Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl recently opened up about his time in Nirvana and shared his thoughts on the band’s iconic hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
Grohl reflected on the origins of the song, the band’s modest expectations for it, and how its unexpected success transformed Nirvana’s career almost overnight.
“We wrote Smells Like Teen Spirit in January or February of 1991,” Grohl said. “We’d been rehearsing in this shed behind someone’s house in Tacoma, Washington. The guy who owned it played in a covers band, a bar band, and he rented out this rehearsal space with a home-made 8-track studio and we rehearsed there for three or four months and that’s where a lot of Nevermind was written.”
He went on to explain that he didn’t initially see the track as a standout on the album.
“With Nevermind, I thought In Bloom was going to be the ‘smash hit’ off the record, or Lithium. I thought Smells Like Teen Spirit was just another album cut. We recorded it pretty quickly, and I think it was one of [producer] Butch Vig’s favourites, and it soon became pretty clear that it would be the special song on the record. But, of course, at that point we didn’t think anything was going to happen with the record.”
Grohl also recalled the surreal experience of watching the band’s popularity explode following the song’s music video.
“I thought Teen Spirit might get on [MTV’s] 120 Minutes and allow us to tour with Sonic Youth, but no one thought it was a hit single because [that] was just unimaginable. I mean the funniest part was seeing the video on MTV. We were touring America just as the album came out in September of ’91, playing places that held maybe 200-300 people, and we’d go back to the hotel and turn on the TV and see our video and go, That’s so funny, we’re on TV, and we’ve just played [legendary ‘DC hardcore venue] the 9:30 Club, or whatever! Then with the video came more people and the clubs got bigger and bigger.”
He described the tour’s early stops and how quickly things escalated.
“The [proper] tour started in Toronto at the Opera House and it seemed like a fairly typical Nirvana gig: there were maybe 500 or 600 people there. To me, you have to remember that was like making it, going from the 32 people who would usually come to see [Grohl’s pre-Nirvana band] Scream in every city to, like, 500 people, I considered that to be the greatest success of my entire life! But the capacity of a lot of the gigs that we were playing on that tour were low – we played a place in Portland, Maine or maybe Vermont where the legal capacity was 67, a tiny little living room of a place, it was chaotic.”
“When the video hit MTV it made a big difference. That’s when you’d show up to a 500-capacity gig and there were 500 extra people there. We were still in our little bubble – we were in our van, the three of us, Krist’s wife Shelli, our monitor guy Miles, and Monty Lee Wilkes, our tour manager – and it didn’t seem like anything unusual was happening until we’d get to the gig and it was fucking chaos.”
“And we started to notice there were normal people here, what are they doing here? That guy looks like a jock, what the f*ck is he doing here? And it was like, Oh, maybe that video thing is attracting some… riff-raff! The only indication that our world was turning upside down would be when you’d get to the venue. Then it would be, Holy shit, these people are nuts!”
Grohl then addressed why the song became so closely associated with the band.
“Teen Spirit definitely established that quiet/loud dynamic thing that we fell back on a lot of the time. It did become that one song that personifies the band. But the video was probably the key element in that song becoming a hit. People heard the song on the radio and they thought, ‘This is great,’ but when kids saw the video on MTV they thought, ‘This is cool. These guys are kinda ugly and they’re tearing up their fucking high school!’ So I think that had a lot to do with what happened with the song.”
Despite its impact, Grohl was clear that he does not consider it the greatest song of all time, or even the best Nirvana track.
“But do I think it’s the greatest single of all time? Of course not! I don’t even think it’s the greatest Nirvana single. And compared to Revolution by The Beatles or God Only Knows by The Beach Boys?! Give me a break! Smells Like Teen Spirit was a great moment in time… but there’s better.”
Grohl’s candid remarks add another layer to the enduring legacy of a song that, despite his own reservations, remains one of the most consequential releases in rock history.
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” was released as Nirvana’s breakthrough single in September 1991. It helped propel Nevermind to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. The album has since become a multi-platinum cultural landmark, earning Diamond certification in the United States for surpassing 10 million units sold.
Despite the song’s massive cultural footprint, it never actually topped the Billboard Hot 100. The track peaked at No. 6 on the chart in January 1992. This detail underscores Grohl’s point that the song’s fame and influence far outstripped its formal chart placement at the time.
The song’s meteoric rise owed just as much to its music video as to the track itself. MTV’s heavy rotation of the video turned the band’s raw, chaotic energy into a defining image for a generation. It also played a central role in transforming Nirvana from underground favorites into a global phenomenon almost overnight.
Even decades later, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” continues to resonate. The track has surpassed 3 billion streams on Spotify alone, a testament to its lasting grip on listeners well beyond the era that produced it.
