While in Nirvana, Grohl didn't get a chance to do much songwriting or figure out what his solo musical voice could be. But before Nirvana, Grohl played around with being his own band. Grohl would record drum tracks with a friend on an old 8-track player and decided to try recording a whole song—drums, bass, guitar, and vocals—on his own.

That song led to an offer to record his own album on a small cassettes-only label called Simple Machines, run by Jenny Toomey. "When she asked me if I wanted to do it," he says, "I said, yeah, sure, but I don't want to call it the Dave Grohl Band. Let's call it something else. Oh, I called it Late!, because I'm an idiot and I thought it would be funny to say to everybody, 'Sorry, we're Late!'"

Those tracks, plus a few more recorded in 1991, made up the one and only album from Late!, Pocketwatch. It was released a year after Nevermind. The label was so small, Toomey had to copy tapes from a double decker boom box at her house whenever supplies of Pocketwatch ran low.

The album had a small following at the time, but the work was great practice for Grohl's eventual one-man recording of the first Foo Fighters album. Though it may have been hard to grab a cassette of Pocketwatch back in the day, you can hear it in its entirety on YouTube.

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