In a new chat with Premier Guitar, Pat Smear explained how Kurt Cobain helped him at his first Nirvana concert.
Nirvana almost didn’t let him perform with them on SNL because of his 1982 Charvel guitar. Smear thought the Charvel was a ‘good guitar,’ but it didn’t impress Cobain and the band.
“And what I didn’t know at the time – I don’t even know if you [referring to Dave Grohl] were involved – but there was a discussion about me and that guitar like, ‘No, no, no, we can’t let him on stage,'” the guitarist explained.
He added, “Kurt ended up giving me this rad f*cking guitar [referring to the Mosrite Mark V in blue he ended up playing], which is not a Charvel.”
During his time with Nirvana, Smear played several guitars, mostly Fender Strats that Cobain bought for him. Nirvana’s guitar tech, Earnest Bailey, mentioned three main guitars Smear used: an American Strat in Midnight Blue with a maple fretboard, another Strat called ‘Glossy’ with a black DiMarzio pickup and a Floyd Rose bridge, and ‘Flopsy,’ a black Mexican Strat Smear modified with nail polish during the tour.
He also played a black Hagstrom III, a blue Hagstrom I, a black Hagstrom XII, and a colorful Harmony Buck Owens acoustic guitar that belonged to Krist Novoselic, which was used during Nirvana’s famous MTV Unplugged performance.
“I was a fan, like everyone else,” Smear told Rolling Stone in 2013 about joining Nirvana. “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 shared with Spin magazine the story 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.”
After performing with the band on Saturday Night Live, broadcast on September 25, 1993, Smear joined them on their autumn ’93 North American tour.
