"KNDD 107.7," "Seattle's original alternative." "Now a song that sounds as good today as it did when it was released in 1991 ." "It didn't sound like history, or like the future, it sounded amazing." "I wasn't thinking that we had made a classic album, I thought, "Wow, it sounds good."" "It announced the new guard in rock music, the new regime." "I think there was a whole generation of people that were waiting to have something to follow." "This is the B verse, one of the first vocals we overdubbed, it's the "hello, hello" section." "You can hear it build in intensity." "And he morphs the lyrics from "hello" to "how low"." "And it explodes into the chorus." "Fantastic." "What set Nirvana apart was Kurt Cobain." "He was the outsider." "He spoke to legions of dysfunctional kids." "You could tell that with Nirvana, there was nothing affected about it." "They didn't set out to be rock stars, they were just these guys from out in the hinterlands." "Aberdeen is about 105 miles away from Seattle." "It doesn't seem that far on the map but metaphorically, psychologically, the world of Aberdeen couldn't be farther away from Seattle." "There wasn't really a music scene in Aberdeen at the time." "Nothing really compelling." "Great rock and roll is usually made by people who don't have a home." "They're looking for someplace to be, someplace to go." "someplace to literally call their own, and Aberdeen just wasn't it." "For most bands growing up in Aberdeen," "Seattle was the only place they thought of success." "There was a tremendous amount of coherence in the Seattle music community." "It seemed that everybody was going to the same parties, taking the same drugs, listening to the same music, just basically hanging out and a lot of cross-pollination happening." "When Nirvana first started coming to town, even though they were very ragged, with their long, dirty hair, and their torn-up jeans..." "You had Krist this tall and Kurt this tall and this elfin drummer." " They were funny-looking." " They looked so odd." "They were like Children Of The Corn or something." "We had no sense of what we were seeing." "But each song was just amazing." "One thing about Nirvana that struck me is that girls liked them." "A lot of girls would go see a lot of the Seattle bands, grunge, whatever you call it, and I remember thinking that all these girls liked Nirvana and Kurt and his voice and that to me reflected well on their potential." "By the time Nirvana had really started to gel, get its sound together," "Sub Pop was really the best place to go." "The fact was, the people at Sub Pop could recognise a great band." "We were very disciplined." "We took rehearsals and playing seriously." "There was no messing around, no partying or having girls over, it was very serious." "We played the songs over and over again until we felt they sounded right, worked out all the bugs." "At that point, we'd go in the studio and we'd just do our thing." "The Bleach record was recorded over... I think the total amount of time they spent on it was about 30 hours." "They were very much about the music at the time, absolutely focused on what they were doing." "They had to be very efficient to be able to make recordings that quickly that good." "For all of the discussion about grunge being punk rock and hardcore," "Kurt was a huge Beatles fan, in particular a John Lennon fan." "None of the other grunge musicians could really say that." "In fact, I think they were all busy rebelling against the Beatles." "So then Kurt started discussing the recording of the second album." "We had made the suggestion of Butch Vig and he was familiar with Butch and very excited at the prospect of working with him." "They were doing shows on the West Coast then coming to the Midwest." "They played Kansas City or someplace, and Chicago or Iowa, and they had a gig scheduled in Madison." "We set aside about seven days, which was an extravagant budget for me." "I was impressed with their new songs." "They were heads and tails better-crafted than the songs on Bleach." "One problem was there were a couple of songs Kurt hadn't finished the lyrics on and he blew his voice out on the fourth or fifth day, he sang so hard, I think it was on Lithium." "We just basically had to shut down recording." "Jonathan flew in from Sub Pop and heard the stuff and loved it." "He said, "We'll get him back here in three, four weeks," ""then do a proper mix."" "Then I didn't hear anything." "The drummer when they first started coming to Seattle was Chad." "He played on parts of Bleach, did all the touring, but they were dissatisfied with his drumming," "so in the period between the two albums, they would do other tours and get substitute drummers." "They had Dale Crover from the Melvins, and then they got Dan Peters from Mudhoney to play some shows." "We finally landed with Dave Grohl." "Once Dave joined, Nirvana was like a tight machine, it just all fell into place." "I don't know if it was providence or what, or something guided us to get together." "You could feel the impact right away." "We had that sort of do-it-yourself punk-rock ethic that we all shared." "I don't think it would've worked if one person didn't have that." "I mean, honestly, there was hardly any career ambition at all." "There was no way we could be the biggest band in the world, we just wanted to play." "Sub Pop at the time was having all sorts of financial difficulties and we..." "If I..." "You know, if I can be candid with you, we didn't really know what we were doing." "There was this whole deal with Sub Pop and they were gonna sign some... they were gonna be a subsidiary of some big major label and we just felt like, "Wow, cut out the middle man." ""We should just get our own deal."" "Any band worth its salt, or any band that knows it's worth its salt, will want to reach the widest audience possible." "And certainly by 1990, 1991 , signing to a major label was not considered the worst thing you could do." "If anything, it was... it was evidence that the revolution might be succeeding." "As an AR person, when you're trying to sign something, it's all that matters." "So there is some of that - "l have to sign this thing."" "I didn't think, "This will be bigger than everything else,"" "or, "This is gonna change the face of popular music,"" "I just thought that there was something really special that happened between Dave and Krist and Kurt on stage." "So we went to DGC, which is the David Geffen Company, and started talking to them seriously, and struck the deal." "I really wanted to do Nevermind." "I didn't know if I had a shot because I was still unknown and I knew that the major labels always liked to have a tried and true producer at the helm." "One reason why we decided to do Nevermind with Butch was how patient he is." "And it was such a great experience working with him in Madison." "The label wanted us to work with other people but it was intimidating, we were comfortable with Butch." "I was sort of shocked when they said," ""We've got $60,000 to do the record."" "That seemed so extravagant compared to what I had been working on in the past." "So we thought Sound City would be good." "It had a Neve console, good mics." "It was in LA. I think the label wanted to keep their eyes on me." "You know, be around just to make sure things weren't going a little crazy." "It wasn't the Hollywood studio that I imagined it to be." "It wasn't Capitol Records Studios or AM Studios, it was out in the middle of Van Nuys in this small warehouse district." "But you walk in and walk down the hallway" "..and you see Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, some Tom Petty records." "Some classic albums had been done there." "Very bare bones but it had a great, big live room, still sounds amazing today." "In Bloom is one of the first songs that we cut at Sound City." "I was familiar with it because we had worked on it for Sub Pop." "I thought it'd be good to start with a song that I was familiar with." "This is basically the setup that we had." "If you take some of the tracks out here, mute this..." "You can hear the bass and..." "And the drums." "Dave and Krist had a great groove going." "That's what we got on the first take." "I didn't throw a bunch of drum fills in there, I kept it as simple as possible." "And that was an unspoken rule." "As far as I'm concerned, for the role that I did, it was about... serving the song." "So after we did the basic take and had Kurt's vocal down we had Dave come in and do harmonies in the chorus." "Their voices sound pretty cool together." "Very similar tonal quality." "And I thought it might sound better if they doubled it, to make it fuller, a bit richer." "So we went back and..." "Kurt did a double track." "He didn't like doing double tracks, so I used the John Lennon reference." "Every time he resisted, I said, "John Lennon did it." He'd go, "OK."" "So that's Kurt doubled." "And you add Dave in." "That sounded good but we thought, we might as well double Dave too, so then we went and... lt sounds great." "It becomes a magnificent chorus." "I just see the progression of Nirvana when it just started off as this kind of whack dissonance punk band, it was a dissonant punk." "And it evolved and it moved towards more pop music." "If music could change anyone's opinion you needed melodies to make people's heart dance." "He genuinely believed that." "His plan was, or his vision was," ""l'm gonna make my art..." ""palatable to reach enough people to where l can effect something."" "I think one of the reasons Kurt wanted the record to sound heavy was because he knew the songs were really hooky, really poppy, lots of pop melodies." "He didn't want to come across as sounding too poppy." "So if the guitars are roaring and thick and heavy and the drums are pounding, that dichotomy would work for him." "Lithium was a widely prescribed drug, pre-Prozac, for manic depression." "But what a great, upbeat pop song." "Even though the lyrics are pretty dark if you look at them closely, nonetheless, it's such a..." "When I saw Nirvana live, Lithium was the song the crowd danced to." "It's one of the few Nirvana songs that you could, it's very upbeat." "As an artist, sometimes writing is a form of therapy and Kurt had a lot of demons." "That was one way of getting things out of his system." "A lot of them I think were just about how he felt about life and even though you couldn't quite tell what he was singing about, you knew it was intense as hell." "Kurt used to say that music comes first and lyrics come second." "And I think Kurt's main focus was melody." "The way the lyrics blend with the vocal and the aesthetic of the song, it just creates a world of its own." "So when you're in that world, I guess, "Come as you are..."" "I'm not commenting on what that song's about, that's the way I see those lyrics." "It's beautiful, the flow's really nice, and it draws you in." "And that's the mark of any good art." "He was not a linear writer." "He did not say," ""l started at point A, I got to point B, and I'm gonna end the song at point C."" "It was like, "These are bits that come together."" "A lot of what he wrote had to do with the sound of words and communicating something inside those words that wasn't necessarily a reflection of the spelling or grammar." "Musically, we just wanted it to be..." "almost like children's songs." "We would always make that analogy." "We would always tell people that the songs were intended to be as simple as possible." "Polly is one of the songs that was recorded at Smart Studios that was going to be for the Sub Pop album and ended up going onto Nevermind." "It's the only song that was." "This song is very spare and it's very haunting." "Sometimes the quietest songs become the most intense." "OK, we're rolling." "Polly." "Little bit of a false start." "You can hear how cheap the guitar sounds." "His voice sounds fantastic." "Went back and added a harmony in the chorus." "Kurt was a great singer." "There's a mournfulness in there that comes across." "Polly was written about a real incident that happened." "A young woman was at a show at the Community World Theater." "I don't think it was a Nirvana show." "She was kidnapped and tortured and it was an article that was in the Tacoma paper." "She decided to come onto the guy and to start seeing him as a person." "That's when he took his guard down and she got away." "And I remember Kurt, when he read that in the newspaper, was..." "That really hit him." "It was really profound, he was like, "Wow."" "The most remarkable thing about Polly is he takes the point of view of the torturer." "I compared it once to Truman Capote whose brilliant work ln Cold Blood puts us in the mind of this murderer and we eventually begin to understand that mindset." "Polly is an amazing song." "Consider that song being released on such a commercial record." "Little bass break." "There's a spot where Kurt came in too early." "And we left it in." "Underneath the guitar and the vocals," "Krist's bass is giving a cool little pulse." "Keeps the track moving." "There's no drums except for the cymbal and hand percussion overdubs." "Very dark song." "Very beautiful." "Kurt's voice was always to me kind of like this real toxic glue." "Without that voice, I kind of suspect that the band wouldn't be as great as it is." "But everybody knows that." "The amount of rasp and gravel in his throat for someone that had such good pitch and such a beautiful tone in his throat." "It just sounded like he was boiling nails in there." "He just got on that microphone and started singing." "It was very natural, it wasn't forced." "He could really, really push it too." "He was channelling something, some kind of energy." "There's no way you could go to a show and not be drawn in." "Just like immediately hear those hooky songs and the..." "You just have to start moving, everyone was doing it." "You just felt alive, it was such a great thing." "Live, you could not tell what was gonna happen next." "You didn't know whether Kurt was gonna jump in the audience and be beaten up, whether Krist was gonna throw his bass so high you'd never see it again, whether the amps would survive another song." "They rocked so much harder than all these other bands that take it seriously." "And here these guys are who... are pretty much taking the piss out of rock and roll and rocking way harder than anyone else." "It felt like the centre of the universe at the time." "A lot of people go to gigs now and they see bands trash their gear and it's not really a very revelatory experience but when Nirvana destroyed their gear, and they did it habitually, it seemed without any care for their self-preservation," "the way they destroyed their equipment." "I remember shows where Krist and Kurt spent three or four minutes destroying their gear and I'm just sitting watching." "There's no music, but there's a couple thousand people watching them." "The smashing of the gear was really a shtick so we could get off the stage after about 45, 50 minutes." "It didn't matter if we played great or horrible, you smash your gear and it's a stellar ending to the set." "You were a wonderful audience, thank you." "No, thank you." "Something ln The Way was the hardest track to record." "After three or four takes of trying to cut it live in the main room, it just wasn't happening." "Kurt came into the control room and he sat on the couch and he basically said, "lt needs to sound like this."" "He laid on his back and started playing the guitar and he was barely singing, it was coming out almost a whisper." "I was like, "OK, stop."" "I grabbed two mics and plugged him in, I unplugged the phone and turned the fans off and the tape machine." "I said, "Do what you think you need to do."" "I literally held my breath for three minutes while he sang." "It was so quiet and yet it was so powerful." "And that was the core of the track." "It's very mournful, very quiet." "Something ln The Way is a complicated song because people assumed that Cobain talked about himself living under this bridge." "And it went down in legend that he lived under this bridge." "Very few people end up homeless and are that separated from their families but the emotional truth of what teenagers feel is so captured in that song, and that's something we all go through in our normal existence on this earth." "Coming up on the second verse, again gets very, very quiet." "I'll bring in some of the instrumentation here." "As we went back and overdubbed, it was very difficult... for both and Krist and Dave to do the drums and bass, cos with no click track the timing was all over the place." "I think I tortured them on it." "At some points we punched bar by bar to make sure it was really languid." "When Dave was doing the drums," "Kurt was in the control room saying, "Quieter."" "I think it's in his nature to hit hard." "But he played it very mellow, very understated." "And they were recorded in studio B, which is a dead, dry room." "Add the high harmonies in the chorus." "And last we brought in Kirk Canning to do a cello." "And he had the same problem that Krist did, trying to get in tune, in tune to Kurt's funky five-string acoustic." "So the track is a little out of tune." "But that gives it the eeriness." "It helps with it, gives it a lot of character." "Very mournful cello sound." "You don't have to be an existentialist to get what Kurt Cobain is singing about." "It's a universal truth in some ways." "I think we all feel alienated from each other and from our own beings at times." "He just cut to the core and put it right there in his music." "Kurt was attractive to a lot of people, to young people who were confused about their place in the world." "Because I think they saw him and they heard his music, and they heard somebody who was equally confused and unsure of their place in the world." "He was a reporter in a way." "He wasn't just writing about himself any more than John Lennon was, or Bob Dylan." "He took all this stuff and he made it sound..." "He made it sound like he was singing about you." "People picked up on Kurt being the real thing." "This is his calling." "It's almost messianic, in a way." "This song is called Smells Like Teen Spirit." "I remember the first time I first heard it." "They were playing at the OK Hotel and it was the first time they played it live." "I remember seeing it lt was like, now it's all over." "Now they're actually writing huge, amazing songs." "It's quite significant that of all the many catchy songs on Nevermind that was one that hadn't been written maybe a year in advance." "Songs like ln Bloom and Lithium were already old Nirvana songs." "Smells Like Teen Spirit was one of the last ones written before the album was finished." "The chorus we double-tracked." "They wanted to make it sound more powerful." "He was great at double-tracking." "He would do a take and another take and they always locked up really well." "Here comes the guitar solo." "He basically copped the vocal melody instead of coming up with something punky, frantic or strangled, like he usually did." "He copped the exact vocal melody and it works really well." "And then at the end of the solo, he lets it feed back into the third verse." "It's got this great, resonant feedback." "We actually pulled it back in the final mix but it would've been cool to leave it." "Starts to bend and morph." "Very creepy-sounding." "Kurt was on the button with playing his guitar, to deliver the sentiment of what he needed to get across." "That's the best guitar playing." "You can hear his voice now in the last chorus." "It's starting to get pretty shot." "It's been going so hard through the song, pushing so hard." "Sounds like his vocal cords are starting to come out of this throat." "Especially when he gets to "a denial"." "It's pretty powerful-sounding." "I remember Butch putting up the rough mixes after Kurt laid the vocals down, and he'd be like, "Listen to this song."" "He'd crank it in the control room and it would just come out, like a barrage." "It was like, "Did we do that?"" "It was like, "How did we do that?"" "I remember around the time we finished the rough mixes, and were listening to everything, I thought all the songs were really strong." "I kept thinking, maybe there's an audience out there, we might go beyond their Sub Pop crowd." "Maybe we can sell 200,000 records." "We predicted or hoped the projection for Nevermind would reach 50,000 copies." "That was based on the fact that Sonic Youth's Goo album had sold 100,000 or so, to that point." "And we felt that if Nirvana could do half of what Sonic Youth had done on DGC, that would be a success." "And when I was introducing the record to the company, I said to them that if we worked really hard... and we got a little bit lucky with the video... and the band didn't implode, that over the course of a year, we could probably sell half a million records." "We were sitting in the rented apartment in Los Angeles, talking about ideas for the video." "There was this film that Kurt was into, where these kids freak out and take over the school." "That was the genesis of it." "School and youthful rebellion." "Nirvana hired me because my reel was so bad." "It was a very punk, cool thing to do. "Let's hire this crap director to do this video." ""We'll get something not corporate."" "I saw the band play at The Roxy." "We didn't have any money." "The kids were moshing and jumping." "I said, that's great, get these kids down to the set." "So all these people showed up and Sam had a bullhorn." "By the first chorus, the place was just a riot, the place was going completely... I remember him screaming into the megaphone, "Stop!" "Cut!"" "The place was just being torn to shreds." "It was hilarious." "It looked like the greatest gig you could ever imagine." "High school going to hell." "Cheerleaders dancing around." "Anarchy." "So you get the Black Flag, Minor Threat type of aesthetic." "It was all there and there was literally nothing else on television like it." "It changed the entire look of MTV." "It made the band successful and it helped them sell a lot of records but it made MTV very successful." "It gave them a whole new platform to work from and a whole new generation to sell to." "I don't think it was cynical." "The media got it all - cynical, grungy, despair." "But it wasn't. lt was just a shot of life." "I think that is what everyone responded to." "A kid heard the song in a mall, started moshing around and fell off the balcony." "It was a phenomenon." "That energy, something came together." "It was really wild and it affected so many people." "Sometimes you'd show up to a gig and there'd be an extra 200 people outside, hoping they could get in." "The shows became more and more chaotic." "It was just one of those things that happens maybe once every generation." "This roll." "This momentum." "Word of mouth. " You must hear this band, Nirvana."" "Never mind the fact they had been playing for years, they had made records, in terms of who knew them at one point, and how everyone knew them at the next one, it literally was overnight." "You could tell that it wasn't like a normal record." "Kids weren't reacting to it like a normal record." "They were reacting to it like a movement." "In the issue of Billboard that was dated January 12th 1992," "Nirvana were number one in the Billboard charts." "They had knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the charts." "Unbelievable." "That was a pretty big deal at the time." "Some Seattle band that we knew had just displaced Michael Jackson in the number one spot on the album charts." "That was inconceivable." "Not only did it reach number one but it just broadened out and completely changed the demographic of what the rock audience was... ..in the USA." "And then it went global." "It was crazy." "We weren't prepared for it." "It's never been a main goal of ours." "We really don't care about that." "We just wanted to put out a good record that the people who liked our first album would like." "Hello, Space Shower TV." "We are Nirvana." "I am Kurt." "Hello, Space Shower TV." "We are Nirvana." "And I am Dave." "Hello, Golden Shower TV." "I am Krist and we are Nirvana." " What do you think about interviews?" " lt's a good magazine." "Did you hear my reaction when he asked if I wanted to do one?" "I said, "Fuck, no." l said, "Heck, no."" "We weren't on a mission." "We just wanted to make a great record." "That's where l think it was tough." "Yeah, sure, Kurt probably wanted to sell 20 million records and be the biggest band in the world." "But I'm sure he didn't want all the baggage that came along with it." "He didn't realise what baggage came with that." "Nobody did. I didn't." "Everybody changed." "We had to." "Change was thrust upon us." "He bore the brunt of it." "He was the creative force behind the band." "Of course, being the guitar player and the singer, that traditional front person role, and it's a tough gig." "Obviously, it was hard." "What people expect of you with regards to the largeness of moving masses of people," "people follow you unconditionally." "The part at which it was unconditional for Kurt, he couldn't understand." "I think what he found, which is certainly true of many successful people, is that he became rich and famous, and all the same things were still there." "He was still from a divorced family, had difficult relationships with that family, and struggled for his place in the world." "Kurt or Nirvana's greatest legacy was to bring the underground overground." "It wasn't that only the kids from "the wrong side of the tracks" got it." "Everybody got it." "His message was for a specific group of tormented people that he knew were out there that were struggling." "He knew that if he could reach them, there were a lot of them waiting to hear it." "He was right." "He knew all along." "You've got to give the music business a kick in the balls now and again." "That's what it did." "That's why it's a classic album." "It's a perfect storm." "So many things lined up the right way." "And that was Nevermind." "It changed my life. lt changed everyone's life affiliated with it." "All the way down the line." "Those don't come by very often, and when they do it's a magic moment." "When I listen to that album I hear a sense of... of purity and honesty... that I haven't heard in a long time, I guess." "Three people made that record." "A drum set, a bass and guitar." "It's undeniably the best thing I ever did in my whole life."