The 2014 Rock N Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony is just under a week away, and rumours are starting to swirl surrounding a certain Seattle band. The class of 2014 contains a Dean’s list of musical luminaries, headed up by The E Street Band, the legendary backing group of Bruce Springsteen, and includes performing inductees Cat Stevens, Linda Ronstadt, Hall & Oates, Peter Gabriel, KISS, and a little three-piece outfit from Aberdeen, Washington known as Nirvana.
The ceremony, traditionally, includes performances from inductees, and so far all bar KISS (who are in the middle of a bitter in-fight over the band’s line up and will not perform) and Nirvana have confirmed they will be performing in one form or another during the ceremony. But the quiet whisper now is that something a little special could be brewing over in the Nirvana camp. The group’s two surviving members, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic (along with Pat Smear, who joined the group prior to Kurt Cobain’s death, but is not being inducted as a member) have played together in the recent past, having teamed up with Sir Paul McCartney in 2012 and 2013 for performances. And now Novoselic seems to be dropping hints that he’s been rehearsing Nirvana riffs on Twitter.
Been playing those @HalLeonardBooks bass tabs to get up to speed. Muscle memory is good too. #PracticeMakesPerfect @nirvana
— Krist Novoseli? (@KristNovoselic) April 1, 2014
The question posed now, is who will step in to the shoes of the departed Kurt Cobain, whose death reaches its 20th anniversary tomorrow? Despite Dave Grohl in the past declaring Nirvana material to be “sacred ground,” there are a number of suitable contenders from Nirvana’s era who could easily fill in for a tribute performance. PJ Harvey, for example, was asked by Grohl to perform a Nirvana song with them for a Sound City Players show in London last year. Due to scheduling conflicts, the cover never eventuated. REM frontman Michael Stipe, who is inducting Nirvana, is another extremely viable option. As would be other Cobain contemporaries such as Pixies frontman Black Francis, the Melvins’ Buzz Osbourne, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, it’s not even out of the realms of possibility for Cobain’s widow Courtney Love to take a break from holding one hell of a grudge against the other two and throwing down a snarl on Heart Shaped Box to honour her late husband’s memory.
Whatever the case, something’s definitely brewing in Brooklyn. And we’ll definitely be watching next week with keen, keen interest (and with fingers crossed they don’t pull a Tupac on us).
Photo: Frederic J. Brown via Getty Images.
