Producer Andy Wallace says he got the gig working on Nirvana’s landmark album Nevermind because of his work with Slayer – which had found a fan in Kurt Cobain.
Wallace had worked on three records with the thrash metal heavyweights – Reign in Blood, South of Heaven, and Seasons in the Abyss – before Cobain, who apparently felt Nevermind needed a more aggressive mix, came calling.
“It's interesting how that came about,” Wallace tells Rick Beato about how his collaboration with Nirvana came about. “I don't know the whole background on it, but I had heard that Butch Vig had mixed the album, and I've heard the mixes; they're good. Butch is very talented, but I guess Kurt wanted to have somebody else do a shot.”
Vig had produced the record but Cobain, it seems, wanted a little heavy metal panache to lacquer the record, and so turned to Wallace for his mixing expertise.
“I presume,” Wallace then theorizes, “it was because he wanted something a little more aggressive. I had heard that he said, ‘I want that guy that did the Slayer album.’ I never discussed it with Kurt, but I’ll bet that’s true.
“There were a couple of things that I knew I wanted in general,” Wallace explains of his approach to the mix. “I knew I wanted to have the big parts be really big and really aggressive, just in your face. Thankfully, the performers were there to do that, I mean, Dave [Grohl] played like a madman.
“The other thing was I wanted it, unlike a lot of the Slayer things, to really take advantage of the dynamics. The intro [to Smells Like Teen Spirit] works in steps: first, you get slapped in the face, then you get shoved, then you get punched.”
It's believed that, with the band looking for a fresh mix, they were offered several high-profile figures. Included in that list were R.E.M. regular Scott Litt and Ed Stasium, best known for projects with the Ramones and the Smithereens.
The fact that Cobain and co looked to heavier climes for their man shows an intentionality that belies the commercial success the album enjoyed. But it encapsulated the anger and angst of the band, without sacrificing the polish that empowered its broad appeal.
Discussing his surprising admiration for Slayer, Cobain told Guitar World during his last interview with the magazine in 1992: “I'm not into a lot of metal, but I respect the fact that [Slayer] can be so extreme and still be so successful.
“They just go for it,” he had said, “and that’s why they're so great. They don't care about anything else but their music.”
Today, two of Kurt Cobain's guitars are the two most expensive guitars sold at auction.
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