull’ so they put a new Seymour Duncan Hot Stack on there. They made the headstock elongated and the fretboard is made of sustainable wood, too. I played it - and they nailed it first time.”

What we at the BP command bunker find it hard to believe is that no bass manufacturer has offered Novoselic a signature model before, even though his old band’s biggest albums - Nevermind and In Utero - had made him a household name by the mid 90s. 

“No, I’ve never been asked!” he guffaws, perhaps unaware of how odd this is. “I was blown away when Gibson approached me, because I really loved that bass. Even if they’d just reissued it rather than made one for me, I would have bought one. 

"You can’t even find these old basses on eBay: they go really fast on there, for like 2500 bucks. You can buy this new RD and keep it your whole life, it’s like a member of the family. You don’t have to bid on eBay for one, and it doesn’t have someone’s sweat all over it!”

Novoselic was also known back in the Nirvana days for playing a Gibson Ripper, a hefty instrument which normally needs at least three people just to pick it up off the floor. 

“I’m six foot seven,” he explains, “which is lucky, because it’s a big bass. Check one out when you go to a music store. Try it on, because it’s big and heavy, it’s a big gun! But it’s got that sustain that I really like. You just let the note ring. 

"That’s probably why I stuck with Gibson basses the whole way through, because they’re so dense. I played a blonde Ripper on Nevermind. I had two that got stolen, actually: the blonde one sounded different from my other black one. You just gotta try them out and see what works for you.”

Anyone familiar with Nirvana’s albums, or even solely with the epoch-shaping Nevermind - their biggest seller by some distance - will know that Novoselic made a point of laying down simple, catchy, effective bass parts with a tone to die for.

Those bass-lines have influenced a whole host of players, he tells us: “I’ve learned that countless people have learned to play bass from listening to those records, ha ha! They’re always coming up to me and saying ‘Those records taught me how to play’. They’re simple, melodic bass-lines, which is what you need when you’re starting out on bass.”

Does he listen back to his old recordings and cringe, or do those bass parts still sound good all these years later? “Oh, I’m happy with them, there’s no cringing there at all. We were a collaboration: Dave [Grohl, drums, now of the Foo Fighters] and Kurt had to like the bass parts too. So it’s all great. They came together really well. 

"I still approach bass playing with the idea of ‘What does the song need?’ Like, if it’s a heavy, dark, grinding song, or a pop song that needs some melody, or whatever. I was really fortunate that I got to work with Kurt: he was such a talented songwriter and he had a real ear for a hook, so as far as I was concerned playing bass with him was super-easy.

 "My unsolicited advice for bass players is that you’re not chained to the guitar: you’re chained to the kick drum, right? But listen to what the vocal melodies are doing. If you can accentuate that and play off that, you’re adding a dynamic to the band and to the song, and if you’re lucky and it comes together, it sounds big.”

Big was indeed what Novoselic’s bass sounded like, and in many ways he occupied a dream situation for any bassist - a power trio with plenty of space not just for his parts to move around, but also to lend melody to the chords and riffs. 

“I had lots of room for the bass,” he affirms, “and Nirvana had these hard, soft, loud, quiet dynamics which required lots of octave parts and parts that were higher on the neck. I’d go down to that E string when the big chorus came, boom!” 

This reminds us of ‘On A Plain’, the Nevermind song on which the other band-members mute after each chorus for Novoselic to play a three-second descending riff. “Oh yeah!” he recalls. “In ‘On A Plain’ the E string is drop-tuned to D, so I rotated between the D string and the drop D. There you go. It was a real simple riff that the vocals were wrapped around, so I wanted to do something to bounce it up a little bit.”

Is Novoselic the same bass player today as he was in the heady days of 1991? “I think so,” he muses. “I’ve been doing the same things lately as I used to do. I’ll tune in to whatever the riff is, and play with dynamics and do different things. I played on the Foo Fighters’ new album: I went in and I played lead bass, because Nate Mendel is the bass player in the Foo Fighters, so he played the [lower] bass on that song.

When I showed up they said: ‘Oh Krist, you’re going to play lead bass!’ I’m like ‘OK’ and they had this Gibson Ripper there. I plugged in a Rat distortion pedal and said, ‘Great, roll the Pro-Tools!’ They said ‘No!’ I said, ‘What do you mean, no?’ and they said ‘We’re making this on tape, dude, remember we told you?’ 

"And I was like ‘You mean I gotta do the whole take?’ and they were standing there with their arms crossed, saying ‘Yep! Can you do it? Can you still do it, Krist?’ It was a real separate-the-men-from-the-boys situation, so I said ‘Yeah, I’ll do it!’ Ha ha!”

Anathema this might be to Nirvana’s resolutely anti-establishment stance, but did Novoselic ever venture into slap-and-pop playing? “I never did,” he says, as we expect. “It was Flea from the Chili Peppers who brought that back. 

"I never did any funk playing myself: I come out of the school of John Entwistle and Geezer Butler, and of course Paul McCartney. Those are the big three for me, along with Mike Mills from R.E.M. I played just rock bass, without any kind of funk in it. 

"I remember in the early 80s when the Chili Peppers were raging: you’d have these dudes with a five-string and a Gallien-Kruger amp. I would play through an Ampeg with a 2x15” cab: old-school.”

Asked how Novoselic got into bass in the first place, he embarks on a nostalgic train of thought which will leave students of alternative music speechless. “When I was living in Aberdeen, Washington and playing with Kurt,” he begins, “he had this Mosrite Univox guitar and a nice Peavey tube amp, so I got a Fender Mustang guitar and used it as a bass.

 "We knew this person who had this cheap 60s Japanese bass and a cheap amp called a PMF. He was kind enough to let me borrow it, and then we found this drummer Aaron Burckhard, and we were among a group of youngsters who would hang out with the Melvins drummer Dale Crover. 

"They rehearsed at his parents’ house, and we’d hang out on the back porch and listen to them rehearse. They were very disciplined and would play every day for hours. We wouldn’t bother them: we would just sit and listen.”

He continues, “The Melvins were so focused, so Kurt and Aaron and I took that ethic and started playing like that. We said, ‘We’re gonna be like the Melvins, we’re gonna be tight and play a lot’, and Kurt was such a prolific artist that he’d be off drawing something, or doing some kind of sculpture, or some kind of weird collage, and he’d write songs.

"He was always compelled to express himself, and that’s how the band started. I just fit in as a bass player: Kurt was really inspired by Greg Ginn and Black Flag. He wasn’t like a technical riff guitarist: he just made this kind of abstract sound. 

"I just fell into playing bass: I had this black Ibanez for 300 dollars, which was a good bass. We were working and I bought a bass amp, so I had my own setup, and I just fell into this Ibanez. We were playing in a trio so I had a lot of latitude, but I tried to keep it nailed down: I let the drummer and the guitar player go off while I kept it tethered to the ground.”

Many a grunge fan would kill to have been at Nirvana’s rehearsals in those far-off days. Did Novoselic ever throw in a few complex fills to push the songs along? “I guess, yeah. A lot of it was just scales, though. It depended on what was going on in the band. We would have these rehearsals and just make up songs. 

"I don’t know why we didn’t have a tape recorder there, or a multi-track or something. The songs that were after Nevermind and before In Utero… we would pull those songs out so fast, and Kurt would make up a vocal, and so many of those things were lost. We were just making stuff up because we really liked playing together.”

Nowadays Novoselic is studying for a law degree. “Yes, that’s my goal,” he nods. “I go to school. In fact, I’m going to be on TV on a political commentary show this afternoon. I still play bass, I was doing it last week, but it’s just a helping hand these days. I have my bass set up in the living room over there, I still have that same HiWatt head that I used in In Utero. That’s hooked up to a new 8x10”. It shakes the whole house.”

It would be remiss of us if we didn’t ask Novoselic if he has ambitions towards public office. “No, I’m never going to do that, I don’t need a job!” he states emphatically. “I’m into transformational politics. 

"In the United States things are really out of whack: people are protesting all around the country. I was skeptical at first, but these Occupy movements have really captured the imagination of the establishment as a movement, so the next thing those people should do is run for office. That’s what you do in a stable democracy, right?”

But you can’t take Novoselic out of politics, just as you couldn’t take the politics out of Nirvana, in the final analysis. “I have so many blessings,” he says. “I got to play with Dave Grohl and Kurt Cobain. I don’t want to run for office, you have to go to all these meetings. Forget it! People gotta get together. Twitter, Facebook… the social networking thing. 

"Can you imagine if you won the election with 99 percent of the population? That would be a commanding lead….” Let’s hope he changes his mind about running for office. President Novoselic? Sounds good to us.

Krist chooses his favorite Nirvana bass-lines

“Wow, which would I pick? I like ‘Lithium’, I like ‘Heart Shaped Box’, I like some of the work I did on that. ‘Lounge Act’ is good. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. ‘In Bloom’… that was my Mike Mills bass part. Those little fills I do there were swiped off R.E.M. records. I like the bass I do on ‘Something In The Way’, the way I march up and down that scale. It’s only four or five notes, but the whole point of ‘Something In The Way’ is not to get in the way.”

At the 1992 MTV Music Video Awards, Novoselic threw his bass in the air, forgetting that it would be coming down again shortly afterwards. It landed on his head.

“Oh that was mega! Yeah! What happened was, there was all this weirdness going on, like bad energy. We started playing this song and my amp just didn’t work. It basically took a crap on me. 

"So I thought ‘I’m gonna do this bass toss and walk off’. Well, the bass got caught in the TV lights, and then boom! It fell on my head. I was like ‘Oh man, I’m so embarrassed, what am I gonna do?’ It was in front of 200 million people, right? So I storm off stage, like ‘I’m outta here!’ and I find this bathroom and I see there’s blood on my hands.

"So I wash my head and I wash my hands, and these paramedics come and take a look at me and they say ‘Oh, you’re fine’ and put a bandage on and say ‘Sign here’ and I had to sign all these release forms so I’m not gonna sue anybody. So I’m all annoyed, right, and I’m like ‘What the hell!’ and behind them there is this amazing fellow, with a glass of champagne. 

"It’s Brian May! Ha ha! Just standing there politely. He says ‘Here you are, my good man’ and he hands me this glass of champagne. I’m like ‘Thank you so much’! It was amazing, I felt so much better. I was like ‘You’re Brian May! How are you?’ and he was said, ‘More importantly, how are you?’”

Former Nirvana band mates Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic reunited onstage at the Foo Fighters show at Safeco Field in Seattle on Saturday night, where Novoselic joined the band (which also includes late-era Nirvana member Pat Smear) for a run-through of the Vaselines' “Molly’s Lips.”

The Vaselines were a favorite of late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, and the band famously covered “Molly’s Lips” numerous times onstage during their career. One version, recorded for BBC Radio One’s John Peel in 1990, later appeared on Nirvana’s 1992 compilation album, Incesticide.  

“This is an old song. We haven’t done this song together in a long time,” Grohl said after welcoming Novoselic to the stage.

Novoselic’s new band, Giants in the Trees, opened the show at Safeco Field. They’ll also be performing at the Foo Fighters’ upcoming Cal Jam Festival, scheduled to take place at the Glen Helen Regional Park & Festival Grounds in San Bernardino, California, on October 5 and 6. In addition to the Foo Fighters, the lineup includes Iggy Pop, Garbage, Tenacious D and Greta Van Fleet. 

For ticketing and general festival information check out CalJamFest.com.

Tuesday night—during their performance at the Matthew Knight Arena in Eugene, Oregon—Foo Fighters welcomed a very special guest onstage; former Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic.

Together with former Nirvana (and current Foo Fighters) members Dave Grohl and Pat Smear, the appearance constituted a mini-reunion of Nirvana's three surviving original members.

After an introduction from Grohl, the group launched into "Big Me," a single from Foo Fighters' self-titled, 1995 debut album. You can watch fan-filmed footage of the performance above and below.

"I just feel like there’s a bit more of a relaxed confidence that comes with age," Grohl told Guitar World in September about the Foo Fighters' evolution over the decades. "I mean, I never thought that I’d be doing this past 30 years old. And that was a long fucking time ago! But when I walk backstage now and see the fresh faces of all the new bands, and I’m the guy with fucking grey hair in my beard, I feel kinda proud. Proud that we’re still here."

A remarkable recording of Nirvana—sans bassist Krist Novoselic—playing an acoustic show at Edinburgh's Southern Bar for an audience of around two dozen people in 1991 has surfaced online for the first time.

According to the Edinburgh News, local band The Joyriders had invited the band to play at a fundraiser for the city's Sick Kids hospital, which was taking place at the pub. Not wanting to cause a scene by listing the band—then in the midst of their meteoric rise to superstardom—on the bill, The Joyriders listed the trio on the bill as "very, very special American guests."

Cobain—perhaps unprepared for the rough Scottish winter despite his Washington upbringing—was deathly ill, allegedly lying in a fetal position on the couch in the hours prior to the show. Despite his condition though, he remained committed to performing that night, despite stern medical advice to cancel.

By the time the trio showed up, the crowd—skeptical of the promised "special guests"—had largely thinned, leaving around two dozen lucky patrons to witness a very hoarse Cobain and Dave Grohl run through "Dumb," "Polly," "Jesus Don't Want Me For a Sunbeam" and Shonen Knife's "Twist Barbie" (though the audio of this final song has not been salvaged).

You can hear the ragged, but fascinating set above.

This past Friday night, Paul McCartney and his band were joined on stage by the former members of Nirvana — Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear (Nirvana's second guitarist for a spell) — at Seattle's Safeco Field.

The mega-band performed a few rocking songs, including "Long Tall Sally" and "Get Back," both of which you can check out in the fan-filmed videos below.

This isn't the first time McCartney has performed with the Nirvana gang. They got together at the 12.12.12 concert in New York City last year to play "Cut Me Some Slack," a new song from Grohl's Sound City project, and then regrouped a week later on Saturday Night Live to perform the same song.

McCartney played a cigar box guitar for both 2012 performances — but he stuck to his Hofner bass on July 19.

Note: If you don't think McCartney's vocals on "Long Tall Sally" (the second video below) are particularly wonderful, remember he's 71 — and he's singing the song in G, the same key in which the Beatles played and recorded the song in freakin' 1964.

It looks like everyone's jumping on the Nevermind bandwagon, even 20 years after its release.

On top of a deluxe 20th anniversary reissue, last month saw Fender unveil the new Kurt Cobain Jaguar guitar, which was meticulously modeled on the battered 1965 Jaguar the Nirvana frontman used heavily during the early '90s.

This month, Gibson has unveiled the new Krist Novoselic Signature RD Bass, which features a pair of noise-cancelling single-coil Seymour Duncan pick-ups with independent volume controls and a master tone pot.

According to the official press release: "To honor this musician's impact on the sound of contemporary rock, Gibson USA presents the Krist Novoselic Signature RD Bass, an instrument primed with unparalleled playability and powerful contemporary tones, all dressed in an alternative style that countless modern bassists will appreciate."

"Finished in Ebony Black nitrocellulose lacquer, the distinctive lines of the RD body shape cut a figure that definitely stands out from the crowd, too."

"The Krist Novoselic Signature RD Bass begins with a body and glued-in neck of solid maple, a tonewood known for its ability to add punch, clarity and sustain to the sound of any guitar."

"It is shaped in the image of the RD guitars and basses first introduced by Gibson USA in the 1970s, with a rounded, offset body style reminiscent of the iconic Gibson Firebird guitar and Thunderbird bass."

"The sustain and thundering resonance of the Krist Novoselic Signature RD Bass are further enhanced by a strings-through-body design with solid three-point bridge, and a gently back-angled headstock to maintain optimum string pressure in the PLEK-cut slots of a Corian nut."

The Daily Show's Jon Stewart will be hosting a special "town hall" with the surviving members of Nirvana in honor of the 20th anniversary of the band's seminal album, Nevermind.

Krist Novoselic, Dave Grohl and Nevermind producer Butch Vig will be on hand on September 24 to answer questions surrounding one of the most celebrated rock albums in recent history.

"SiriusXM Town Hall With Nirvana" will be boradcast on SiriusXM's appropriately titled Lithium station at 8 p.m. that evening.

Speaking candidly about the Nevermind sessions, Butch Vig recently told Rolling Stone that Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain's perfectionism during the recording of the album was "kind of a pain in the ass." You can read more here.

Foo Fighters made an appearance on The Daily Show earlier this year as musical guests in support of their new album, Wasting Light

Former Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic recently re-united with one Nirvana drummer, playing on the new album from Dave Grohl's Foo Fighters, Wasting Light. Now, it seems another ex-sticksman from Nirvana would like to work with the bassist.

Chad Channing, who played drums for Nirvana from 1988-1990, said he would like to work with Novoselic on his new album. Channing is now the frontman of his own band, Before Cars, who recorded their debut album, Walk Back, in 2008.

"It's got a lot influence from '70s singer-songwriter type of stuff. It's kind of like a mix between David Bowie meets Gordon Lightfoot," said Channing.

You can read the full report here.