Up next in 10
The Petty Feud Between Guns n' Roses vs. Nirvana
450 views
Mar 31, 2025
Even before Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift, rock and roll feuds tore both bands and fans apart. The transition from big hair in the late '80s to dirty hair in the early '90s created one of the most memorable rock beefs in history: Guns N' Roses (GNR) vs. Nirvana. Though the two bands shared many of the same fans, GNR and Axl Rose clung to excess in both lifestyle and performance, while Nirvana considered themselves the alternative, criticizing anything that seemed mainstream or aligned with corporate greed.
View Video Transcript
0:00
The music industry has always been a battlefield filled with memorable feuds between musicians
0:05
the world of rock especially. That said, the life of a musician is competitive
0:10
and it doesn't take much to shake a sensitive artist's fragile ego. Today, we're exploring how the members of Guns N' Roses and Nirvana
0:17
hated each other in one of the 90s' greatest rivalries ever. In 1991, glam metal was dying an unavoidable death
0:30
and grunge was bubbling up from Seattle dive bars and onto the mainstream radio
0:34
Axl Rose didn't start out hating Nirvana. It was the exact opposite
0:38
He was actually an early admirer of the band. In the video for Gunn's Don't Cry, which dropped on September 17, 1991
0:46
a week before Nevermind was even released, Axl gave props to the band by including a baseball cap with the Nirvana logo on it
0:53
Kurt Cobain was beside himself with embarrassment by the gesture. Five months later, when Axl requested that Nirvana perform at his 30th birthday bash in February of 1992
1:04
Cobain immediately declined the offer. No matter how hard Axl tried, he kept getting shut down, which apparently hurt his feelings
1:12
In public, Kurt kept his opinion of Axl and Guns to himself
1:15
but he eventually explained why he was brushing them off in a 1991 interview with Seconds magazine
1:20
while he was promoting Nevermind. We're not your typical Guns N' Roses type of band that has absolutely nothing to say
1:28
Ooh, no he didn't. In a press conference around the same time, Kurt took another unprovoked shot, this time at Axl personally
1:36
He made reference to Axl treating his fans like crap because he didn't show up for a gig or making them wait several hours for him to take the stage
1:43
Kurt said, When you're a popular figure, you owe a certain responsibility to your fans
1:47
I think Guns N' Roses are promoting the wrong values like sexism and the way they do drugs
1:53
I mean, what are they rebelling against? I don't think this is rebellion. Rebellion is standing up to people like Guns N' Roses
2:04
It was to be one of the most highly anticipated rock tours ever
2:08
Guns N' Roses were going to join forces with Metallica in the tour they said would never happen
2:13
The co-headlining tour was scheduled between Gunn's Use Your Illusion tour and Metallica's two world tours promoting their eponymous fifth album, Metallica, known commonly as The Black Album
2:24
Rejected once when he asked Nirvana to play his birthday party a couple of months earlier, Axl offered Nirvana the opening slot on the 26-date tour, only to be rejected again
2:35
Kurt refused the invitation, and Axl didn't take the snub lightly. Not long after the word got out that Nirvana turned down Axl's offer
2:43
he went on the attack in an interview in Metallics magazine. Nirvana would rather stay at home and shoot heroin with their wives than tour with us
2:51
History has proven that Kurt was right in shooting down Axl's offer because the tour turned out to symbolize everything Nirvana hated about the world of Guns N' Roses
3:00
Audiences during the tour were treated to scenes of Axl vomiting on stage
3:04
and repeatedly walking off mid-performance, late starts to shows, and over-the-top pirate techniques
3:10
which scorched half of James Hetfield body during their Montreal gig This was also the show that fans launched into a full riot after Axel ended the show early and retreated to his dressing room because of a sore throat
3:23
Fans overturned cars, smashed windows, looted local stores, and set fires, resulting in $400,000 in damages
3:31
Nirvana looked smart in keeping its distance from this tour. by now Axel had zero tolerance for Nirvana and he was taking every opportunity to go after them in
3:44
public not one to go easy on someone who publicly humiliated him over the past 12 months Axel went
3:51
straight for Kurt's Achilles heel his drug problem for context it all started when Kurt and Courtney
3:56
Love first met on a Friday night in January 1990 at the Satyricon a small dank nightclub in Portland
4:03
Oregon. Kurt was an up-and-coming indie darling thanks to Nirvana's debut Bleach, released six
4:09
months earlier, while Courtney fronted whole and was slowly making a name for herself on her own
4:14
merit. Bleach didn't set the world on fire, but it put Kurt on the map, and being in a band herself
4:20
not to mention an aggressive social climber, Courtney latched on to the Nirvana frontman
4:24
the moment she saw him at the Satyricon. They flirted that night in Portland, but things heated
4:29
up fast when they bumped into each other on May 17, 1991, during an L7 concert at the Los Angeles
4:36
Palladium. They bonded that night over drinking cough syrup straight out of the bottle and studio
4:41
talk. Nirvana was currently recording Nevermind, while Hole had just finished making Pretty on the
4:46
Inside. Kurt and Courtney sort of became a couple after that night, a nasty cross between John and
4:52
Yoko and Sid and Nancy. They also got hooked on heroin together. Flash forward 14 months later
4:58
on August 18, 1992, when Courtney gave birth to their first and only child, Francis Bean Cobain
5:05
A Vanity Fair article confirmed Courtney was famously hooked on drugs throughout a good
5:09
portion of her pregnancy. Cut to Orlando, Florida on September 2, 1992, at the Florida Citrus Bowl
5:16
12 dates into the Guns and Metallica tour. Axl went on another one of his infamous mid-concert
5:21
diatribes. The only thing alternative music means to me is someone like Kurt Cobain in Nirvana
5:27
who basically is a junkie with a junkie wife, and if the baby's born deformed
5:32
I think they both ought to go to prison. Hot off Axl's mid-concert outburst in Orlando
5:41
the rivalry between Guns and Nirvana was at its peak, and everything culminated during the 1992 MTV Music Video Awards
5:49
It would be the first time the two bands were ever in close proximity to each other
5:53
and this face-to-face war was actually made up of five battles. After their soundcheck, but before they took the stage
6:00
Nirvana, Courtney, a few friends of the band, and an MTV exec were hanging out backstage under the outdoor artist's tent
6:07
a cordoned-off area where that night's performers could mingle. A makeshift green room, if you will
6:12
Frances Bean was there, too. Her dad was holding her. Axel showed up with five bodyguards and another one of his guys
6:19
with a video camera recording everything. As Axel was walking by the tent, Courtney taunted
6:24
Axel Axel do you want to be the godfather to our child If Courtney comment didn piss Axel off the laughing from the tent did and that all it took for Axl to lose it Kurt laughed as he recalled the incident later These were his words
6:38
you shut your b***h up or I'm taking you down to the pavement. So I turned to Courtney and said
6:42
shut up b***h. So I guess I did what he wanted me to do, be a man. The lead singers weren't the
6:47
only two to square off. The band's bassists went toe-to-toe too. When Duff McKagan got wind of
6:53
Axel's altercation with Kurt, he felt the entire band was disrespected by Nirvana
6:58
Fueled by booze, McKagan spotted Krist Novoselic just as Nirvana approached the stage to perform
7:04
Lithium. Along with a few bodyguards, McKagan approached Novoselic and taunted him
7:09
pushing him in the process. Novoselic was in an altered state of mind himself
7:14
and he was all too ready to fight. The production crew pulled the men apart and calmed things down
7:18
before Novoselic and Nirvana could continue on stage to perform. Seconds after Novoselic threw his bass guitar about 15 feet in the air
7:26
and caught it with his face during the closing of lithium, Kurt proceeded to stab his stack of Marshall amps with the neck of his Fender strap
7:33
Surrounded by a wash of swirling feedback and over-eager stage divers plunging headfirst into the Pauley Pavilion's front rows
7:41
Kurt got bored with destroying his rig, so he proceeded to wrestle Grohl's drum kit
7:45
While Kurt was doing a cannonball on the snare, Grohl snuck up front to Kurt's microphone and sarcastically beckoned for Gunn's leader
7:52
High axle! Where's axle? High axle! High axle! Not long after Nirvana got off the stage, several members of Gunn's decided it would be a good idea
8:02
to continue the fight. So Duff, Gunn's guitarist Gilby Clark, and a couple other members of the
8:07
band headed for the Nirvana trailer. Because Novoselic smashed himself in the head, the standoff
8:12
never happened. Nirvana didn't go directly back to the trailer, they hung out underneath the stage
8:16
tending to Novoselic. In fact, the only two people in Nirvana's trailer were Jackie Ferry
8:21
Kurt and Courtney's nanny, and Frances Bean. MTV's director of music programming, Amy Finnerty
8:26
recalls arriving at the trailer to find McKagan, Clark, and others rocking it and attempting to
8:31
knock it over. She claimed Rose was also there, but did not partake in the attempted tipping of
8:36
the trailer. Feeling pretty good after their performance, Kurt's confidence level must have
8:40
been at an all-time high because he wanted to stick it to Axl one more time before the show
8:45
ended. The way Kurt tells it, as he was hanging out underneath a stage after Nirvana's performance
8:51
he found Axel's piano, or so he thought. Guns and Elton John were scheduled to close out the show
8:57
with a rendition of November Rain, with Axel and Elton and their dueling pianos emerging from
9:02
underneath the stage. When Kurt came face to face with Axel's piano, he let loose and sprayed its
9:07
keys with a world-class loogie. Unfortunately, Kurt realized later he spent on Sir Elton John's piano
9:13
not Axel's custom-made piano with matching Harley Davidson seat. An A for effort, though, right
9:22
By 1994, the rivalry between Nirvana and Guns had simmered down. During this quiet period, Kurt and Duff McKagan found themselves sitting next to each other
9:31
on the same flight from Los Angeles to Seattle on April 2, 1994
9:36
McKagan says they chatted about their mutual experience with addiction and recovery during the flight
9:40
As the two landed and claimed their baggage people recognized Cobain and McKagan and soon swarmed them There was basically a national manhunt for Kurt due to the fact that he jumped the wall of the Exodus Recovery Center the day before Amid the chaos the two separated somewhere within the bowels of the Seattle SeaTac Airport
9:58
and they never saw each other again. Although McKagan thought briefly about inviting Cobain
10:02
to his house since he seemed lonely, he didn't ask. Cobain returned to his home
10:07
which was located just down the street from McKagan's. Three days later, Cobain was dead
10:13
On April 8th, 1994, the day after Kurt's body was discovered at his Lake Washington Boulevard home
10:30
the remaining members of Nirvana and GNR opted to put an end to their feud
10:34
According to Grohl, Guns N' Roses drummer Matt Sorum quickly reached out to offer his condolences
10:39
In a 2010 Reverb column, Duff McKagan wrote about the Guns and Nirvana beef as well as Kurt's death
10:46
McKagan wrote, Your band should have been one of those that kept setting new benchmarks for what a rock band is
10:52
Your career and vision was cut short. We musicians just don't talk about this kind of stuff, thinking maybe it's a little too touchy-feely
10:59
We are expected to just get over it. Why, don't we have piles of money to make ourselves feel better with
11:04
If only people knew. Slash claims he was never involved in the Guns Nirvana melee at the 1992 Video Music Awards
11:19
explaining, I was like, I don't have time for this d**k. On May 22, 2010, Dave Grohl attended the Revolver Golden Gods Award
11:27
to present Lemmy Kilnister with the evening's Lifetime Achievement Award. Before receiving the award, Lemmy joined Grohl and Slash on stage
11:35
for a blistering rendition of Motorhead's classic Ace of Spades. Slash and Grohl played together without issue
11:41
receiving compliments for their performance. The two men even shared a smile at the end of the performance
11:49
On June 12, 2015, Dave Grohl fell off the stage two songs into the Foo Fighters set at Sweden's Ulevi Stadium
11:57
Although Grohl finished the gig alternating between crutches and a wheelchair with eight, yes, count them, eight songs for an encore
12:05
he found out soon after the gig he fractured his leg. The Foo Fighters were in the middle of their year-long Sonic Highways world tour
12:12
With the remaining five months of their world tour in jeopardy, Grohl had what he later said was a painkiller-induced vision
12:18
and asked his stage crew to design a chair he could sit in to perform while on stage
12:23
The device came back looking like the Iron Throne, but with guitar necks and a pretty cool lighting rig instead of swords
12:29
As requested, it also came equipped with an extended plank where Grohl could rest his leg and keep it elevated while he completed the tour
12:36
About five months after the Foo Fighters tour ended, Axl broke his foot at the Troubadour in Los Angeles
12:41
It was an unannounced warm-up gig for the freshly reformed Guns Not In His Lifetime world tour, which was to take place a week later
12:49
Since Axl's foot was going to require surgery, it looked as if the band would have to cancel some, if not all, dates of the tour
12:55
But thanks to squashed beefs, Grohl loaned Axl his guitar throne, and the tour commenced on schedule at the T-Mobile Arena on April 8th
#Celebrities & Entertainment News
#Recording Industry
#Rock Music