NIRVANA
“AS BIG AS THE BEATLES!”
From the Smart Studio in Wisconsin – via $2 pitchers of beer at the Friendly Tavern – to Los Angeles’ legendary Sound City, BUTCH VIG guides us through the Nevermind recording sessions. Stand by for food fights with L7, encounters with Billy Corgan and Europe and sojourns at the “Cokewood Apartments”
JONATHAN Poneman at Sub Pop called me out of the blue sometime early in 1990. They wanted me to work with Nirvana. He said they would be as big as The Beatles. I thought he was just being cheeky. A couple of days later, Bleach turned up at Smart, my studio in Madison, Wisconsin. I thought it was pretty one-dimensional except that one song, “About A Girl”, which to me did sound like a Lennon-McCartney composition, an amazing melody with a great arrangement.
JASON LAVERIS/FILMMAGIC; MARK AND COLLEEN HAYWARD/GETTY IMAGES; KMAZUR/WIREIMAGE
We scheduled a week to record and about six weeks later Nirvana showed up in the Sub Pop van, pretty bedraggled. Krist was really friendly, Chad [Channing], who was drumming, seemed nice, Kurt was very likeable, quiet but polite. I fed them up at this blue-collar bar called the Friendly Tavern, a real working man’s watering hole and dirt cheap – you could get a pitcher of beer for $2 and a bowl of soup and grilled cheese for a buck and a quarter.
In the studio, I was taking my time to set up and I could tell Kurt was getting impatient. He kept saying he just wanted to sound “like Black Sabbath”. We tracked the first song and did a couple of takes when Kurt put his guitar down and went and sat in the corner. I tried to talk to him but Krist explained he got into these moods. You had to let him go through it and he’d eventually snap out of it. Eventually, Kurt stood up and said “Let’s go” and we cut the first song.