At the start of the third week in February, the band traveled to Minnesota to record their new album with producer Steve Albini.
Kurt had the basic ideas for most of the songs by the time he and Courtney had left the Spaulding apartment in the summer of 1992. They just needed structure, which was worked out in rehearsals with Chris and Dave. Early versions of three of the songs—“Rape Me,” “Dumb,” and “Pennyroyal Tea”—had been kicking around on bootlegs since just after Nevermind. Kurt had wanted to begin recording the album that summer, but all three members lived in different cities and they weren’t in close touch; besides, Kurt and Courtney were about to have a baby.
Kurt had always wanted to record with Albini, ever since he first heard Big Black, an incendiary, tremendously influential Chicago trio on Touch & Go Records that combined nasty guitar textures, bilious, nasal vocals, and the incessant pounding of a drum machine to induce visions of urban rage and paranoia. Albini went on to a thriving, even legendary, career recording (like Jack Endino, never producing) various bands like Helmet, Superchunk, PJ Harvey, and even EMF, as well as countless underground heroes, such as the Jesus Lizard and Tar.
But Kurt was particularly after the drum sound he had heard on two Albini projects—the Pixies’ epochal 1988 album Surfer Rosa and the Breeders’ excellent 1990 album Pod. It’s a natural, powerful sound produced with canny microphone placement rather than phony sounding effects boxes. It reminded Kurt of the drum sound on Aerosmith’s 1976 Rocks album.
After Big Black, Albini fronted the unfortunately named thrash band Rapeman. Within indie-rock circles, a reputation as a misogynist seems to dog Albini, which would make him an odd choice for Kurt. “That’s what I’ve heard from people, but I just thought until I meet him, I don’t really care, because if he turns out to be an asshole, I’ll at least use him for his recording abilities,” Kurt says. “Definitely a few sexist things leaked out of him, but that’s just the scene he’s in. There’s a few misogynists that I admire like William Burroughs. Brion Gysin is a total misogynist and I like his writing. I hate people for being misogynists and I would choose not to be associated with them but sometimes they produce some good work. They just have a flaw that they need to work on.
“I learned a long time ago that if you’re too strict about things and you cut yourself off from people who have those tendencies, you’re limiting yourself,” Kurt says. “There are things that can be learned from people like that. And why not try to persuade them into thinking differently rather than just banning them, putting a veto on them, and not having anything to do with them. All it does is make them resentful and they won’t even think about the things that they do wrong.”
So, misogynist or not, Kurt was eager to get Albini, or more specifically, the Albini sound. “That sound is as close to the sound that I hear in my head that I’ve ever found,” he says, “so I just had to do it.”
For months before the band contacted him, rumors had been circulating that Albini was to produce the next Nirvana album. At last he sent a disclaimer to the U.K. music press stating that “the appearance in the press of this mistake fosters the impression that I only work with bands who’ve been on television. This is not the case!” Days later, Gold Mountain contacted Albini.
This was the man who once told a friend that he thought Nirvana was just “R.E.M. with a fuzzbox.” “I thought they were an unremarkable version of the Seattle sound,” Albini admits. “I thought they were typical of the bands of this era and of that locale.”
It’s an opinion he still holds, so one wonders why Albini would take the assignment. The way he puts it, it was a mission of mercy. “This is going to sound kind of stupid,” he says, “but in a way, I felt sorry for them. The position they were in, there was a bunch of bigwig music industry scum whose fortunes depended on Nirvana making hit records. It seemed obvious to me that fundamentally they were the same sort of people as all the small-fry bands I deal with. They were basically punk rock fans, they’re people that were in a band that came up from an independent scene and it was sort of a fluke that they got famous.”
“It seemed that they understood doing things the way I usually do them and they would appreciate making a record like that,” Albini continues. “But if I didn’t do it, they weren’t going to be allowed to make a record like that by the record company or by anyone else who worked with them. Any other producer that would work with Nirvana, for a start, would rob them, would want to get a lot of money out of them. And they’d probably be banking on making a hit record, in which case he would be making a record that he thought fit the mold of the hit singles record, not a powerful, personal punk rock record, which is the sort of record I got the impression they wanted to make.”
In addition to a $24,000 studio bill, Albini’s fee was $100,000, but unlike virtually any other producer, Albini refused to take points (a percentage of sales) on the album. “I just think that taking points on an album is an immoral position—I cannot do it, I think it’s almost criminal,” says Albini. “Anyone who takes a royalty off a band’s record—other than someone who actually writes music or plays on the record—is a thief.”
Albini didn’t want the album to sound anything like Nevermind. “It sounds like that not because that’s the way the band sounds,” he says, “but because that’s the way the producer and the remix guy and the record company wanted it to sound.”
Once again, Kurt finished writing most of the lyrics within days of recording his vocals, culling most of them from notebooks full of poetry.
Booking themselves in as “The Simon Ritchie Group,” the band recorded and mixed the entire album in two weeks at Pachyderm Studios, located about fifty miles south of Minneapolis in the middle of the Minnesota tundra. It’s a favorite haunt of Albini’s, where he has produced the Wedding Present, PJ Harvey, Killing Joke, Failure, and others. Clients stay at a large house which Chris described as “Mike Brady meets Frank Lloyd Wright.” The studio is a separate building about a hundred yards through the woods. The spacious wood-paneled main room where they set up the drums had a large window that looked out onto the snowy Minnesotan winter. The Neve mixing board had been used to make AC/DC’s Back In Black.
The band had made it abundantly clear to DGC and Gold Mountain that they didn’t want any interference with the recording—they’d learned at least one lesson from Nevermind. They didn’t even play any work tapes for their A&R man Gary Gersh, a pretty cheeky maneuver, to say the least. But Nirvana now had enough clout that Geffen wouldn’t dare reject the album—or would they? “If they do, they know we’ll break up,” says Kurt. “Fuck, we made them fifty million dollars last year.”
For most of the two weeks it took to make the album, it was just Albini, Kurt, Chris, Dave, and assistant engineer Robert “Bob” S. Weston IV.
Although it was ostensibly a low-budget project, Albini says the band was not above typical indulged rock star behavior. The band didn’t actually show up with their equipment and instead had it shipped, then wasted the better part of three days waiting for it to arrive. Albini says the band wanted someone to Fed Ex a boom box to them instead of just going out and buying one; when Kurt began having trouble tuning his guitar, they wanted to fly in their guitar tech Ernie Bailey. “When you’ve got millions of dollars, maybe you go a little crazy and start doing stuff like that,” says Albini.
But once they actually started recording, it went very quickly and they completed all the recording—basic drum, bass, and guitar tracks, guitar solos, and vocals—in about six days. Kurt says they could have done the whole album in a week if they had really wanted to.
They recorded live—meaning bass, drums, and guitar all at once—and kept virtually everything they laid down. Kurt added another guitar track to about half of the songs, then added guitar solos, then vocals. This time, he didn’t run out of cough syrup before it was time to sing.
“It was the easiest recording we’ve ever done, hands down,” says Kurt, who had anticipated at least so
me disagreements with Albini. “I thought we would eventually get on each other’s nerves and end up screaming at each other. I was prepared to have to live with this person who was supposedly a sexist jerk, but he was surprisingly helpful and friendly and easy to get along with.”
Personally, Albini was pleasantly surprised by all three band members. “Kurt is actually quite normal,” Albini says. “He’s been through a lot and you can tell that it’s beaten up on him. He’s kind of sallow and a little bit somber and melancholy but I think he’s melancholy because he’s in a situation that he thinks is not as pleasant as it should be, considering all the attributes—he’s got a lot of money, he’s famous, he’s in a successful, popular rock band, so things should be going fairly easily for him and they’re not. That’s a dichotomy that he’s uncomfortable with and I think he’s coming to accept it.
“He is an intelligent guy—he doesn’t come off that way,” Albini continues. “He plays dumb occasionally to try to get people to trip themselves up. Also I think he thinks it cool to be naive and dumb. But I think he’s an intelligent guy and he’s handled it better than most people. He still has a healthy suspicion of the other big shots in the music industry. A lot of people in his position would have completely converted and gone to the position where ‘They’re people just like us and I give them all the credit I would give you.’ I think he recognizes that most of the players and movers and shakers in the music scene are real pieces of shit.”
“Probably the easiest guy to deal with of them all was Dave Grohl,” Albini says. “For one, he’s an excellent drummer, so there’s never any worry whether he’s going to be able to play. His playing was rock solid and probably the highlight of my appreciation of the band was watching Dave play the drums. He’s also a very pleasant, very goofy guy to be around.”
Albini respected Chris as well. “If he listens to something and he doesn’t like it,” he says, “he will say that he doesn’t like it but he’s adult enough that he can say ‘Well, this is the sort of thing that might grow on me. I’ll let it sit there for a while before I veto it.’ ” Albini also feels that Chris has to do a fair amount of “mopping up.” “Like if Kurt doesn’t know how to plug in his guitar and tune it, for example, and Chris does, he doesn’t make a big deal about it,” Albini says. “Chris will just run in there and take care of it.”
As Albini himself insists, he’s more of an engineer than a producer—he gets sounds rather than arrangements. So although he had his own opinions, Albini encouraged the band to decide what was a good take and what wasn’t. “If he would have had his way, the record would have turned out way raunchier than it did,” Kurt says. “He wanted to mix the vocals at an unnecessarily low level. That’s not the way we sound good.”
Albini was confident that Kurt knew what he was doing. “Generally speaking, he knows what he thinks is acceptable and what isn’t acceptable,” says Albini. “He can make concrete steps to improve things that he doesn’t think are acceptable. After the fact, when he’s in a vacuum, when he’s back at home, occasionally he gets a little too overcritical and introspective about things. But while he’s actually doing it, he’s very efficient.”
The idea was to go for a natural sound. “The last Nirvana album, to my ears, is sort of a standard hack recording that has then been turned into a very, very controlled, compressed radio-friendly mix,” says Albini. “That is not, in my opinion, very flattering to a rock band.”
The all-important drum sound was achieved with virtually no electronic chicanery—just a lot of microphones placed around the room to pick up the room’s natural reverberance. If you’ve got a good drummer, a good drum set, and a good-sounding room, you’re home free. “Dave Grohl’s an amazing drummer,” says Albini. “If you take a good drummer and put him in front of a drum kit that sounds good acoustically and just record it, you’ve done the job.”
Kurt’s vocals also had few effects. Instead of electronically doctoring the vocal tracks to make it seem like they were done in a nice, resonant room, Albini simply recorded the sound of someone singing in a nice, resonant room. “On the last album, there was a lot of double-tracked vocals and stuff, which is a hack production technique to make vocals sound ‘special,’ ” Albini says. “It’s been done so much over the last ten years that to me, that now sounds ordinary. That’s now a standard production trick. To hear just the sound of a guy singing in a room—which is on the new album, it’s just one take of Kurt singing in a room—that sounds so different from what else is out there that it sounds like a special effect.”
In Utero is the equivalent of an acoustic album—but it gets back to basics in a way that isn’t as forced and obvious as the “unplugged” trend. This is Nirvana’s version of the stereotypical indulgent follow-up album—they’re doing exactly what they’ve always dreamed of doing. Usually, that means two double-length CD’s full of filler and overinflated wankery, the budget ballooning with university marching bands, legions of chanting Gyuto monks and months and months of time wasted in the studio. Instead, Nirvana recorded the follow-up to a quadruple platinum album in two weeks on a vintage twenty-four-track analog board.
Of course, some would say they made a low-budget album out of some sort of indie-rock guilt complex. “We didn’t make a raw record to make a statement at all, to prove that we can do whatever we want,” Kurt insists. “That’s exactly what we’ve always wanted to sound like.” Many have contemplated such a move, but no one has ever actually done what Nirvana did. Kurt covers himself, though, because even the most “new wave” songs have hooks—the spiraling ascending riff on “Scentless Apprentice,” the wrenching, Zeppelinesque breaks in “Milk It.”
And as far as modest recording strategies go, Nirvana was not the only one. A low-tech, low-profile approach had already begun sweeping—or rather, resweeping—underground rock in the early nineties. As a reaction against the cold, digital CD and the cynical, greedy way it was foisted on the public—and as a cost-cutting measure—Nirvana favorites such as Pavement and Sebadoh became proponents of “chimp rock,” or “no-fi,” as this crude approach to recording became known. Ever with their eyes on the horizon, Sonic Youth purposely recorded their Dirty album (1991) with plenty of distortion and at a lower than usual tape speed for even lower fi.
The approach isn’t confined to cheap equipment or primitive recording techniques—a first-take, best-take philosophy is part and parcel. Besides making the music more spontaneous—when you think you’re only going to get one take, you try harder—it’s also a dare: Can the music stand without layers of studio gloss? As they began to get into the no fi ethos, Nevermind became even more repugnant to Kurt, Chris, and Dave than it already was. Rock history will probably record In Utero as a giant step back to the future.
A little over a week into the recording, Courtney flew in, basically because she missed Kurt. Albini says she tried to butt in on the proceedings, but he won’t say exactly what the problem was. “I don’t feel like embarrassing Kurt by talking about what a psycho hose-beast his wife is,” says Albini, “especially because he knows it already.”
“The only way Steve Albini would think I was a perfect girlfriend,” Courtney replies, “would be if I was from the East Coast, played the cello, had big tits and small hoop earrings, wore black turtlenecks, had all matching luggage, and never said a word.”
Eventually, Courtney and Dave got into a huge spat, but no one will talk about it.
The mixing was done in under a week—quick by the band’s standards, but not for Albini, who was used to mixing an entire album in a day or two. If a mix wasn’t working out, they’d all goof off the rest of the day and do things like watch the complete series of David Attenborough nature videos or go in for a little pyromania. “Steve was really into lighting his ass on fire,” says Kurt. “He’d pour rubbing alcohol on his ass and light it on fire. He likes to do that,” Chris spent most of his spare time working on a magazine article about his latest visit to Croatia.
Kur
t’s drum-head doodle, made during the In Utero sessions. (Courtesy J. Mario Mendoza)
At one point during the recording, Kurt drew a simple but evocative caricature of the band on a drum head. “When you see Kurt do something like that, you think about the way Kurt writes songs,” Dave says. “They’re so simple and so to the point and so right. Something that would take me an hour to explain, Kurt would sum up in two words. That’s something he has that I’ve never seen in anyone else.”
They also used their spare time to make prank phone calls and record them for later delectation. Kurt had gotten a message from Gold Mountain that Gene Simmons from Kiss wanted to talk to him. Albini “just happened” to find the number sitting by the studio phone and decided to call Simmons and pretend to be Kurt. It turned out that Simmons wanted Nirvana to play on a planned Kiss tribute album and even offered to co-write a song with Kurt. Albini also called Eddie Vedder and pretended to be legendary producer Tony Visconti (David Bowie, T. Rex, etc.). “Your voice really speaks to me,” said Albini, who offered to get Vedder in with “a real band” to do some recording. Vedder bought it, but said he’d rather just make a home recording and sell it for five bucks a throw.
They called Evan Dando of the Lemonheads on tour in Australia and told him that Madonna was on the line, and to please hold. Dando bought it hook, line, and sinker, growing more and more anxious the longer he waited on hold. “I’m going to start beating off!” he says at one point on the tape. Gradually, he gets more and more impatient. Finally Albini, saying he’s Madonna’s assistant, tells Dando that Madonna will have to call back.
The capper was a call Dave made to John Silva to fill him in on how the project was going—“Things are going really bad,” Dave says solemnly. “Chris was throwing up blood last night …”
To celebrate the completion of the record, they had a listening party and sat around and smoked cigars, except for Kurt, who stuck to his trusty Winston Lights.
Come As You Are Page 34
