Butch Vig Butch Vig was a top record producer in the U.S. underground when he got the call to co-produce and engineer Nevermind in 1991. He has since made three albums with his own alt-pop group, Garbage. But Vig says bands still ask him to produce their records, to make them "sound like Nirvana. I say, 'You want to sound like Nirvana? Write songs as good as Kurt Cobain.'"

You first recorded Nirvana in April 1990 at your studio, Smart, in Madison, Wisconsin, for what was supposed to be their second Sub Pop album.

Jonathan Poneman [of Sub Pop] called up and said, "This band can be bigger than the Beatles." I laughed.

He really said that?

Yeah. The van pulled up, they walked in. I had no preproduction. One of the first things Kurt said was, "We want to sound slower and heavier than Black Sabbath. Turn the treble off on all the tracks."

We recorded eight songs in six days. I mixed the tracks and sent them to Sub Pop. I think Kurt and Krist [Novoselic] had made cassettes and given them out to shitloads of people. All of a sudden, everyone I knew had copies of the sessions.

Five of those songs became Nevermind classics. Could you hear the leap in Kurt's writing from Bleach?

It was much more sophisticated. The melodies were gorgeous. In "In Bloom," the chorus is, "He's the one who likes all the pretty songs." "Pay to Play," which became "Stay Away," was closer to old-school punk but it was less one-dimensional than the stuff on Bleach.

"Polly" on Nevermind is the actual Smart demo. Why didn't you recut it?

I don't know that Kurt heard the song in any other way. He had this old, shitty five-string guitar that he never bothered to tune. It had these nylon strings, this plucky, ukulele sound. He was playing and singing so quietly that there was tons of tape hiss on the track. Being a nerdy engineer, I'm going, "Oh, shit." He was like, "No, that sounds good."

What was Kurt like as a bandleader?

He and Krist had a specific chemistry. Krist wrote a lot of the hooks, which came across on Nevermind. In a lot of the songs, the verses are just chords and melody. The riff is the bass hook. Kurt gave Krist a lot of latitude. I rarely heard him say, "I think you should change that riff."

The hardest thing was that Kurt would go through these mood swings. He would be really articulate and talk about what he wanted. Then, for no apparent reason -- I could never tell what triggered it - he would just shut up. He would sit in the corner and not say anything. I'd say, "Do you want to do another take?" He wouldn't even look at me.

How hard was it to maintain a working pace when you didn't know which Kurt was going to show up?

Usually, both showed up on the same day [laughs]. The swings were very extreme. But if he would go into a funk, it would only last an hour or two. At Smart, I was trying to figure out if he was pissed off. I was trying not to push him too much. Krist finally said, "He's all right. He's just moody sometimes. He'll come out of it."

Kurt often talked about his love for the Beatles. Did you try to bring that out, the pop within the noise?

I would use it to motivate him. When I wanted him to double-track his vocals, he would go, "That's fake. I don't wanna do that." I'd go, "The Beatles did it on everything. John Lennon loved the sound of his voice double-tracked."

But he would be sitting around, strumming his guitar, playing "Julia." He was constantly playing little Beatles things. One night, while we were making Nevermind, they'd all taken mushrooms and gone to Venice Beach to watch the sun come up. He told me that he went to listen to the White Album at about 7 a.m. He was going, "It's the greatest album in the history of albums!" He had that innate melodic sensibility that came out of him, and part of it was from listening to the Beatles.

What do you remember about the day you cut "Smells Like Teen Spirit"? They got the rhythm track in three takes.

Kurt had a hard time doing the guitar intro and then clicking onto a clean effect in the verse. It was a foot pedal called a Small Clone. It had this watery effect, the same one we used in "Come as You Are." He couldn't get the timing of it. I said, "We'll go back and overdub it later." That pissed him off. He wanted to play it live all the way through.

The day you cut "Lithium" also yielded the CD-bonus track, "Endless, Nameless."

For some reason, in "Lithium," the band kept speeding up. Kurt hated it. It was bugging him. Then Kurt went off into "Endless, Nameless." He just started banging away, the band latched on, and I got it all on tape. He was livid, so fucking pissed. The anger and frustration in his eyes - it was scary. He sang so hard he strangled his vocal cords, then he smashed up his guitar. It was a left-handed Mosrite. That ended the session, because that guitar was what he played on ninety percent of the album.

At the end, he was completely drained. Kurt came into the control room and didn't say anything. He didn't even want to hear it back. He just sat on the couch, and I said, "Well, maybe that's it for today."

Where did the nutty start of "Territorial Pissings" -- Krist yelping the chorus of the Youngbloods' "Get Together" -- come from?

That's Krist singing into one of Kurt's guitars, a Fender Jazzmaster. It had a shitty pickup, and you could sing into it. Kurt wanted to put some intro on the song. I said, "Why don't you do some stupid hippie lyric in there?" Krist went in and sang a bad a cappella version of it. Kurt died laughing. Then I thought, "Do we have clearance on this? Is this going to be a problem?" [According to Novoselic, Nirvana pays a publishing royalty for that intro.]

What was it with Kurt and cellos? There's one on "Something in the Way," and he used them later on tour and on In Utero.

There is a melancholy to it. He loved that sound. Dee Plakas from L7 -- her husband played cello on that track ["Something"]. The hardest thing was getting it in tune with the guitar, because Kurt recorded the song with that five-string nightmare he had. It was never tuned to anything -- it was like between notes -- but that was what Kurt wanted to use.

We struggled to record bass and drums and guitar live on that song. Then Kurt came into the control room. He was really frustrated. He sat on the couch and started playing the song, mumbling the words. I could barely hear him. But there was an intensity to it. I shut the doors to the control room and told the assistant engineer to turn off the telephone. We put a vocal mike on Kurt and a condenser mike on the guitar. He lay on the couch and did the song. I knew right away that I wanted to end the album with it. Instead of ending the album with an adrenaline high, it leaves you thinking. It leaves a stillness in the air. There aren't many outtakes from the album: "Old Age," "Sappy," also known as "Verse Chorus Verse," and something called "Song in D."

I wanted Kurt to finish the words to that one. It was like "On a Plain" or "About a Girl," this jangly arpeggio thing in the key of D. I thought I could turn it into another single. At the end, Kurt said he didn't want to finish it because it was too much like R.E.M. For "Sappy," he had some lyrics, but he wanted to change it. The band tried to record it on numerous occasions. It was one of those songs Kurt heard in his head, but they never got it right. But he kept taking a stab at it.

Did it bum you out when, after Nevermind became a hit, Kurt repudiated the production, saying it was too arena rock?

Yeah, it did. I know the band loved it when it was done. But I expected that to happen. When you're hanging out with your punk friends, and all of a sudden you go Number One, you can't go, "God, I love that album, I'm glad it's sold 20 million copies." It was hard for him to embrace it.

He was so complicated anyway. There are moments when I think about what that record did to him. Maybe if he hadn't had that success, he'd still be around. It's hard to know. He was miserable a lot of times, but what I found when we were recording was that he found escape in music. If he hadn't had that, he might not have lived as long as he did.

Can you see any cracks in Nevermind today, anything you would have done differently, regardless of subsequent events?

There are a couple of lines that he sang in "Teen Spirit" that are out of tune. I wanted him to go back and redo them, and he didn't want to do it. I can still hear them. But that's all right. It was more about the feel than making it perfect.

[From Issue 877 — September 13, 2001]