Session Information
On March 1st, 1994 Nirvana was in Munich, Germany to play what would turn out to be their last ever show with Kurt Cobain. Whilst many more dates were scheduled across Europe morale in the band was low and “Kurt wanted to go home” according to Dave Grohl. “I think he intentionally blew his voice out so that any doctor in his right mind would look at his throat and go, ‘It's kinda inflamed.’ He intentionally blew his voice out so that we could all go home,” Grohl believed. Whether intentional or not, Cobain was diagnosed with severe laryngitis and bronchitis after the show, with the last two dates of that leg of the tour canceled. At this stage, however, shows later in the month were still set to go ahead.
Grohl remained in Germany to film a promo video for the Backbeat Band whilst Krist Novoselic had already flown home to Seattle. Cobain, on the other hand, headed to Rome to try and recover but instead wound up in a coma following an overdose on Rohypnol and Champagne. The rest of the tour was immediately canceled and after waking from the coma on March 5th Cobain flew home, with Grohl also following suit.
With tensions between the band members already high before the overdose incident the future of Nirvana was uncertain. Grohl was relieved to hear that Kurt was OK but had no idea what would happen next. To take his mind off the situation, soon after arriving back in Seattle, he headed to a place of comfort – Barrett Jones’ Laundry Room Studio.
Tape was running on March 9th with the first song to be tracked being ‘Big Me’, a song he’d first recorded with Novoselic just a couple of months earlier. This was instead another entirely solo effort with Grohl on all instruments, also recording vocals. Just one other song would be recorded on this day, entitled ‘Mountain of You’. In 2004 a recording of the track, among others, was shared online by a Foo Fighters fan, albeit with the slightly erroneous title ‘Mountain View’. Dave Grohl himself went online to correct the mistake, ending an unrelated message on the bands official message board with the postscript “it's ‘Mountain of You’, and it's old as fuck.”
The recording of ‘Big Me’ from this session saw official release in 2015 on the special Record Store Day release ‘Songs From The Laundry Room’, whilst the generated cassette recording posted online remains the only release of ‘Mountain Of You’.
