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.”
Before joining the band on their autumn '93 North American tour, Smear's first appearance with Nirvana would come on their second appearance on Saturday Night Live, broadcast on September 25, 1993. The Seattle band's previous appearance on the long-running and hugely-popular comedy sketch show the previous year had proved somewhat controversial when, after the group trashed their instruments, bassist Krist Novoselic french-kissed Kurt Cobain, in order to "piss off the rednecks and homophobes", as Cobain later revealed.
Their 1993 appearance, on SNL's 19th season premiere, would make less headlines, but offered the first chance for the American public to see the group perform songs from their eagerly-awaited follow-up to Nevermind, In Utero. In addition to their new album's first single, Heart-Shaped Box, Nirvana elected to play Rape Me, a song which very consciously echoed Smells Like Teen Spirit but proved that the Seattle group had lost none of their bite. Even if they did almost forget to include their new guitarist...
“I remember the first day of rehearsal at the SNL studio, they forgot me,” Smear told Rolling Stone. “A couple hours later, someone called me and goes, ‘Oh, we’re used to having three guys, sorry!'”
Watch the performance below:
