Nevermind – Nirvana

Smart Studios, Butch Vig, 1991

In September 1991, a trio from Aberdeen put a baby and a dollar bill on the cover and, inside, a set of songs that move from quiet verses to loud choruses. Nevermind does not fade in. Smells Like Teen Spirit starts with a guitar figure you can hum after one pass, then the chorus comes in much louder. Quiet, then loud, then quiet again: the change is old, and here it is played as if the band had just found it in a garage. Released on 24 September 1991, on DGC, the album looked, for a few weeks, like another record away from the big stations. Then it was the record those stations played.

Butch Vig produced it at Sound City, in Van Nuys, in May 1991. Dave Grohl had joined the year before, and his drums are why the choruses hit harder than the verses. Andy Wallace mixed. The baby on the cover, Spencer Elden, was photographed underwater by Kirk Weddle, reaching for a dollar on a hook. Kurt Cobain wanted the image because it was blunt. The songs are not all blunt. Polly had already been caught, quieter, at earlier sessions, a story told almost without raising the voice. Something in the Way was sung so close, Cobain on a couch in the control room, that the band had to play around a whisper. Between those two quiet pieces, Lithium, In Bloom, Come as You Are, and Drain You carry the rest: melody first, then the rougher guitar, not the other way around.

What people argued about, later, was whether a pop chorus had sold out a punk band. The record itself does not argue. It puts the chorus where a slogan might have gone, and Krist Novoselic’s bass stays low under it. Cobain’s voice cracks in the places a more careful singer would have fixed. Those cracks stay in the mix. You can hear a singer who wanted the song to be easy to remember and who also wanted to get away from the crowd that would remember it. Both are still audible. Wallace’s cleaner mix did not erase them. It made them travel.