Dave Grohl recalls first meeting with Mark Lanegan: “There was nobody like him”

Dave Grohl has shared a tribute to late Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan, who passed away earlier this week at age 57.

Speaking with the U.K.’s The Independent, the Foo Fighters leader recalls when he first met Lanegan. He had just joined Nirvana, which was about to explode in the Seattle grunge scene that Screaming Trees, a fellow Washington State band, had helped pioneer.

“When I first joined Nirvana I was living with Kurt [Cobain] in our tiny apartment,” Grohl shares. “One weekend he said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna go up to Seattle for the weekend and hang out with a friend, do you want to come?'”

“We went up to stay with his friend…and we went to a show,” he continues. “I passed out on the couch and woke up in the morning and opened my eyes and Mark Lanegan was sitting in a chair right across from me.”

Lanegan’s first words to Grohl? “Who the f*** are you?”

Grohl adds that he thinks Lanegan’s first solo album, 1990’s The Winding Sheet, is a “masterpiece,” and calls it one of the “most influential records” on him.

“It was so pure and so real,” Grohl says of Lanegan’s music. “If he sang about pain, you believed it and if he sang about love, you believed it.”

“There was nobody like him,” Grohl adds. “In Seattle he was much loved.”