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Voice over
Ten years after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, an author remembers the 1991 interviews in which Nirvana gave him a look at the creative process that led to their seminal album, Nevermind
BY KURT ST. THOMAS WITH TROY SMITH


Someone at MTV says, "I knew Nevermind was gonna be a big hit." Nobody did, man! Nobody did! And I don’t care if someone at DGC says, "Man, I saw this coming." Nobody knew! No-Body! I mean, it just happened.

Dave Grohl

Nirvana set up camp to begin work on Nevermind at Sound City Studios, in Van Nuys, California. In its heyday in the 1970s, rock dinosaurs like Fleetwood Mac, Cheap Trick, Tom Petty, and Foreigner had recorded albums there, and the studio’s simple, decades-old analog technology was exactly what Nirvana was looking for. "We were afraid to record in a big studio with a professional sound mixer," Kurt [Cobain] noted. "If we wanted to make it really raw, we could have. We didn’t feel we had to compromise at all."

"We didn’t want to get lost in technology," Krist [Novoselic] said. "I’ve heard other people talk about digital technology and all the new things it offers and the drawbacks.... We got a warm sound out of [Sound City]." Krist later added, "It was like a time machine. It was like an old pair of corduroys that was starting to wear out. Just like a studio Abba would have recorded in. We’d just stagger in late, then get intense with it."

"It hadn’t been touched since like 1974," remembered Dave Grohl. "And all the equipment was really old and fucked-up, and it had corkboard all over the walls.... It’s a great studio. It’s fucking excellent. All the equipment we used was analog. None of it was digital, so we got this beefy, warm, fat ’70s sound to the basic tracks."

Despite their vaunted discipline, Nirvana had no particular focus when they entered the studio. "We really weren’t thinking about anything," Dave said. "I mean, it was about time the band recorded something, finally. It had been two years since Bleach, so it was more of like, ‘Wow, okay, we’re in the studio, let’s just get this done. Let’s just do it.’ There wasn’t really any massive analyzing. It was just sort of ‘Well, let’s just put down the drums and bass and then put down the guitar, and eventually get to the vocals.’ We didn’t spend six months and five million dollars on it. We tried to hash it out as quickly as possible."

Even Kurt’s songwriting was completed in this casual fashion. "I very rarely write about one theme or one subject," he explained. "I end up getting bored with that theme and write something else halfway through the rest of the song, and finish the song with a different idea."

Kurt’s songwriting method benefited from a kind of inspired anarchy. "It’s just thumbing through my poetry books and going, ‘Oh, there’s a line,’ and writing it down. That’s all I do. None of my poems are coherent at all. They have no themes whatever. They’re not based on anything. It’s just a bunch of gibberish. I mean, I try to have relations to some of the lines, and there’s a lot of double meanings, and in certain senses, they do relate to something, but it’s always changing. But when I say ‘I’ in a song, it’s not me, 90 percent of the time."

"Kurt is the meister behind the songs," said Krist. "He’ll sit on his couch and hack off a riff and a vocal melody, and then he brings it to the band and we throw in some dynamics."

Logically, there was only one person to produce Nevermind, one person who fully understood the current mindset of the band, and that was Butch Vig. Nirvana had worked well with him when they recorded the basic Nevermind demo tracks at Vig’s studios in Wisconsin. "He was just easy to work with," Kurt said. "Laid-back and really attentive to what’s going on. He works hard, but he doesn’t work the band hard. That’s the thing. That’s a good balance there."

In another interview, Dave agreed. "It took about three weeks to do the record, which was a lot more time than Bleach took, but our producer, Butch Vig, was really great to work with. He didn’t put any pressure in the wrong places. He was just easy to work with, and the record came out just as we wanted it to."

Compared to Bleach, Nevermind demonstrated the band’s growing attention to detail, accounting for the extra time it took to record. The three-week recording time was still rather quick compared to most major-label-released records, and the extra money and time saved allowed Nirvana to lay down a few more tracks and work on overdubs a little more than usual.

For example, Kurt’s guitar sounds were drawn from a handful of guitars, including a late-model 1960s Fender Mustang and a Fender Jaguar. He also used newer-model Fender Stratocasters. Armed with several different distortion pedals, the speaker cabinet for Kurt’s amp was miked with four different mikes. Butch Vig used the best-sounding one for the overdubs of Kurt’s guitar parts. The songs were recorded live, and additional vocal and guitar dubs were added later.

The increased attention to Kurt’s guitar sound gave each of the songs on Nevermind a distinctive flavor. Yet they still seem to flow together like a finely braided cord. Kurt talked about how one of the songs set the tone for the entire album: "We’d been practicing for about three months. We were waiting to sign to DGC, and Dave and I were living in Olympia, and Krist was living in Tacoma. We were driving up to Tacoma every night for practice, trying to write songs. I was trying to write the ultimate pop song, I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies. I have to admit it. When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily I should have been in that band — or at least in a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard. ‘Teen Spirit’ was such a clichéd riff. It was so close to a Boston riff or ‘Louie, Louie.’ When I came up with the guitar part, Krist looked at me and said, ‘That is so ridiculous.’ I made the band play it for an hour and a half."

Both Krist and Kurt thought the same thing once the playing of the song fell into place. "The Pixies," Krist says. "We saw it right away. Both of us said, ‘This really sounds like the Pixies. People are really going to nail us for it.’"

When they were listening to the mix-down, it was Dave who first spoke out and said he didn’t think "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was that hot. "I don’t know, everybody else was flipping out on it and thinking, ‘Ooh, this will be the first single,’ " Dave said. "We sort of wanted ‘In Bloom’ to be the first single. I mean, ‘Teen Spirit’ wasn’t a favorite or anything. It was just sort of another song."

Many theories have been offered to explain the song’s title, but Kurt’s explanation seems to fit best. ‘Well, this friend of mine [Kathleen Hanna] and I were goofing around in my house one night. And we’re kind of drunk and we were writing graffiti all over the walls in my house and she wrote, ‘Kurt smells like teen spirit.’ Earlier on we were kinda having this discussion on revolution and teen revolution and stuff like that, so I took that as a compliment. I thought that she was saying that I was a person who could inspire, in a way. I just thought that was a nice little title. And it turns out she just meant that I smelled like the deodorant Teen Spirit. I didn’t even know that deodorant existed until after the song was written."

"[‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’] is a typical teenage aggression song," Kurt said in the fall of 1991. "It has revolutionary themes, but I don’t really mean it in a militant [light]. The generation’s apathy is getting out of hand. [I’m] pleading to the kids, ‘Wake up!’ " This explanation was echoed in another interview: "It’s about ‘hey brother, especially sister, throw away the fruit and eat all the rind’.... No longer is it taboo for the tattooed to take their generational solidarity and shove it up the ass of the Byrds and Herman’s Hermits — loving disgraces we call parents, posing as the enemy to infiltrate the mechanics of the system, to slowly start its rot from the inside. It’s an inside job, it starts with the custodians and the cheerleaders."

"No one, especially people our age, wants to address important issues," Kurt said. "They’d rather say, ‘Never mind, forget it.’ The song ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ addresses that subject, in a way." He recalled the origins of the line, "Here we are now, entertain us." "That came from something I used to say every time I used to walk into a party to break the ice. A lot of times, when you’re standing around with people in a room, it’s really boring and uncomfortable. So it was ‘Well, here we are, entertain us. You invited us here.’ "

Dave dismissed the song’s deeper implications. "Just seeing Kurt write the lyrics to a song five minutes before he first sings them, you just kind of find it a little bit hard to believe that the song has a lot to say about something. You need syllables to fill up this space or you need something that rhymes."

However, those within the Nirvana management saw this song almost immediately as an anthem of sorts, a song that would speak to a troubled generation of people. "Every once in a while, a song is that powerful," said Danny Goldberg about "Smells Like Teen Spirit." "And in their instance, they not only had a song that was that powerful — it combined with an image that was very attractive to a certain subculture."

The version of "In Bloom" on Nevermind is a remake of the 1990 version that featured Chad Charming on drums. The audio track of that 1990 version is on the "In Bloom" video, but it has never been officially released by DGC. For this version, it is clear that Dave simply mimics Charming’s original drum part, but he pounds the skins just a little bit harder, adding his own flavor. The production is crisper, and overall the song’s new version kicks harder.

Kurt explained how his old peeve, high-school jocks, inspired the lyrics. "Football players who become stage divers. There were some very violent, macho guys there [in the pit], who we can’t stand, and hopefully we can weed them out. The only thing we can do is make jokes about them." And don’t forget the guys with bi-level haircuts, rednecks with guns. "Yeah. I suppose it leans toward that more than anything," said Kurt. "I really don’t have any explanation for that song. I mean, of course it does have those things in it. Obviously I don’t like rednecks, I don’t like macho men, you know, I don’t like abusive people. I guess that’s what that song is about. It’s an attack on them."

In a DGC Records press release for Nevermind, Kurt, tongue in cheek, referred to "Come As You Are" as just "an old-fashioned love song coming down in three-part harmony." Kurt used a Small Clone Chorus Pedal on his guitar to give it that underwater feel to the opening guitar riff; the result sounds remarkably like the opening guitar riff to the classic Killing Joke song "Eighties."

"I really don’t know what that song is about," Kurt said. "I guess it’s about expectations of people. The lines in the song are really contradictory ... you know.... One after another they’re kind of a rebuttal to each other. I really don’t have much to say about it. It’s just about people and what they’re expected to act like."

Originally titled "Imodium" (culled from the bottle of the anti-diarrhea medicine Tad Doyle was taking during TAD’s European tour with Nirvana in 1989), "Breed" was first recorded with Chad Channing on drums and Butch Vig overseeing the production during the Nevermind demos. A leftover from the Bleach era, the new version of "Breed" (now with Dave on drums) has many of the characteristics of the songs from Bleach. Kurt’s punk-rock rantings "I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care," Krist’s heavily distorted bass, and Dave’s incessant pounding on the skins make "Breed" one of the heaviest songs on the album.

Another song first recorded with Charming in 1990 and recut with Dave for Nevermind is "Lithium." "It’s another story that I made up, but I did infuse some of my personal experiences," said Kurt, "like breaking up with girlfriends and having bad relationships, feeling that death void that the person in the song is feeling, very lonely, sick." In the official DGC press release for Nevermind, Kurt expanded on the subject. "People who are secluded for too long go insane, and as a last resort they often use religion to keep alive. In the song, a guy’s lost his girl and his friends and he’s brooding. He’s decided to find God before he kills himself. It’s hard for me to understand the need for a vice like that, but I can appreciate it too. People need vices."

Kurt played guitar through a Fender Bassman amp, and used an Electro Harmonix Big Muff Fuzz to achieve a darker sound.

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Issue Date: April 2 - 8, 2004
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