Gersh noticed Vig was tired and took the opportunity to call in veteran mixer Andy Wallace, who had done terrific work on Slayer’s Seasons in the Abyss. Although the band was skeptical, they “just went along with the game,” as Chris puts it.
This was also Vig’s major label debut and he may have overcompensated slightly. “That record is pretty hacked up,” Chris says. “Some songs were pretty straight ahead but a couple of songs were electronic sleight of hand. It’s a really produced record.” Occasionally, Vig would have to stitch together several different parts to get a complete performance, but the lion’s share of slickness came from Andy Wallace. Vig’s mixes sound positively naked in comparison to the final result. Wallace sweetened the sound, filtering the raw tracks through various special effects boxes, cranking out about one mix a day.
Between extra lodging, extra studio time and Wallace’s fee, calling in Wallace doubled the budget of the record, which was still comparatively modest.
The band wasn’t wild about Wallace’s presence. “We’d get in and he’d play us his mix and he wasn’t too kind to suggestions,” Dave recalls. “He did a lot of tweaking of the drums, making them more digital-sounding. Everything had a produced weirdness. All we wanted to do was record these songs and get a record out because it had been so long since Bleach and we’d been playing these songs and they were great and we were excited and we wanted to record them before we got totally sick of them, which we already were. So it was just like, ‘Let’s get it over with.’ ”
Part of the reason the album sounds so slick is the fact that the room miking of the drums didn’t work out well, and so Wallace used digital reverb to fix the sound and further pumped up the drums with equalization and some samples that he blended in behind the kick drum and the snare. “He gave some real wide stereo separation using some doubling and delays on guitars and things,” says Vig. “He put a little bit of gloss on the voice but I don’t think he went too far with it. If anything, we wanted to make sure the mixes still sounded fairly organic.” For all the studio tricks, Wallace didn’t use as much as most pop albums.
Listening to the album now, it sounds as if the music were a jagged stone encased in Lucite. “That’s Andy Wallace,” Kurt says, adding that Geffen loved it that way because they were used to records like that. It was all for the best anyway, according to Kurt, “because it sold eight million records and now we’re allowed to do whatever we want. It was part of the plan that we had to try to get on the radio and get our foot in the door and be able to do whatever we want for the rest of the time we’re a band.”
“We tried to have a fine line between being commercial and sounding alternative,” says Chris.
“Looking back on the production of Nevermind, I’m embarrassed by it now,” Kurt says. “It’s closer to a Motley Crue record than it is a punk rock record.”
During the recording, Kurt and Dave had seen a documentary on underwater birth, and Kurt mentioned it as a cover idea to Robert Fisher, an art director at Geffen. Fisher found some pictures of babies being born underwater but they were too graphic, so they settled for a stock photo of a swimming baby. Kurt joked they should add a fish hook with a dollar bill on it, and the idea stuck. Then it transpired that the stock house which controlled the photograph wanted $7,500 a year for as long as the album was in print, so Fisher got underwater photographer Kirk Weddle to go down to a pool for babies and take some more shots.
The band chose one of five different photographs, with a shot of five-month-old Spencer Elden emerging as the winner. The only thing was, the baby’s penis was quite visible. “If there’s a problem with his dick,” Fisher said, “we can cut it off.” Some people in the Geffen/DGC sales department did worry that the traditionally conservative chain stores might object to the penis and Fisher even went so far as to begin preparing a cover with the penis airbrushed out. Kurt had anticipated some outcry as well, and had already composed some copy to put on a sticker over the problematic member. It read, “If you’re offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile.”
What’s missing from from this picture? The alternate artwork for the Nevermind cover, (photo by Kirk Weddle, courtesy Geffen Records)
Spencer Elden’s penis stayed on.
There was only slight umbrage taken at the naked infant. In April of 1992, a city code enforcement officer allegedly advised the Wild Planet record store in Ventura, California, to cover the baby’s penis on a poster they had in the window. They used a pink Post-It note. “It’s just weird that anybody should have a problem with a baby,” says Chris.
There were many different interpretations of the cover. Some thought the baby represented the band, and that swimming toward the dollar bill represented their sell-out. But the image probably appealed to Kurt because it echoed his ideas about recapturing his innocent childhood bliss; like many of his paintings, the cover symbolized the very moment when that bliss would begin to disappear. More overtly, the image also signaled a departure from the acquisitive, yuppie eighties, a rejection of the materialism which backfired into junk bond scandals, corrupt savings and loan institutions, and a whole lot of repossessed BMWs. When the book of the nineties is written, the cover of Nevermind should be on the first page.
Then there was a photo shoot with Michael Lavine, who had flown out from New York. During the shoot, the band passed a bottle of whiskey around until they were all quite stewed. “Hurry up, take the photo before I pass out,” Kurt begged Lavine.
Outtakes from the infamous underwater photo session. (© Kirk Weddle)
Later on, the group did an underwater photo session in a pool with Kirk Weddle to play off the cover concept. The shoot turned into a Spinal Tap–style fiasco. “It was really stormy the weekend before and the pool got really clouded up,” says Fisher, “and the pump broke two days before so the water was really cold and Kurt was really sick and they were hating being in the water. It was kind of a nightmare. Kurt had a hard time—it seemed like he had a real buoyancy problem—he’d kick and thrash and he’d still be on top of the water. He just couldn’t submerge himself.” Fisher eventually had to make a composite of three different shots to get something usable. The photo appeared in an ad campaign.
The photo on the back of the album is from when Kurt was in a “bohemian photography stage” and features the ubiquitous Chim-Chim. Behind Chim-Chim is the meat-and-diseased-vagina collage that Kurt put on his refrigerator back in Olympia. Close inspection of the photo reveals a picture of Kiss a little bit above Chim-Chim’s head.
The band’s bio contained some hilarious whoppers. “Cobain, a sawblade painter specializing in wildlife and landscapes, met Novoselic at the Grays Harbor Institute of Northwest Crafts,” the bio said. “Novoselic had a passion for gluing seashells and driftwood on burlap and, he remembers, ‘I liked what Kurt was doing. I asked him what his thoughts were on a macaroni mobile I was working on. He suggested I glue glitter on it. That really made it!’ The incident formed the basis of Nirvana’s magic.”
Kurt catching forty winks by the pool. (© Kirk weddle)
Later in the bio, Dave explains his first encounter with Kurt and Chris. “They wore berets, sunglasses, sandals and had goatees. Chris walked around with these poetry books by Rod McKuen and Kurt would do interpretive dances while Chris recited.”
“Our songs have the standard pop format: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, bad solo,” Kurt said. “All in all, we sound like the Knack and the Bay City Rollers being molested by Black Flag and Black Sabbath.”
From the Michael Lavine session done shortly after completing Nevermind. (© Michael Lavine.)
CHAPTER EIGHT AND A HALF
IT FELT AS IF WE COULDN’T BE STOPPED
In mid-June, right after the record was finished, they landed an opening slot on a quickie eight-date West Coast tour with Dinosaur Jr. Shelli worked at the T-shirt stand. As the tour wound through Denver, L.A., and Santa Cruz, it began to seem like people were more excited about Nirvana than the headliner.
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In August, Nirvana opened for their heroes, Sonic Youth, on a European festival tour. “That was a wild tour,” Chris says. “We got in a lot of trouble. Busting stuff up. Drunk, getting kicked out of clubs.” Chris would know. He missed Shelli and he was homesick, and he’d get very drunk and disorderly on the tour. Eventually, John Silva called Shelli and asked her to talk to Chris. It worked a little bit, but finally, Shelli simply flew to Europe and kept Chris company, earning her keep by working at the T-shirt stand again.
Sonic Youth had made sure that their new favorite band was on the tour, smoothing the way for Nirvana with promoters and generally making sure they were well taken care of. They were by the side of the stage at every show, checking them out. If Kurt jumped off the stage, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore would often be the one to haul him back up again.
Mostly, it was an idyllic time. Various members of Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and Dinosaur Jr all hung out together and laughed and drank and gossiped and talked about music and no one was a global superstar yet. Nirvana was playing festivals for the first time. They were curious and enthusiastic about what lay before them. “The most exciting time for a band is right before they become really popular,” Kurt says. “I’d love to be in bands that just do that every two years. Every time I look back at the best times in this band it was right before Nevermind came out. It was awesome. That’s when the band is at its best—they’re really trying hard and there’s so much excitement in the air you can just taste it.”
The band drank a lot. Part of their contract specified one bottle of vodka and one bottle of Glenfiddich at every show. Dave didn’t actually drink much at first, but Chris would drain the Glenfiddich and Kurt and his buddy Ian Dickson, whom he brought along for the ride, would the vodka. Eventually, even Dave broke down and would swig on a bottle of red wine during the drumless “Polly.” “You stick all this free alcohol in front of people night after night and you get bored waiting around and you think, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll have a drink,’ ” says tour manager Alex Macleod. “And things go downhill from there.”
Early in the tour at England’s mammoth Reading Festival, Courtney, Kat Bjelland, and Kim Gordon were sitting in one of the trailers backstage, drinking whiskey and talking about Kurt. Filmmaker Dave Markey, shooting footage for what would become the documentary film 1991: The Year That Punk Broke, stuck a camera in the door and Courtney stared straight into the lens and said “Kurt Cobain makes my heart stop. But he’s a shit,” and walked away.
Later, Courtney, Kurt, Mudhoney’s Mark Arm and Dan Peters, and Melody Maker writer Everett True were indulging in some innocent backstage vandalism. Peters flung a big bottle of oil and it leaked, dousing Courtney’s face and hair. Embarrassed, she ran away in tears—it reminded her of the humiliation she used to feel in school. That night, they were all watching Iggy Pop’s set by the side of the stage and Kurt whispered in Courtney’s ear, “I would never have picked on you in high school.” “It was like he had ESP or something,” says Courtney.
Kurt admits to plenty of bruises for his efforts, but he says he never really hurt himself by hurling his body into the drum set until he slightly dislocated his shoulder at Reading that year. “I have this protective shield around me that stops me from getting hurt,” he half jokes.
By the time of the 1992 Reading Festival, they had gotten it down to a science, piling up the equipment with special care, then knocking it all down with gleeful malice for a good fifteen minutes after every show.
“It got to the point where it was like, people see the ‘Lithium’ video and that’s three minutes of the ultimate Nirvana experience—we’re rocking out, the crowd’s going nuts, shit’s getting broken—this is what it’s like to see Nirvana play,” says Dave. “From then on, everywhere we go, we walk offstage and we haven’t smashed anything and people are like, ‘What’s your problem? Where’s Nirvana?’ So then it got to the point where it became a parody where everybody expects us to do this, so you might as well make fun of it. So you set things up and you set this on top of this and set this over there and do everything methodically.”
Later on the summer ’91 festival tour, Kurt, Chris, Dave, Courtney, her then-boyfriend Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins, and a few others went out to a club in London. Kurt boasted to Courtney, “I’m going to be a rock star soon.”
“You are not.”
“Yes I am. I’m going to be a big rock star. I’m going to buy antiques—really expensive antiques for my wife.”
That night, Kurt went home with two English girls, very out of character. “I hope you get fucked!” Courtney called out to him as he left. As it happens, he didn’t.
Nirvana played a Belgian festival called Pukkelpop, which translates as “Zit-pop.” Nirvana’s set began at eleven in the morning, but that wasn’t too early for the band to get drunk before the show. “And,” as Alex Macleod says, “things went downhill from there.”
The band switched around all the name tags on the dinner tables backstage, so that the Ramones and their entourage of twelve were seated at a table for two which was meant for then-Pixies leader Black Francis and his girlfriend. Even John Silva got into the act and started a food fight.
Kurt was walking around with a Black Francis name tag stuck to his chest all day and by seven o’clock in the evening had built up quite a head of steam. While Black Francis played his solo set, Kurt spied a fire extinguisher by the side of the stage and started hosing down Black Francis. A horde of security men dashed toward Kurt as he dropped the hose and ran for his life.
One country where Nirvana didn’t do as well as it could have is Germany, During the European summer festival tour with Sonic Youth, they played a show in Bremen. A woman from the German branch of MCA, Geffen’s parent company, stopped by and presented the band with a garbage can with a talking basketball hoop on it that made a crowd noise after every basket. It was filled with candy and American magazines and had A cheerful little card that read “Welcome to Germany and MCA!”
By this point, the band was fully dedicated to completely destroying their dressing room every night of the tour. The German MCA rep walked in after Nirvana’s set to witness the baud, falling-down drunk, trashing their dressing room and throwing all her gifts all over the place. Meanwhile, sometime during the show, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon had found the note on the garbage can and written “Fuck you!” on it. The MCA rep saw this and assumed the hand had written it to her; then Chris shot off a fire extinguisher. As Alex Macleod puts it, “It all went downhill from there.”
Later that evening, while sitting in the tour bus doing interviews, Kurt was playing with a lighter and managed to set the curtains on fin. They quickly doused them with some water, but seconds later, the same MCA rep knocked on the door and was greeted by Kurt, who was enveloped in a cloud of putrid smoke from the curtains; she walked off in a huff (somehow the English music press reported that the hand had burned down their bus).
That night they got an apoplectic phone call from John Silva. “You guys have got to take it easy! What did you do?’ ”
“We thought we were dropped,” Dave says. “We were going ‘All right, we gol our advance and we’ve already been dropped! Wooooo!’ ”
Kurt’s Great Kock and Holl Swindle fantasy had almost come true without anybody even trying.
The hand got drunk before their set at the final show of the tour in Rotterdam. Chris climbed up the P.A. stack at the end of the set, with his trousers around his ankles and a bottle in his hand. Security ran onstage and hauled him down while Kurt trashed everything in sight. One of the security men took a swing at Chris and a brawl broke out right on stage. Chris eventually got thrown out of the venue and came back and started a fight with the; promoter.
***
The band went home for a while, then went down to L.A. to shoot the “Teen Spirit” video. Kurt worked up a treatment for the video, which originally included vignettes resembling something out of the Ramones movie Rock and Roll High School, or perhap
s more like Over the Edge, an excellent 1979 movie about a band of crazed juvenile delinquents who smoke pot, drink, and vandalize a Southern California suburb. In the finale, their parents hold a meeting at the high school, but soon the local kids lock them inside, smash their cars, and set the building on fire. “That [movie] pretty much defined my whole personality,” says Kurt. “It was really cool. Total anarchy.”
The video was shot for a modest thirty-three thousand dollars on a Culver City, California, sound stage made up to look like a high school gym, or what Dave fondly calls a “pep rally from hell.” The janitor was played by Rudy Larosa, who was actually the janitor in director Sam Bayer’s apartment building. Kurt had envisioned another type of gym—“it looked too contemporary,” he says—and the backdrop bugged him, too. It reminded him of those bland backdrops used in aspirin commercials or Time-Life infomercials.
Kurt had other ideas for the clip—he wanted all the kids to run outside and start smashing things up and ruining cars. He wanted to have everyone in the audience come down and empty out their wallets into a big bonfire. He wanted to have a bonfire inside the gymnasium and burn some effigies. The last shot of the video, in which the janitor walks by a bound and gagged principal, was originally part of a larger scenario, but it got axed early on in the editing process.
The cheerleaders were Kurt’s idea. “But I wanted really ugly overweight cheerleaders,” he says, “and a couple of guys, too, just because I’m sickened by the stereotypical prom queen.”
Bayer vetoed the ideas. The band nicknamed him “Jethro Napoleon.” “He’s got a little Napoleon complex,” Kurt says of the diminutive Bayer. “He was just so hyper, such a rocker guy. I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe we actually submitted to that.”
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