Dave Grohl can remember exactly how he responded to Kurt Cobain telling him that ex-Germs guitarist Pat Smear was going to be joining Nirvana on second guitar for their In Utero tour.
“Honestly,” Grohl told US radio personality Howard Stern, “my first reaction was, That guy's still alive?”
To be fair to Grohl, Smear's musical career since LA punks Germs broke up following the death by suicide of his best friend Darby Crash hadn't exactly been making global headlines. The guitarist had recorded two solo albums, 1987's RuthenSmear, and 1992's So You Fell in Love with a Musician..., but had revisited his past in late '92 by guesting with Hole on a recording of Germs' Circle 1 for a split single with Mudhoney side-project The Monkeywrench, released by Gasatanka Records.
Smear and Hole's Courtney Love had actually been friends since the mid '80s, when both musicians were taking work as film extras, and the guitarist would later claim that he had an “ESP thing” that Love's then-partner Kurt Cobain might reach out to him.
“I was a fan, like everyone else,” Smear recalled in a 2013 Rolling Stone interview. “I had actually read an interview with them not too long before he called me, where he said Nirvana was always meant to be four people. I thought, Wow, I want that. And then it happened.”
“I expected him to be this bitter old junkie from the crazy SST scene,” Dave Grohl told Spin magazine of his first meeting with Smear in Seattle, “but it was 180 degrees the other direction. I felt like he saved the band when he started playing with Nirvana. He walked into the room and it just lit up, and Nirvana practices never lit up like that.”
