“I was unimpressed”: The Nirvana album Butch Vig never liked
No producer gets to make a classic with a band without doing their homework. Even though it would be easy to go to a handful of gigs and get a flair for what the artist is going for, it’s important to get the sonics down on any group before deciding to make an all-time classic with them. Although Butch Vig already had some of the biggest names knocking on his door before Nirvana got ahold of him, he remembered not being all that thrilled with what they sounded like on first listen.
Then again, what Vig was doing seems miles away from what Nirvana had done in the Seattle scene. Compared to the eventual grunge scene that would take over the world, Vig had been known for producing people like Killdozer around the same time fellow Nirvana producer Steve Albini was working on indie records, so it wasn’t like he was paying attention to some upstart from the other side of the country.
But listening to the records that he was working on right before Nirvana, he already had a massive band laying at his feet to produce. Before working on Nevermind, Vig had already started putting the finishing touches on Smashing Pumpkins’s Gish, which actually sounds remarkably close to what Kurt Cobain was trying to get out of his sound when working on tracks like ‘Lithium’.
That’s not to say that Cobain was riding anyone’s coattails. He knew exactly what he wanted Nirvana to sound like for years, and when working on tracks on Bleach, a lot of the bones of their sound were already intact. Although many people knew the record for the version of ‘Love Buzz’, ‘Negative Creep’ and ‘Floyd the Barber’ were the closest to what the “grunge” sound was supposed to be.
Across the album, it was clear that the record bled influences like Melvins and REM in equal measure, and when listening to ‘About a Girl’, it was clear that they were going to go places. When Vig listened to what they had in the pipeline, though, he wasn’t completely sold on the music he was about to produce.
Compared to their sophomore release, Vig didn’t care for the sound of Bleach until he heard ‘About A Girl’, saying, “I was kind of unimpressed. I thought their record was kind of one-dimensional, but there was one song on there, ‘About a Girl’, which to me was a brilliant pop song and sounded like Lennon-McCartney-style songwriting.”
And while the band’s initial demos of Nevermind in Madison, Wisconsin, sounded serviceable as demos, it wasn’t until Dave Grohl got onboard that everything fell into place. Cobain’s songs could stand on their own, but once Grohl added his trademark punch to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, Vig was ecstatic behind the production chair, knowing that he saw a bit of history being taped in real-time.
But as much as he wasn’t impressed, Bleach remains a decent album from the band’s inception. They had a lot of work to do, but looking past some of the technical issues, they sounded like a group about to explode.
