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Charles Barkley famously hosted the season premiere of Saturday Night Live on September 25, 1993, with Nirvana as the host. Before the show aired, the NBA player filmed a promo clip with the rock stars where he referred to them as his mom's "favorite band," while Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl, and Krist Novoselic (who's actually taller than Barkley, standing at 6'7") awkwardly smiled and blinked.
Nirvana played "Heart-Shaped Box" and "Rape Me" during their set. The musical performance would be the band's second, and last, on the show, as Cobain would tragically end his life just months later.
Author Timothy Bella just published a biography on the NBA star titled "Barkley" and shared an excerpt with Rolling Stone about his experience hosting SNL and one particularly funny memory he had about meeting Nirvana.
Read the excerpt below:
With the SNL dressing rooms virtually on top of each other, Charles kept the door open to allow his friends and family to come in and out. In doing so, he started to feel for himself how the musical guests were spending their downtime three feet across the hall from him.
“Every time those guys from Nirvana opened up their door, I got like a contact high,” Charles recalled. “It was like one of those big mushroom clouds came. I was scared to go to the airport … ‘Do not go to the airport!’”
Whether the smoke from the ganja had anything to do with the stacks of food the production assistants brought him on set was unclear, said David Mandel, an SNL writer at the time. What was more obvious was that Charles was not going to step onstage in front of a live audience on an empty stomach.
“God bless him,” Mandel said. “He ate a lot.”