Nevermind

Nevermind
Information
Released	September 24, 1991
Recorded	April 1990; May 2, 1991–June 1991
Studio	Sound City Studios, Van Nuys, California Smart Studios, Madison, Wisconsin
Genre	Grunge, Alternative Rock
Length	49:09
Label	DGC
Producer	Butch Vig
Release Order
Previous	Bleach
Next	Insecticide

Nevermind is Nirvana's second studio album that was released on September 24, 1991 by DGC.

The album was certified Diamond by the RIAA and has sold over 30 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling albums of all time.

In 2005, the Library of Congress added "Nevermind" to the National Recording Registry, which collects "culturally, historically or aesthetically important" sound recordings from the 20th century.

Track listing

1. Smells Like Teen Spirit – 5:01
2. In Bloom – 4:14
3. Come as You Are – 3:39
4. Breed – 3:03
5. Lithium – 4:17
6. Polly – 2:57
7. Territorial Pissings – 2:22
8. Drain You – 3:43
9. Lounge Act – 2:36
10. Stay Away – 3:32
11. On a Plain – 3:16
12. Something in the Way – 3:46
13. Endless, Nameless (Hidden Track) - 6:43

Album Background

Nirvana was a grunge rock band from Aberdeen, Washington, formed by Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic in 1987, that had signed to Seattle independent record label Sub Pop. They released their debut album "Bleach" in 1989, with Chad Channing on drums. However, Channing left Nirvana in 1990, and the band was in need of a permanent drummer.

During a show by hardcore punk band Scream, the group's drummer, Dave Grohl, impressed Cobain and Novoselic.

When Scream unexpectedly disbanded, Grohl contacted Novoselic, travelled to Seattle, and was soon invited to join the band. Novoselic said in retrospect that when Grohl joined the band, everything "fell into place".

Meanwhile, Cobain was writing a number of new songs. At the time, he was listening to bands like The Melvins, R.E.M., The Smithereens, and the Pixies.

Feeling disillusioned by the heavy detuned rock popular in the Seattle grunge scene upon which Sub Pop had built its image, Cobain (inspired by his contemporary listening habits) began writing songs that were more melodic.

A key development was the single "Sliver", released on Sub Pop in 1990 (before Grohl joined the band), which Cobain said "was like a statement in a way. I had to write a pop song and release it on a single to prepare people for the next record. I wanted to write more songs like that."

Grohl said that the band at that point often made the analogy of likening their music to children's music, in that the band tried to make its songs as simple as possible.

By the start of the 1990s, Sub Pop was experiencing financial difficulties. With rumors that Sub Pop would sign up as a subsidiary of a major record label, Nirvana decided to "cut out the middleman" and start to look for a major record label.

A number of labels courted Nirvana, but they ultimately signed with Geffen Records imprint DGC Records based upon repeated recommendations from Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth and their management company.

Recording\Production

In early 1990, Nirvana began planning its second album for Sub Pop, tentatively titled Sheep. For the album, Sub Pop head Bruce Pavitt suggested Butch Vig as a potential producer.

Nirvana particularly liked Vig's work with Killdozer and called Vig up to tell him, "We want to sound as heavy as that record."

The band traveled out to Vig's Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin, recording from April 2 to 6, 1990. Most of the basic song arrangements were completed by that time, but Cobain was still working on lyrics and the band was unsure of which songs to record.

Ultimately, eight songs were recorded: "Immodium" (later renamed "Breed"), "Dive" (later released as the B-side to "Sliver"), "In Bloom", "Pay to Play" (eventually renamed "Stay Away" and given a new set of lyrics), "Sappy", "Lithium", "Here She Comes Now" (released on "Velvet Underground Tribute Album: Heaven and Hell Volume 1"), and "Polly".

On April 6, Nirvana played a local show in Madison with fellow Seattle band Tad. Vig began to mix the recordings while the band hung out in Madison, giving an interview to Madison's community radio station WORT on April 7.

Nirvana had planned to record more tracks, but Cobain had strained his voice, forcing the band to shut down recording.

On April 8, Nirvana headed to Milwaukee to kick off an extensive Midwest and East Coast tour of 24 shows in 39 days. Vig was told that the group would come back to record more songs, but the producer did not hear anything for a while.

With the band parting ways with drummer Chad Channing after the tour, additional recording was put on hold. Instead, they used the sessions as a demo tape to shop for a new label. Within a few months, the tape was circulating amongst major labels, creating a buzz around the group.

After signing to DGC, a number of producers for the album were suggested, including Scott Litt, David Briggs, and Don Dixon, but Nirvana still wanted Butch Vig. Novoselic noted in 2001 that the band was already nervous about recording on a major label, and the producers suggested by DGC wanted percentage points for working on the album.

Instead, the band held out for Vig, with whom they felt comfortable collaborating. Afforded a budget of $65,000, Nirvana recorded the album at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California in May and June 1991.

Nirvana was originally set to record the album during March and April 1991, but the date kept getting pushed back in spite of the band's eagerness to begin the sessions.

To earn gas money to get to Los Angeles, Nirvana played a show where they performed "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for the first time.

They sent Vig some rehearsal tapes prior to the sessions that featured songs recorded previously at Smart Studios, along with some new ones including "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Come as You Are".

When the group arrived in California, Nirvana did a few days of pre-production where the band and Vig tightened up some of the song arrangements.

The only recording carried over from the Smart Studios sessions was the song "Polly", which included cymbal crashes performed by Chad Channing. Once recording commenced, the band worked eight to ten hours a day.

The band members tended to take two or three tries at instrumental takes; if the takes were not satisfactory at that point, they would move on to something else.

Nirvana had rehearsed the songs so much before recording started that often only a few takes were needed.

Cobain used a variety of guitars, from Stratocasters to Jaguars, and Novoselic used a black 1979 and natural 1976 Gibson Ripper.

Novoselic and Grohl finished their bass and drum tracks in a matter of days, but Cobain had to work longer on guitar overdubs, singing, and particularly lyrics (which sometimes were finished mere minutes before recording).

Cobain's phrasing was so consistent on various takes that Vig would mix the takes together to create overdubs.

Vig says that he often had to trick Cobain into recording additional takes for overdubs since the singer was averse to performing multiple takes. In particular, Vig convinced Cobain to double-track his vocals on the song "In Bloom" by telling him "John Lennon did it."

While the sessions went well generally, Vig said Cobain would become moody and difficult at times: "He'd be great for an hour, and then he'd sit in a corner and say nothing for an hour."

After the recording sessions were completed, Vig and the band set out to mix the album. However, after a few days, both Vig and the band members realized that they were unhappy with how the mixes were turning out.

As a result, they decided to call in someone else to oversee the mixing, with Geffen Records imprint DGC supplying a list of possible options.

The list contained several familiar names, including Scott Litt (known for his work with R.E.M.) and Ed Stasium (known for his work with The Ramones and The Smithereens). However, Cobain feared that bringing in known mixers would result in the album sounding like the work of those bands.

Instead, Cobain chose Andy Wallace (who had co-produced Slayer's 1990 album Seasons in the Abyss) from the bottom of the list. Novoselic recalled, "We said, 'right on,' because those Slayer records were so heavy."

Wallace ran the songs through various special effects boxes and tweaked the drum sounds, completing about one mix per day.

Both Wallace and Vig noted years later that upon hearing Wallace's work the band loved the mixes. After the album's release, however, members of Nirvana expressed dissatisfaction with the polished sound the mixer had given "Nevermind".

Cobain said in "Come as You Are": "Looking back on the production of Nevermind, I'm embarrassed by it now. It's closer to a Mötley Crüe record than it is a punk rock record."

Nevermind was mastered on the afternoon of August 2 at The Mastering Lab in Hollywood, California. Howie Weinberg started working alone when no one else showed up at the appointed time in the studio; by the time Nirvana, Andy Wallace, and Gary Gersh arrived, Weinberg had mastered most of the album.

One of the songs mastered at the session, a hidden track called "Endless, Nameless" intended to appear at the end of "Something in the Way", was accidentally left off initial pressings of the album.

Weinberg recalled, "In the beginning, it was kind of a verbal thing to put that track at the end. Maybe I misconstrued their instructions, so you can call it my mistake if you want. Maybe I didn't write it down when Nirvana or the record company said to do it. So, when they pressed the first twenty thousand or so CDs, albums, and cassettes, it wasn't on there."

When Nirvana discovered the song's omission after listening to its copy of the album, Cobain called Weinberg and demanded he rectify the mistake.

Weinberg complied and added about ten minutes of silence between the end of "Something in the Way" and the start of the hidden track on future pressings of the album.

Composition

Kurt Cobain, Nirvana's main songwriter, fashioned chord sequences using primarily power chords and wrote songs that combined pop hooks with dissonant guitar riffs. His aim for Nevermind's material was to sound like "The Knack and the Bay City Rollers getting molested by Black Flag and Black Sabbath".

Many of the songs on "Nevermind" feature shifts in dynamics, where the band changes from quiet verses to loud choruses.

Dave Grohl said this approach originated during a four-month period prior to the recording of the album, where the band would experiment with extreme dynamics during regular jam sessions; however; the Smart Studios recordings of songs such as "Lithium" and "In Bloom" show that the band was writing songs in that style long before Grohl had joined the band.

Guitar World wrote, "Kurt Cobain's guitar sound on Nirvana's Nevermind set the tone for Nineties rock music."

On "Nevermind", Cobain played a 1960s Fender Mustang, a Fender Jaguar with DiMarzio pickups, and a few Fender Stratocasters with humbucker bridge pickups.

The guitarist used distortion and chorus pedals as his main effects, the latter used to generate a "watery" sound on "Come as You Are" and the pre-choruses of "Smells Like Teen Spirit".

Krist Novoselic tuned down his bass guitar one and a half steps to D flat "to get this fat-ass sound."

Grohl has said that Cobain told him, "Music comes first and lyrics come second," and Grohl believes that above all Cobain focused on the melodies of his songs.

Cobain was still working on the album's lyrics well into the recording of "Nevermind." Additionally, his phrasing on the album is often difficult to understand.

Vig asserted that clarity of Cobain's singing was not paramount. Vig said, "Even though you couldn't quite tell what he was singing about, you knew it was intense as hell."

Cobain would later complain when rock journalists attempted to decipher his singing and extract meaning from his lyrics, writing: "Why in the hell do journalists insist on coming up with a second-rate Freudian evaluation of my lyrics, when 90 percent of the time they've transcribed them incorrectly?"

Charles R. Cross asserted in his 2001 biography of Cobain, "Heavier Than Heaven" that many of the songs written for the album were about Cobain's dysfunctional relationship with Tobi Vail.

After their relationship ended, Cobain began writing and painting violent scenes, many of which revealed a hatred for himself and others.

The songs written during this period were less violent, but still reflected anger absent from Cobain's earlier songs.

Cross wrote, "In the four months following their break-up, Kurt would write a half dozen of his most memorable songs, all of them about Tobi Vail." "Drain You" begins with the line, "One baby to another said 'I'm lucky to have met you,'" quoting what Vail had once told Cobain, and the line "It is now my duty to completely drain you" refers to the power Vail had over Cobain in their relationship.

According to Novoselic, "'Lounge Act' is about Tobi," and the song contains the line "I'll arrest myself, I'll wear a shield," referring to Cobain having the K Records logo tattooed on his arm to impress Vail.

Though "Lithium" had been written before Cobain knew Vail, the lyrics of the song were changed to reference her.

Cobain also said in an interview with Musician that "some of my very personal experiences, like breaking up with girlfriends and having bad relationships, feeling that death void that the person in the song is feeling–very lonely, sick."

Album Title\Artwork

The album's tentative title "Sheep" was something Cobain created as an inside joke directed towards the people he expected to buy the album. He wrote a fake advertisement for Sheep in his journal that read "Because you want to not; because everyone else is."

Novoselic said the inspiration for the title was the band's cynicism about the public's reaction to "Operation Desert Storm".

As recording sessions for the album were completed, Cobain grew tired of the title and suggested to Novoselic that the new album be named "Nevermind". Cobain liked the title because it was a metaphor for his attitude on life and because it was grammatically incorrect.

The Nevermind album cover shows a naked baby boy, Spencer Elden, swimming underwater with a U.S. dollar bill on a fishhook just out of his reach.

According to Cobain, he conceived of the idea while watching a television program on water births with Grohl. Cobain then mentioned it to Geffen's art director Robert Fisher.

Fisher found some stock footage of underwater births, but they were too graphic for the record company. Furthermore, the stock house that controlled the photo of a swimming baby that they subsequently settled on wanted $7,500 a year for its use.

Instead, Fisher sent a photographer, Kirk Weddle, to a pool for babies to take pictures. Five shots resulted and the band settled on the image of four-month-old infant Spencer Elden, the son of a friend of Weddle.

However, there was some concern because Elden's penis was visible in the image. Geffen prepared an alternate cover without the penis, as they were afraid that it would offend people, but relented when Cobain made it clear that the only compromise he would accept was a sticker covering the penis that would say, "If you're offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile."

The back cover of the album features a photograph of a rubber monkey in front of a collage created by Cobain.

The collage features photos of raw beef from a supermarket advertisement, images from Dante's Inferno, and pictures of diseased vaginas from Cobain's collection of medical photos. Cobain noted, "If you look real close, there is a picture of Kiss in the back standing on a slab of beef."

The album's liner notes contain no complete song lyrics; instead, the liner contains random song lyrics and unused lyrical fragments that Cobain arranged into a poem.

For the 10th, 17th and 25th anniversaries of the album, Spencer Elden recreated the front cover shot for photographers each time. He wanted to do the 25th anniversary shoot nude, but the photographer preferred that he wore swim shorts. In 2003, he also appeared on the cover of cEvin Key's album, "The Dragon Experience."

Chart Performance

"Nevermind" was released on September 24, 1991. American record stores received an initial shipment of 46,251 copies, while 35,000 copies were shipped in the United Kingdom (where their previous album "Bleach" had been successful).

The album's lead single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" had been released on September 10 with the intention of being a base-building cut among alternative rock fans, while the next single "Come as You Are" would be the song that would possibly garner more attention.

Nirvana set out on a short American tour four days before the release date to support the album.

Geffen Records hoped that "Nevermind" would sell around 250,000 copies, which was the same level the record company had achieved with Sonic Youth's Geffen debut album, "Goo." The best estimate was that if all involved worked hard, the record could possibly be certified Gold by September 1992.

"Nevermind" debuted on the Billboard 200 at #144. Geffen shipped about half of the initial U.S. pressing to the American Northwest, where it sold out quickly and was unavailable for days. Geffen reputedly put production of all other albums on hold in order to fulfill demand in the region.

"Nevermind" was already selling well but, over the next few months, the momentum increased significantly as "Smells Like Teen Spirit" unexpectedly became more and more popular.

The song's video had received a world premiere on MTV's late night alternative show "120 Minutes," but it soon proved so popular that the channel began playing it during the day.

The record was soon certified Gold, but the band was relatively uninterested in the achievement.

Novoselic recalled, "Yeah I was happy about it. It was pretty cool. It was kind of neat. But I don't give a shit about some kind of achievement like that. It's cool—I guess."

As the band set out for their European tour at the start of November 1991, Nevermind entered the Billboard Top 40 for the first time at #35.

By this point, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" had become a genuine hit and the album was selling so fast none of Geffen's marketing strategies aimed at different sales levels could be enacted.

Geffen president Ed Rosenblatt told The New York Times, "We didn't do anything. It was just one of those 'Get out of the way and duck' records."

Nirvana found as they toured Europe during the end of 1991 that the shows were dangerously oversold, television crews became a constant presence onstage, and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was almost omnipresent on radio and music television."

"Nevermind" became Nirvana's first number one album on January 11, 1992, replacing Michael Jackson at the top of the Billboard charts. By this time, Nevermind was selling approximately 300,000 copies a week.

The album was certified Gold and Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America in November 1991 and was certified Diamond in March 1999.

It was also certified Diamond in Canada (1,000,000 units sold) by the Canadian Recording Industry Association in March 2001 and five times Platinum in the United Kingdom.

In 1996, Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs released Nevermind on vinyl as part of its ANADISQ 200 series, and as a 24-carat gold Compact Disc. The CD pressings included "Endless, Nameless".

The LP version of "Nevermind" quickly sold out its limited pressing but the CD edition stayed in print for years.

In 2009, Original Recordings Group released the album on limited edition 180g blue vinyl and regular 180g black vinyl mastered and cut by Bernie Grundman from the original analog tapes. It has been praised in reviews for sound quality.

Critical Reception

Geffen's press promotion for "Nevermind" was lower than that typical of a major record label.

The label's publicist primarily targeted music publications with long lead times for publication as well as magazines in the Seattle area. The unexpectedly positive feedback from critics who had received the album convinced the label to consider increasing the album's original print run.

At first, "Nevermind" didn't receive many reviews, and many publications ignored the album. Months after its release and after "Smells Like Teen Spirit" garnered airplay, print media organizations were "scrambling" to cover the phenomenon the album had become.

However, by that point, much of the attention fell on Cobain rather than the album itself. The reviews that did initially appear were largely positive.

Karen Schoemer of The New York Times wrote: "With 'Nevermind,' Nirvana has certainly succeeded. There are enough intriguing textures, mood shifts, instrumental snippets and inventive word plays to provide for hours of entertainment." Schoemer concluded, "'Nevermind' is more sophisticated and carefully produced than anything peer bands like Dinosaur Jr. and Mudhoney have yet offered."

Entertainment Weekly gave the album an "A–" rating, and reviewer David Browne argued that on Nevermind, Nirvana "never entertain the notion" of wanting to sound "normal," compared to other contemporary alternative bands.

Concluding his very enthusiastic review for the British Melody Maker, Everett True wrote that "When Nirvana released Bleach all those years ago, the more sussed among us figured they had the potential to make an album that would blow every other contender away. My God have they proved us right."

Spin gave Nevermind a favorable review stating that "you'll be humming all the songs for the rest of your life—or at least until your CD-tape-album wears out."

Select compared the band to Jane's Addiction, Sonic Youth, and the Pixies, stating that the album "proves that Nirvana truly belong in such high company."

Some of the reviews were not entirely positive. Rolling Stone originally gave the album three out of five stars.

Reviewer Ira Robbins wrote: "If Nirvana isn't onto anything altogether new, Nevermind does possess the songs, character and confident spirit to be much more than a reformulation of college radio's high-octane hits."

The Boston Globe was less enthusiastic about the album; reviewer Steve Morse wrote, "Most of Nevermind is packed with generic punk-pop that had been done by countless acts from Iggy Pop to the Red Hot Chili Peppers," and added "the band has little or nothing to say, settling for moronic ramblings by singer-lyricist Cobain."

"Nevermind" was voted as the best album of the year in The Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics' poll; "Smells Like Teen Spirit" also topped the single of the year and video of the year polls.

The album topped the poll by a large majority, and Village Voice critic Robert Christgau wrote in his companion piece to the poll:

"As a modest pop surprise they might have scored a modest victory, like De La Soul in 1990. Instead, their multi-platinum takeover constituted the first full-scale public validation of the Amerindie values—the noise, the toons, the 'tude—the radder half of the [Pazz & Jop poll] electorate came up on."

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