Grohl explained his reluctance in returning to his previous spot in music.
He said: “Honestly, after Nirvana ended, I was asked to join a few other bands as the drummer. And I didn’t really want to just sit back down on the drum stool because I thought it would remind me too much of losing Kurt and losing Nirvana. So, it’s almost like, you know, if you stare at the sun, you wind up blinding this little sunspot in your vision. I almost thought of it like that perspective from the drum set. I will always have that sunspot right there in front of me, just to the right. Like, that will be there forever.”
It hasn’t been revealed which bands offered Grohl this chance, though he did make a couple of musical cameos in 1994. One was with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on Saturday Night Live (SNL). He later said “he’s just a bad**s,” when asked about Petty by documentarian Peter Bogdanovich.
The next came in The Backbeat Band, a musical ensemble group that covered music from The Beatles’ early years. It was part of a biopic, Backbeat, that focused on the group’s pre-fame years.