“Kurt was enjoying himself when he made that record,” Vig remembers. “That was before Nirvana got really big. They had a kind of casual attitude toward making the record. There was not a lot of pressure. I felt more pressure making that record than they did. ’Cause it was really the first major-label record I was making.”
With an initial budget of $65,000, the band could certainly take a more leisurely approach than they’d taken with Bleach (which had cost just $606.17 to make). Cobain, meanwhile, was apprehensive about being seen as a major-label sellout. After Nevermind was completed, he had fears that it sounded too slick—that the final mix of the record, completed by producer Andy Wallace, was a little too radio friendly.
“Looking back on the production of Nevermind, I’m a little embarrassed by it,” Cobain told Azerrad. “It’s closer to a Mötley Crüe record than it is to a punk rock record.”
Understandable though they may be, Cobain’s artistic qualms about the record sell it short. It is an astoundingly powerful album, an irrefutable declaration of an important new band’s arrival. The disc’s first single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” became an instant anthem. It is a showcase for the kind of expressive mood swings that were a trademark of Cobain’s guitar playing, songwriting and personality. The tune is a brilliant evocation of volatile emotions, with its sullen, world-weary verses that explode into abrasive power chording for the choruses.
In an interview for Australian radio, Cobain explained that the song’s attention- grabbing title came out of a relaxed evening at his house.
“A friend of mine and I were goofing around my house one night. We were kinda drunk, and we were writing graffiti all over the walls of my house. And she wrote, ‘Kurt smells like Teen Spirit.’ Earlier on, we’d been having this discussion about teen revolution and stuff like that. And I took [what she wrote] as a compliment. I thought she was saying that I was a person who could inspire. I just thought it was a nice little title. And it turns out she just meant that I smelled like that deodorant [called Teen Spirit]. I didn’t even know that deodorant existed until after the song was written.”
Cobain worked notoriously fast as a lyricist. He’d write the words to his songs in the car on the way to the studio, or even a few seconds before having to record a final vocal. But the unstudied, hasty quality of his lyrics are part of their expressiveness. His songs are like action paintings: kinetic, disconnected bursts of angry energy. He shifts from topic to topic in a manner that has been compared to a restless adolescent channel surfing through the cable TV wasteland. It has been pointed out that Cobain’s lyrics were inseparable from his plaintive, raspy vocal style. Nobody else could sing those words with quite the same effect. But it’s equally true that Cobain’s distinctive voice was inseparable from his guitar style. The voice and guitar in Nirvana rubbed against each another in an ever-shifting dynamic, like a couple making love, or fighting, or both at the same time, with Cobain’s choppy guitar rhythms and grainy distortion welling up to dominate at one moment then slipping into subaqueous quietude the next.
The months following the release of Nevermind were turbulent ones for Cobain. Not only were there the pressures of sudden, massive stardom to cope with, but he also entered into two relationships that were to have a profound effect on him. One was with Courtney Love, longtime punk scenester and splashy front-woman for the group Hole. The other was with heroin. Cobain and Love first met at a Nirvana club gig in 1989, but didn’t become serious about each other until ’91, after Kurt had moved to Los Angeles to record Nevermind. Love was often blamed for introducing Cobain to heroin, but he had experimented with the drug as early as his Aberdeen days. Cobain always insisted that he became a serious heroin user of his own accord, because it was the only thing that seemed to quell the terrible pain in his stomach. In describing this pain to Azerrad, Cobain made some seemingly rhetorical statements which later proved tragically prophetic: “Halfway through [Nirvana’s last] European tour, I remember saying I’ll never go on tour again until I have this fixed because I wanted to kill myself. I wanted to fucking blow my head off, I was so tired of it.”
Cobain and Love were married on February 24, 1992. Their daughter, Francis Bean Cobain, was born on August 18 of that same year. Because of press reports—inaccurate, Love insisted—that she used heroin while pregnant, the Los Angeles Children’s Services began proceedings to take the Cobains’ daughter away from them. It was the beginning of a long and difficult legal battle that the couple ultimately won, in March of 1993. But it wasn’t only the law that seemed to have it in for the Cobains. Provocative, outspoken and confrontational, Love was disliked by many Nirvana fans who perceived her as a gold digger who manipulated the passive Cobain. Love often joked about being her generation’s Yoko Ono.
But even in the midst of all these difficulties, Nirvana’s career kept on skyrocketing, and Cobain continued developing as a songwriter. December ’92 saw the release of Incesticide, a collection of previously unreleased rarities. Selections like “Hairspray Queen” and “Mexican Seafood” go back to that first Jack Endino–produced demo. The public finally got to hear some of the “new wave” side that Cobain had suppressed on Bleach and Nevermind. Meanwhile, at a much more advanced level, Cobain was writing songs for what would become Nirvana’s final, and arguably finest, studio album, In Utero. Thanks to the band’s success, Cobain was finally able to make pretty much the album he’d always wanted to make.
Influential alternative rock producer Steve Albini (Pixies, Sonic Youth, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion) was drafted to produce the disc. “The main reason we recorded In Utero with Steve Albini is that he is able to get a sound that sounds like the band is in a room no bigger than the one we’re in now,” said Cobain in a hotel room interview with British journalist Jon Savage. “In Utero doesn’t sound like it was recorded in a hall, or that it’s trying to sound larger than life. It’s very in-your-face and real.”
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