Nirvana Nevermind producer and Garbage drummer Butch Vig revealed that he was subjected to listen to a ‘sad’ version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in a new tweet. Dave Grohl recently revealed how a Nirvana member got ripped off.
“Sitting in waiting room at Drs office, listening to sad Muzak version of Teen Spirit.
So weird.”
Definitely doesn’t sound as great as Kurt Cobain! Vig’s career was launched by Nevermind. He later produced Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream (and Gish earlier on), and took center stage with Garbage in the mid-90’s.
Vig told Izotope about Nevermind, “Y’know, I started mixing the record as soon as we were done recording it, at Devonshire Studios in North Hollywood. The band was there with me, and it was kind of tough for me to do, because Kurt would sit behind me and say things like, ‘Turn all the treble off the guitars—I want it to sound like Black Sabbath,’ or whatever, and I felt kind of hamstrung to a certain extent. But I did get everything mixed, and I didn’t do a lot of hyping. I kept the mixes pretty au naturel. But at the time, I think the label thought that the mixes could have a little bit more sheen to them, or they wanted to pump them up a bit more. So they hired Andy Wallace to mix the record. Years later, I pulled out those Devonshire mixes when Nirvana were getting ready to do this 20th Anniversary Edition.
I called up that original mix, and thought I would just compress it a little bit, and add a little mastering EQ to it, and all of a sudden it just came to life, and it really sounded great and more competitive. It was really exciting for me to be able to do that, and to send them into the band and management. They loved it, and ended up including it on the record. In the end, my mixes are just a little more primal sounding than the album version, but they’re exactly the same performances: guitars panned left and right, Kurt singing with some doubling here and there, Dave singing some harmonies, and bass and drums. That’s it. Sure, you can hear some differences between my mix and Andy’s mix, and I think it’ll be interesting for hardcore fans to listen to.”
He told Billboard, “You know, I never put the album on. I really, kind of disengaged a little bit from it after the massive success back in the day, especially after I formed Garbage. On the first Garbage tour we would go out and no one knew who we were and we would do an interview and I could see the journalist just waiting at the end to ask me about Nevermind, which was totally understandable. And it wasn’t really until about the 20th anniversary that Dave Grohl, Krist [Novoselic] and I got together a lot and we did a lot of interviews and press for the 20th. And we went back and dug through all the masters, we had the album re-mastered and then we found some outtakes.
That was the point I really re-embraced the album. It obviously changed my life profoundly and I’m still really proud of it.”
Sitting in waiting room at Drs office, listening to sad Muzak version of Teen Spirit.
So weird.— Butch Vig (@butchvig) June 28, 2019
