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Sat 11 April 2026 23:00, UK
Everything about Dave Grohl seemed like the exact opposite of what you would have seen out of an LA musician.
The whole point behind Nirvana was about taking a stake through the heart of every single band on the Sunset Strip, and even when Grohl formed Foo Fighters, he only needed to spend a few days making The Colour and the Shape in California before he realised that the sunny side of life wasn’t really for him. But as much as ‘The City of Angels’ was the best place for glam music, he felt that the true outsiders would find their way back in eventually.
Because, really, Los Angeles was already a refuge for outcasts. There wasn’t a single person moving there that wasn’t thinking of finding a better life for themselves than what they were feeling in their nowhere towns across the country. This is where you went to make it, but there were also the street urchins who were looking to make the best with what they had whenever working on their first songs.
And since Grohl’s heart bled punk rock from the minute that he started playing music, The Germs were exactly the kind of band that he was used to. Then again, is there any way to adequately prepare someone for if they are listening to The Germs for the first time… I mean, they’re great, but it’s not like they were going to be playing in the same places that housed artists like the Eagles or anything.
If anything, the band seemed like the most unprofessional group of musicians you’ve ever seen when they debuted in the late 1970s. Darby Crash was one of the most unpredictable frontmen of all time whenever he got onstage, and while they weren’t all that concerned with their self-preservation whenever they played one of their shows, you could feel the energy every time they played. They wanted to leave the audience stunned, and Grohl felt that no one else in LA really compared to them.
Fans only got a small taste of them in the documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, but this was like a musical awakening for Grohl when he first heard them, saying, “These were the first Germs song I ever heard, so when I bought the album, I thought it was almost too together… I couldn’t understand anything he was singing. Thank God they subtitled the movie. I mean, The Germs are considered to be one of the most influential Los Angeles punk rock bands, the one that all the other bands looked up to.”
So when the opportunity came for Pat Smear to join Nirvana back in the 1990s, it wasn’t a stupid question for Grohl to wonder if Smear was even still alive. They didn’t give a shit about anything they did whenever they played, and though they tried their best to go down like legends, Crash’s sudden death in late 1980 made them look more like casualties from the punk rock scene than genre innovators.
But the fact that they managed to get songs out at all was what inspired Grohl. He has said on numerous occasions that he wasn’t exactly a fan of what the Eagles were doing, and since the hair bands would be coming in only a few years later, The Germs would be one of the only bands that were born and raised in California that seemed to have everything he liked about punk rock rolled up into one.
Queens of the Stone Age would come in a little later to set his mind on fire all over again, but The Germs weren’t music for the masses. These were songs that were bordering on the edge of chaos every single time they were played, and if they could make a dent in music history, Grohl was going to do everything he could to get his name in the same spot as them when he started drumming for Scream.
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