Nirvana producer Butch Vig remembers his first time hearing ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’
At the start of the 1990s, no one had ever heard anything quite like Nirvana. After being inundated with hair bands throughout the ‘80s, the rise of grunge kicked the entire alternative movement into high gear as Kurt Cobain screamed at the top of his lungs, begging to be entertained. Although Cobain may have known he had a hit on his hands, it was a long road to making something as classic as Nevermind.
While still touring in support of their debut album Bleach, Nirvana was looking for someone to work on their next record when they came across Butch Vig. Outside of being the drummer for the band Garbage, Vig had built up a reputation in the underground scene for his production style, having worked with bands like Sonic Youth and already working on The Smashing Pumpkins’ debut album Gish.
Though Nirvana was psyched to work with him, Vig remembers not being elated by their debut, saying, “I heard their first record and wasn’t that impressed. I thought the record was one-dimensional except for the one song on the record, ‘About a Girl’, which I thought sounded like Lennon and McCartney. When we started working on it, he already had songs like ‘In Bloom’ and ‘Lithium’. The songs had gotten way more hooky”.
While the sessions were going well when they worked with Vig in Madison, Wisconsin, it wasn’t coming together until they hired Dave Grohl, who took over for their original drummer Chad Channing. Vig eventually talked about how excited they were to have Grohl in the band, recalling in Back and Forth, “I remember there was a call on my answering machine from Kurt saying, ‘Butch, we just hired the best drummer in the world, I’m not kidding you, he’s awesome dude’, and he hung up”.
As Cobain continued to write more hook-driven songs, Vig vividly remembered listening to the group kick into ‘Teen Spirit’ for the first time. Having heard the song’s beginnings on a distorted boom box, Vig couldn’t contain his energy the first time he heard it in a rehearsal room, explaining, “They started playing it, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I was pacing around the room saying, ‘Oh my god, this sounds incredible’. And the band stopped, and they said, ‘What do you think?’. I just said, ‘Play it again’”.
Then again, Cobain may have known that he had written a song that was a little bit too mainstream for his taste. According to Vig, most of the recording of Nevermind was about making sure that none of the songs sounded too poppy, making sure that all of the guitars were roaring through the entire mix.
Even after the visceral reaction from their producer, the shadow of ‘Teen Spirit’ began to chip away at Cobain’s fondness for the song, eventually making a mockery of the song whenever they played it live. There’s no denying the power that comes from the opening grooves of ‘Teen Spirit’, but sometimes a song this good tends to overpower its creator.
