Butch Vig on Nevermind

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.]