Dale Crover has been behind the drum kit for the Melvins for more than 40 years, but superfans know he was briefly the band’s bassist, played guitar and sang when the group spoofed Kiss and has put out several releases under his own name.
The newest is an EP called “Get Your Ba-Ba’s Out,” released digitally earlier this month with a yellow vinyl version coming Oct. 23 on Joyful Noise Recordings.
The EP is notable for a tandem of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” and Crover’s reworking of the Melvins’ “The Bit.”
“I thought that would be fun and kind of funny, doing a combination of that with ‘The Bit’ since they’re both in drop detuning,” says Crover, who wrote the guitar part for the original version of “The Bit” as well. “I was like, oh, I could do that. And so I started doing it [live], worked out good, and people really liked it. And I’m like, I got to record this, I got to record this whole thing.”
During a recent trip to Sao Paolo with Red Kross, another band he drums for, he booked his own show, “and it was great. It was sold out. And when I played that song, people were singing along to it.”
The version on the new EP hews closely to the original, but Crover’s vibraphone takes over the main guitar melody, adding an appropriately dreamy quality.
A fun mash-up of a classic song and a Melvins favorite is enough of a hook, but there’s a surprising backstory: Crover played a young Neil in the “Harvest Moon” music video in 1992.
“When I met him, I was shocked. I was made up to look like him. So that was really strange, just like meeting Neil for the first time looking like him,” says Crover, who had earlier done extra work in “The Doors.”
“It was really funny. He was really nice. There’s a flashback scene where I’m his younger self, but in the other parts of the video, I’m his double. So if you look closely, you’ll see him playing on stage while he’s actually dancing with his wife. That’s me on stage. And then I’m also dancing with his wife.
“So we were swapping clothes back and forth. We’d go to the trailer and we’d switch clothes.”
“Get Your Ba-Ba’s Out” also features acoustic versions of three songs from his 2024 solo album “Glossolalia,” one from 2021’s “Rat-A-Tat-Tat” and the title track, which is brand new.
In addition to his work with the Melvins, Red Kross and his solo output, Crover recently joined the rebooted line up of Sleep on drums.
“I’ve been friends with those guys for a long time, and also friends with Al [Cisneros] for years and years,” he says of the stoner metal group, which has November dates at Irving Plaza and Basilica in Hudson. “We played in kind of a super group together in the mid-late 2000s called Shrinebuilder. I don’t know. We’ve always been friends. I think that he saw that I was doing outside projects. Melvins did something with him. Buzz and I did something with him not that long ago where it was us doing Sabbath covers.
“It just kind of made sense. He wanted to do something different. They had been on hiatus since the pandemic as well so just wanted to get back to doing stuff. And it started off with just doing one song, and then those guys really liking it, and then continuing on to do more.”
Crover has also been working out of the Melvins studio on projects for other musicians.
“The last couple of years, I’ve been doing a lot of recording for other people, I’m kind of for hire. If anybody wants drum tracks or anything else, I’m available. Some things are definitely pretty challenging. I just worked with this guy who’s in a band called Spirit in the Room and he said that he wrote his songs with me in mind but definitely had specific things that he wanted, so it was interesting and a little different than I’m used to. A lot of times I’ll just get tracks from people and they’ll kind of trust me on what to do and I’ll listen to the song and kind of figure out what’s best.”
Mentioning a different project, he says: “I can’t say who, but I did vocals for almost a whole record of this guy, and he wrote all this stuff and it was way different than what I would do. It was really wordy, which is fine. But it was really fun to do because it was so different. And I mean, nobody’s ever hired me for vocals before.”
Crover, who went to high school with Kurt Cobain in Aberdeen, Wash., a roughly two-hour drive southwest of Seattle, played drums for Nirvana in two stints in 1988 and 1990. He is on three tracks – “Floyd the Barber,” “Paper Cuts” and “Downer” – on the band’s 1989 debut album “Bleach” and four tracks on the band’s 1992 compilation record “Incesticide.”
“It’s funny because that was like a tiny sliver of time and then people still talk about it, which blows my mind. It blows my mind that it’s lasted this long and continues to,” Crover says.
“The one thing about Kurt — and what people probably don’t realize because of what happened and just kind of the way that he was perceived as being this kind of dark, depressed person – was that he was really funny. He had such a great sense of humor and dark sense of humor. He had really great art that he would do.
“I don’t know, it’s like I always felt like he was really one of the guys in our small little town that I could trust and be friends with, and he was really likable. He’s one of those people that when you meet you feel like you’ve known him for a long time, you know what I mean?
“I get reminded about that stuff all the time. It’s like inescapable. I don’t mind people asking me about it because I know it’s a big part of our history.”
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