Billy Corgan revealed how Butch Vig lost control of the mix of Nirvana’s Nevermind in a new Rolling Stone interview.
“People can wax nostalgic about this particular period in time. I was in the studio with a guy who was basically an unknown, as were we. I mean, he was doing some Sub Pop stuff. We knew that he’d worked some with Nirvana, and Nirvana was obviously on the rise. There was a thing happening, but people didn’t know who he was.
I remember having a record company meeting and the guy said…I think it was Donnie Ienner, who was running Sony at the time. He asked me who I wanted to produce our first album. This is before we signed with anybody. I said “Butch Vig,” and he said, “Who? What’s a Vig?”
You gotta remember that we were in the studio the day that he got the call to do Nevermind. I was literally in the next room. I could hear him talking. He came in and said, “I’ve been offered this job.” He had this glum look on his face because they wanted him to work with someone he didn’t necessarily want to work with. They didn’t trust him because he wasn’t a known entity.
Even though Kurt wanted to work with him, the label was suspicious of that and wanted him to work with a more established name producer, basically sublimating him in the process. And obviously that ended up not happening, and Butch produced the record himself, and even then they took the mix away from him, which is why Andy Wallace did it.”
