Dave Grohl recounts early Nirvana days touring in a van: Kurt Cobain 'was one person we didn't allow to drive'

Dave Grohl's Amazon Prime Video via Coda Collection documentary What Drives Us, which he directed, debuted today (April 30) and focuses on the van-touring culture's imperative role in rock and roll success.

Apparently, however, Kurt Cobain had a glaring weakness.

"I think maybe he was one person we didn't allow to drive the van," Grohl told Seth Abramovitch for The Hollywood Reporter interview published Thursday (April 29). "I don't remember him driving ever. No, it was me and Novoselic and the sound guy. No, I don't think Kurt got behind the wheel. That's a good question. That's funny."

Grohl, the drummer for Nirvana from 1990-93, more broadly reflected on those early days in the van with the iconic grunge-rock group:

"When Nevermind came out and we started that tour in September of 1991, we were in a van. We were pulling a trailer, and it was all of us and our road crew in a van. And the album started blasting up the charts as we were playing venues that held 100, 200, maybe 300 people. And the 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' video was on MTV. We were pulling up to these venues in our van that were just overflowing with people in a, like, imminent riot situation. We're supposed to go in there and set up and incite this riot. So you're experiencing all of these things from a bench seat in a van. You're just like, "What the f—k is going on right now?" So, yeah, I mean, every day there was something new. It was f—ing insane."

Nirvana abruptly broke up after Cobain's tragic April 1994 death by suicide at just 27 years old. Grohl then founded and became frontman for the Foo Fighters—still going strong and up for nomination into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. 

The 16-time Grammy winner touched on how van-touring saved Foo Fighters in the early days in the documentary, as relayed by Rolling Stone's Daniel Kreps:

"Through previously unseen home movies, a portion of What Drives Us takes the viewer back into the Foo Fighters’ van during a May 1995 tour, two months before the band’s self-titled debut album—recorded by Grohl alone — was released. 

[...] 

"'We kind of felt like we needed to have some experiences of our own. Go out and do stuff, so the van just made perfect sense,' Grohl says of that early Foo trek with guitarist Pat Smear. 'Had we not done that, we probably never would have made it through the first year.' Grohl is so indebted to the van that, at the documentary's start, he seeks out the Foo Fighters’ original van and, after locating it, drives it around the remainder of the film, sharing anecdotes along the way."

Watch the trailer for What Drives Us below.