Craig Montgomery, Nirvana’s live sound engineer from 1989-1993, recently did an AMA on Nirvana’s Reddit. Below are highlights.
Do you have any funny memories during the early Bleach era? (88-mid 89))
Oh and was it the final straw for Jason bc of the fight with the drunk guy or was it already figured that he’d be kicked out?
I wasn’t on the early tour with Jason, but there are other places where you can read what that was like. I don’t have any first-hand knowledge about it.
I do think they figured out they didn’t need another guitarist.
Oh okay. Do you remember anything about the last US tour with Chad?
A little bit. I know Chad was feeling like he needed a creative outlet and Nirvana wasn’t it. He wasn’t just a drummer. And Kurt and Krist could sense his declining enthusiasm.
After the tour, Kurt called me and told me they were thinking of kicking Chad out and asked my opinion about it. I was against it because I still thought the 3 of them had a great chemistry together. They really did love Chad as a friend, so it must have been a hard decision. Kurt must have been really agonizing about it if he called me!
Did you and Kurt (or anyone in the band) get into a lot of arguments about how things should sound? I know he was particular about how he wanted things sometimes. Edit: spelling
No, not in the context of live shows. I think they must have trusted me because they let me stick around so long. Kurt was happy as long as we could get his vocals loud enough in the monitors.
Sometimes they were playing so loud, I would have to ask them to turn down a little because I just couldn’t do anything. This was an unpopular move, so I tried to do it as little as possible!
