As told to Stevie Chick

I really think every artist is totally unique, and I need to get in their heads a little bit, to understand what their vision is and help them achieve it. The role of a psychiatrist is part of my job. And if they need help with songs, I can do that. But I realised very early on that more than half of being a producer is that psychological aspect.

The first track I heard by Nirvana was their 1988 debut single Love Buzz, their contribution to the monthly Sub Pop Singles Club. Then I started doing some work with Sub Pop, producing a couple of Sub Pop singles, and [early grunge heavyweights] Tad’s 8-Way Santa, a brilliant, brilliant album. Sub Pop founder Jonathan Poneman said I should work with Nirvana. He sent me their first album, Bleach, and I was underwhelmed – it was really heavy, but very one-dimensional. Except for one song, About A Girl. That sounded like a composition by Lennon and McCartney of the Beatles. It showed the possibilities of where the band could go.

We booked eight days at my studio, Smart, in Madison, Wisconsin. Nirvana were in the middle of a Midwest tour when they arrived in the Sub Pop van. I didn’t know any of the new material. They just set up and we started recording within a couple of hours of them arriving. I could tell that they were writing more sophisticated arrangements. Smart Studios looked like a crackhouse from the outside. It was just a piece of shit really, but the inside was like a clubhouse. It was not a state-of-the-art studio, it was kinda funky, but the room sounded good, it was really intense-sounding.

I think Nirvana wanted to work with me because I’d done bands like Tad, and Die Kreuzen and Killdozer [legendary underground groups from Butch’s Madison neighbourhood]. Kurt loved the heaviness of the Killdozer albums. But I’m a pop geek – I’ve always been a sucker for a good hook. Kurt’s melodic sensibility was what attracted me to Nirvana, those great vocal lines over great chord progressions. The difference between Nevermind and Bleach is quite extraordinary, just in terms of the craft of his songwriting. And I loved the power of the songs, and I loved Kurt’s voice, his amazing ability to growl and shred his voice with unbelievable emotional power, and yet also be really fragile at the same time. There was so much emotion and pain in the sound of Kurt’s voice.

They were relatively easygoing. Kurt didn’t say a whole lot at first, but Krist was very amenable and very outgoing. Chad Channing was the drummer, and he was totally cool, though I sensed some frustration between him and Kurt. Kurt was struggling to get the band to sound the way he heard it in his head; at one point he got on the drum kit to show Chad how to play a drum part. It was tense. Kurt could be very witty and totally engaged and funny and charming, and then it was like a light switch would click off and he would withdraw into himself and go sit in a corner. I remember the first time it happened it kinda freaked me out. I said, Kurt, you need anything? You okay? You want to go get some food or whatever? And he didn’t respond. Krist pulled me aside and said, ‘He’s okay, he just gets in these moods, he’ll snap out of in a little bit.’ Sure enough, a couple hours later Kurt just picked up his guitar and said, ‘Let’s go’, and we started recording.

About four or five days in, they played this little café underneath an Italian restaurant in Madison. They were amazing. The place was packed, but it only held like a hundred or 120 people. And the band played so intense that Kurt completely blew his voice out, so bad that he couldn’t even talk the next day. Nothing would come out of Kurt’s voice, and he didn’t feel like playing when he couldn’t sing, so that was it. They packed up their gear, and went off to do more shows in the Midwest. The last day they were here, I mixed the tracks down, with the plan that Sub Pop would schedule them in the studio again a few months later to finish up the album. The band pressed up a hundred cassettes of the rough mixes and gave them out to all of their friends – they bootlegged themselves. The tapes got passed around, and then, all of a sudden, the major labels got interested. There was a bidding war, and Nirvana signed to Geffen Records.

I was working on Smashing Pumpkins’ debut album Gish at the time, and Billy Corgan kept asking me, Are you going to work with Nirvana? Then Krist called and asked if I would engineer the new album – they had met with some producers and didn’t really like any of them, and felt if I was engineering, at least they’d worked with me before, and they’d be in their comfort zone. I didn’t really want to be engineer for someone else, but a couple of days later Krist called again and said they wanted me to produce the album. We booked some time at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California. So many great records had been done there – Neil Young’s After The Goldrush, Dio’s Holy Diver. It was pretty bare bones, but they had great microphones and a Neve console, the one Dave Grohl now owns [see Dave’s 2013 documentary Sound City for details]. It was very No Frills, it totally had a 70s vibe – weird brown carpeting everywhere. But the room was like an auditorium, the sound was amazing. The control room was small, with a low ceiling, and again, brown carpet everywhere. Very claustrophobic. But such a great sound.

I was nervous, because I’d never worked for a major label, or made a record in Los Angeles – it was out of *my comfort zone. A week before we flew to California, Kurt sent me some demos. It was a boombox recording of a rehearsal, with Kurt introducing it by saying, ‘Hey Butch, we got some new songs for you, and we also got Dave Grohl – he’s the best drummer in the world!’ Then they clicked into Teen Spirit, with the scratchy guitar at the start, and the second that Dave started playing, the tape just went “BSSSHHHHHHHH!” It was so fucking distorted, I could barely hear anything. But underneath all of the fuzz, I could hear ‘Hello, Hello’, the melodies and the chord structures. And even though the recording was terrible, I was super-excited. Because I could hear the power of the band since Dave had joined, and the new songs just sounded terrific.

In California, the band were happy as could be, because it was the first time they’d had any money in their pockets. The label had set them up at the Oakwood Apartments in the Hollywood Hills; people used to call it the ‘Cokewood Apartments’, because B-movie actors would stay when they were filming TV pilots. But they’d been living in squalor up in Washington State; there was no heat in their apartment, one of the reasons they rehearsed so much was they had a heater in their rehearsal space. So all of a sudden they had some money, they got their first credit card, they had a rental car and they were living high on the hog. To Kurt it was like moving to Beverly Hills, even though it was just some sleazy corporate apartment.

Dave had joined the band and brought this great energy; he’s an amazing drummer but he brought a great vibe to the band too. There were days where we hit some walls, and Kurt still went into his black moments and shut himself out from the world for a while. But for the most part the sessions were pretty loose. They had been playing so much, they had rehearsed so much, most of the songs were recorded fairly quickly. I would get there around noon and listen to whatever we’d done the night before, and set up for what we’d record that day. The band would get in there around two in the afternoon, and then we’d record, take a dinner break, and then record again until around 9 or 10 o’clock at night. And then they’d go out.

They were enjoying being in a band and making a record in Los Angeles. One night they took mushrooms and went to Venice Beach, down by the Santa Monica Pier, and watched the sun come up. I think they were out with [legendary Pretend We’re Dead rockers] L7 that night. I went to see [notorious Texan psychedelic noise-punks] Butthole Surfers with them at Hollywood Palladium, and I lost them during the show, and got a ride home with a friend. Later that night Krist got pulled over for drunk driving and taken to jail. Kurt walked home, over the Hollywood Hills and through the canyons to the apartment, five miles or so – I don’t even know how he knew how to get back. The band didn’t show up till about 4 or 5 in the afternoon that day; their manager he told me, Krist got thrown in jail last night, but he’ll be at the studio later.

We had a food budget, and they were always so excited, like, Let’s order a big spread of Thai food tonight! There was a place called Dr Hogly Wogly’s Tyler Texas BBQ, and we would order a giant spread of beef brisket and chicken and sausages and french fries and coleslaw, so it looked like a giant picnic, and bring it to the lounge in the studio. One day L7 came by so we ordered like twice as much food – there was so much, it was ridiculous. And of course, they got into a food fight and started throwing barbecued sausages around. It was a gnarly mess; unfortunately, one of the assistants at the studio had to clean up. But the band had a total gas working at Sound City.

I did a little tightening-up of some arrangements, but for the most part the songs were 90-95% there. Kurt had a couple of different options for melodies on some songs, and he would ask me which he should sing. There were a couple of options for Smells Like Teen Spirit; one was a little more monotone, a bit like John Lennon, and the other one was more McCartney-esque. I said he had to go with that one, it was super hooky. I would always choose what I perceived to be the hookier choice, if there was one.

Teen Spirit was the first song they’d played when we had three days in a rehearsal space in North Hollywood, just before we went into Sound City. It just blew me away. It was also the first time I heard Dave Grohl play live, and it sounded so amazing. I was floored when I heard it. I remember pacing around thinking, Oh my god, this sounds crazy intense. And Kurt finished the song and said, Hey Butch, what do you think? And I said, Just play it again. And I took some notes on the next pass. I knew I wanted to make it larger than life, so I said, ‘Kurt, I want you to double-track the guitars and double-track the vocals and let me do some things in the production to really make this jump out of the speakers.’ Initially he didn’t really want to do that – he thought it was ‘cheating’, especially with his vocals. He wouldn’t listen to his vocals and then sing over the track, how we usually multi-track vocals – I just had him do multiple takes of the vocal, and he sang them so consistently I could run them at the same time and use it as a double track, and it really made the song sound powerful.

I definitely wanted the album to sound intense, and I wanted the playing to feel like you were in the room with them, but I also wanted everything to sound really focused. I would bring Kurt back in to the studio and have him redo the guitars, and he didn’t really enjoy that much, but then he heard how much clearer and focused the guitars were, because I could really dial in the sound. On Teen Spirit, when it kicked in he was using his RAT distortion pedal into his Mesa Boogie, and on the verses and the ‘Hello, Hello’ part was a different guitar, an AC30 and a Small Clone chorus pedal. It took some time to go back and overdub all those parts, but when you put them all together it sounded really good, and really seamless.

We struggled with a couple of songs. On Lithium, for some reason the band kept speeding up, so it was losing its heaviness. We tracked that one afternoon up until dinner, and we didn’t get it, and after a bunch of takes Kurt, out of frustration, launched into the song that ended up being Endless, Nameless, the bonus track on Nevermind, and the rage and frustration in his voice was fuckin’ scary to hear, because he kind of lost it. And the band followed suit. I just kept on recording. Then Kurt smashed his guitar to smithereens, and that was the end of the session that day – Kurt just threw his guitar down and walked out of the room. I was like, Wow, I’m glad I caught that on tape! Kurt had smashed up his left-handed Mosrite, so I had to start frantically scouring LA that night to see if I could find a replacement.

But that night I pulled Dave Grohl aside and asked if he had ever worked with a ‘click track’ before. Years later he told me that broke his heart; he thought, ‘I’m gonna be replaced by a machine?’ I had a drum machine I gave to him, saying, ‘Why don’t you take this home and listen to this tonight?’ We came in the next day and I ran it with a click track and Dave played it perfectly in one take, and it blew my mind. Like, Fuck, is he a good drummer! [laughs] The whole time we were recording I was thinking, Fuck, is he a good drummer.

Something In The Way was also really hard to record. We tried tracking that as a band in the main room, and it just didn’t sound good – it was too ‘live’, it didn’t feel intimate enough, with all the room ambience bleeding in. I ended up recording Kurt in the control room, just with his guitar. He did a couple takes, and I used one of the first digital editors, an early ancestor of Pro-Tools. It took three hours to render a single edit, and it took a whole day of that until I finally got a performance that felt fluid and smooth. The last couple of days we moved into the smaller studio B, where we overdubbed the drums and Kurt’s guitar, and we brought in the cello player.

We’d talked about adding something. I brought up the idea of doing something like [The Beatles’ psychedelic epic] I Am The Walrus, a bendy cello part. The cello player was Kirk Canning, who was married to Dee Plakas of L7; I’d said I could get a string quartet to come in, and I think Kurt thought that might sound too pretty. But a single cello would make it really mournful, and they liked the idea of someone with a punk-rock pedigree coming in, not some LA session musician. The only difficulty was, Kurt had an acoustic guitar that was only five strings, and he never tuned it, it was tuned to its own key, somewhere between E and E flat, so Krist had to tune his bass to it, and it was really hard to get the strings in tune with that guitar. If you listen to the track its kinda out of tune, which gives it some of the creepiness. Then Kurt and Dave overdubbed vocals on the side. It’s one of my favourite songs on the record, because it’s so intimate and Kurt sounds so vulnerable when he sings it.

We were at Sound City for 16 days. Then we mixed for a couple of days at a studio called Devonshire, but I wasn’t very happy with the mixes, and neither was the band. After a couple of days of that we said, Let’s hire someone to mix this so we can get some distance. We ended up hiring Andy Wallace, who did a brilliant mix on the album.

The band loved Nevermind when we finished it – they were blown away by how good it sounded. But then, after the record started to sell like hotcakes, they kind of had to distance themselves from it – Krist and Dave both admitted, when we did promo for the 20th Anniversary Reissue, that back then you couldn’t really have punk credentials and say, I really love our record, I’m glad it’s selling 10 million copies – it’s just not cool to do that. Compared to Bleach, it was more polished-sounding. But it’s still a dead-simple recording: just drums, bass, a couple of guitars, vocals and some harmonies. If you look at the 24-track sheets for each song, there’s like 15-17 tracks, and probably ten of those are drums. There’s not a lot of instrumentation. And now, if you listen to it back, it sounds really raw. But at the time, a lot of people comparing it to Bleach thought that it was a bit too polished. But I didn’t.

Part of Nevermind’s success was its timing. It blew up because it came out of nowhere and set a tone for a generation that was trying to discover itself. It just sounded so real and primal at the time – we were very lucky it happened, because it changed all our lives. It changed my life, and anyone involved with the band. It’s one of those rare moments where you hit critical mass, and the record is both critically and commercially successful.

At the end of those sixteen days, I just remember them being totally buzzed, totally thrilled. Kurt had all of these ambitious plans – if you ever see his journals or his notebooks, you can tell he wanted to be a successful artist in a successful band. And I think, as the sessions ended, he knew they had written and recorded a really great album.