The Mix Nirvana Spent Two Years Disowning
Nirvana made two albums that changed what a rock record was allowed to sound like, twenty-three months apart. Nevermind arrived on September 24, 1991, all bright edges and enormous drums, and reached number one on the Billboard 200 on January 11, 1992, replacing Michael Jackson's Dangerous. In Utero arrived on September 21, 1993, sounding like three people scraping the varnish off their own success with a wire brush. Three decades on, the argument between them has hardened into a loyalty test: the album that let everybody in, or the album that told them what they had walked into. It has an answer, and the people who made both records gave most of it away in print.
The album that ate 1992
Nevermind was produced by Butch Vig at Sound City in Van Nuys, then mixed by Andy Wallace, and it is the mixing credit the whole quarrel turns on. Wallace used kick and snare samples to drive the reverb, cleaned up the guitars, and handed DGC a record that sounded correct on a car stereo, a mall PA and a bedroom boombox at once. It worked past anyone's planning: gold and platinum by November 1991, diamond by 1999, thirteen times platinum in the United States, more than thirty million copies sold worldwide.
The band signed off on it. Then its singer spent two years taking it back. Kurt Cobain told the journalist Michael Azerrad, for a book published in 1993, that he was embarrassed by the production and that it was closer to a Motley Crue record than a punk rock one. He was right about the mechanics. He was wrong about what the mix had bought him.
That is the fairest sentence anybody has written about Nevermind, including the people who love it. The production is a costume. Underneath it sit a dozen songs with hooks blunt enough to survive any amount of polish, and a voice that frays in the right places whatever you do to the tape. Wallace's mix is not a betrayal of those songs. It is a delivery system, and it delivered them to teenagers who had never heard of Sub Pop and never would.
The band could hear the difference: the 2011 reissue finally included Butch Vig's original pre-Wallace version, the Devonshire Mix, rawer in the guitars and smaller in the drums. Steve Albini heard a cassette of it during the In Utero sessions and wrote later that it sounded "maybe 200 times more ass-kicking than what I remember of the released version". Two hundred times more ass-kicking is also, as it happens, several million copies fewer.
Six days in Cannon Falls
Cobain knew who to call. He had heard the Pixies album Surfer Rosa, which Steve Albini engineered in 1988, and said in 1992 that he "heard songs off of Surfer Rosa that I'd written but threw out because I was too afraid to play them for anybody". In 1993 he listed it in his notebooks among the fifty albums he thought had shaped Nirvana most. That record is why Albini got the job.
Albini's answer, a letter sent in November 1992, is mostly a list of refusals. No royalty points, ever. "I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it's worth," he wrote, having worked out that the usual point or point and a half on three million sales came to four hundred thousand dollars or so. He took a flat hundred thousand instead.
They set a two-week deadline and went to Pachyderm in Cannon Falls, Minnesota on February 13, 1993, tracking to the 21st and mixing through the 26th, with the band paying for the sessions out of their own money. The recording took six days, and Cobain sang almost all of it at one go. "The bulk of the record Kurt sang in one sitting," Albini said years later. "He sat with this broken acoustic guitar on his lap and had me play the songs back to him and he would strum along on this acoustic guitar and sing the songs."
The paper trail
Almost every line quoted so far reached us through a book, which is why the reading list matters as much as the discography.
Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana is the one to start with. Michael Azerrad wrote it at Cobain's own invitation, interviewing the band over six months from late 1992, and Doubleday timed it for October 1993 so it would land with In Utero. Cobain read the manuscript but was not allowed to change anything beyond minor factual corrections. He handed it back and told Azerrad, "That's the best rock book I've ever read." Every Nevermind complaint fans still quote at each other comes out of those pages.
Heavier than Heaven is Charles R. Cross's 2001 biography: four years, more than four hundred interviews, and access to Cobain's private journals granted by Courtney Love. It is where the tidy version of the mixing story comes apart, because Cross reports that Cobain agreed to Wallace's touch-ups only after a lobbying campaign by label executives. Read it knowing the objection reviewers raised then, that Cross wrote Cobain's final days as a scene rather than reporting them.
Journals is Cobain arguing with himself in his own handwriting, 280 pages of notebook reproduced in colour, with transcripts at the back for the pages you cannot read. Serving the Servant is the view from the office: Danny Goldberg's 2019 memoir, by the manager whose company, Gold Mountain, is the one Albini briefly refused to hand the master tapes to. It is named after Serve the Servants, the first track on In Utero.
The purity story needs an asterisk
Everything you have been told about In Utero being the uncompromised one needs that asterisk, and the asterisk makes it better, not worse.
The first people unhappy with the tapes were the band. They decided the bass and the lyrics were inaudible and asked Albini to remix; he declined, and they tried to fix it at the mastering stage instead. In April 1993 Albini told the Chicago Tribune he doubted Geffen would put the album out at all. Scott Litt was then brought in to remix Heart-Shaped Box and All Apologies in Seattle that May, which is to say the two songs most likely to reach radio were quietly sweetened. Wal-Mart and Kmart refused to stock it over the back cover, so in March 1994 a new edition arrived with edited artwork and Rape Me relabelled Waif Me.
Doubted by its own band, remixed at the edges, bowdlerised for the biggest shelves in America, and it still entered the Billboard 200 at number one with 180,000 copies in a week. Albini's own verdict: "The record in the stores doesn't sound all that much like the record that was made."
The verdict
In Utero wins, and the margin is narrower than either camp wants it to be.
Here is the test that decides it. Put on Nevermind and you hear a producer, a mixer and a label making correct decisions about a band. Put on In Utero and you hear the band making them, including the ones that cost it money. Scentless Apprentice is built on a scream the 1991 version of this group would have been talked out of. And then Dumb and All Apologies sit inside that noise, quieter and prettier than anything on the earlier album, which is the actual design: both extremes on one record instead of a polished average of them.
Nevermind is the better introduction, and probably the better twelve songs taken one at a time. In Utero is the better album, because it is the only one of the two where you can hear a band working out what it is, in a room, in under a week, for one flat fee and no royalty points. Dave Grohl has said that listening to it "kinda makes my skin crawl", which is a stranger compliment than it looks. Nobody's skin crawls at a record that lied to them.
The third answer
There is one more Nirvana record, and it settles the argument by refusing to have it. The band taped MTV Unplugged in New York in Manhattan on November 18, 1993, two months after In Utero reached the shops. Cobain asked for stargazer lilies, black candles and a crystal chandelier, and when the producer Alex Coletti asked whether he meant it to look like a funeral, he answered: "Exactly. Like a funeral." Fourteen songs, filmed in a single take, six of them covers, three of those played with Cris and Curt Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets.
It aired on December 16, 1993. Cobain died on April 5, 1994. The album followed on November 1 that year, sold more in its first week than any Nirvana record before it, and won the band its only Grammy. It is the record where the polish argument has nowhere to stand, because there is nothing to polish: an acoustic guitar, a voice, and a reading of Where Did You Sleep Last Night that no studio could have improved.
The loop
If the two albums send you looking, the rest is right here. Cobain: Montage of Heck is Brett Morgen's 2015 documentary, the first film about Cobain made with his family's cooperation, built out of home movies, journals and unreleased recordings. Surfer Rosa is where the sound Cobain hired Albini for actually lives, and the self-titled 2002 best-of compresses the argument onto one disc.
And then there is how the fight ended, which is the best part of it. In 2011 Dave Grohl made Wasting Light with Butch Vig, the producer of Nevermind, in his garage in Encino, on analogue equipment all the way to the mastering room. Krist Novoselic turned up to play bass and accordion on one song. Grohl's reason: "When I listen to music these days, and I hear Pro Tools and drums that sound like a machine it kinda sucks the life out of music." Twenty years on, the man who made the shiny one was working the unvarnished way, at the invitation of the drummer who had been in the room for both.
Steve Albini died at his home in Chicago on May 7, 2024, at 61. He never took the royalty, and was still charging $900 a day, less than a quarter of what an engineer with his record could have asked.
So: play Nevermind once, loud enough to annoy someone. Then play In Utero twice, with Azerrad open on your lap.
