Nirvana :: Nevermind...Well, Whatever Version
2. In Bloom (Smart Mix)
3. Come As You Are (Devonshire Mix)
4. Breed (Devonshire Mix)
5. Lithium (Smart Mix)
6. Polly (Smart Mix)
7. Territorial Pissings (Devonshire Mix)
8. Drain You (BBC John Peel Session)
9. Lounge Act (Devonshire Mix)
10. Pay to Play (Stray Away Original Version - Smart Mix)
11. On a Plain (Devonshire Mix)
12. Something in the Way (Devonshire Mix)
13. Endless, Nameless (BBC John Peel Session)
30 years of Nevermind, and they are still finding ways to make it sound worse. This year's Super Deluxe 30th anniversary reissue gets yet another reslickening and glossifying in the remastering laboratories for optimal consumer enjoyment. Take a scroll through Spotify and you'll see that there are way more versions of Nirvana albums than there needs to be. But there's an interesting story as to why this is the case and why mixing actually matters.
Kurt Cobain said in Michael Azerrad 1993 book Come as You Are, “Looking back on the production of Nevermind, I’m embarrassed by it now...It’s closer to a Motley Crue record than it is a punk rock record.” This perspective often gets scoffed and snobbed by virtually every journalist talking about it online, but I think Kurt was right and I'll explain why.
Kurt's favorite version of the album were the original Butch Vig mixes, called the "Devonshire Mixes" because they were recorded at the Devonshire Sound Studios in North Hollywood, California. When the record label heard these initial mixes, they immediately hired a guy named Andy Wallace to lay the bubble gum on thick and make the sound of the mix less dirty and more listener friendly. For perspective, Wallace is a grammy award winner for engineering a Sheryl Crow album. They agreed to let him mix because they knew him from a Slayer album (which isn't much better).
The Devonshire mix version of Nevermind, which is called online "Kurt Cobain's favorite version," is only available on the 2011 20th anniversary Super Deluxe reissue, squirreled away on disk 3 and only on the digital release (and here on spotify). Yet, this version isn't even the most optimal version that could have existed. Butch Vig wasn't 100% on board with Kurt's vision.
Butch Vig called the Devonshire mixes a disaster. From Rolling Stone:
“I’d be balancing the drums and the guitars,” says Vig, “and Kurt would come and say, ‘Turn all the treble off. I want it to sound more like Black Sabbath.’ It was kind of a pain in the ass.
Vig was also trying to make a radio friendly album and Kurt was conflicted about what he wanted, because it was his first time making a record for a multi-million dollar record label as a 24 year old. Just the fact that Vig said, “it was smart to get Andy Wallace to come in,” shows that his judgement was off.
That's why the mix in this post exists. It has other mixes swapped in when they were available. Before Nirvana went to Devonshire studios to record, they did demos at Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin. There was a documentary about the studio that was released in 2016 in which Dave Grohl says, “When I joined the band they had this demo that sounded amazing, it
sounded huge and it sounded different than the things that they had done
before.” These mixes have a feel that's closer to their previous album Bleach, so I included them to give a different listening experience. Most notable about this is that the drummer for these versions isn't Dave Grohl, but their previous drummer Chad Channing.
Other changes are that "Drain You" has been replaced by a take from a BBC studio performance mixed by John Peel. There's also a extra long and wild live version of "Endless, Nameless," the hidden track on the album. The album cover for the mix is a painting by Kurt himself.
The production of In Utero
To contrast with the production of Nevermind, In Utero has a slightly different story. After Kurt saw what happened with their first major label record, they decided to go as hard in the opposite direction as they could.
They chose Steve Albini as the engineer because he managed one of Kurt's favorite Pixies albums, Surfer Rosa. Albini is someone who is also similarly mocked in the industry for not compromising his beliefs. He was a member of Big Black and many other bands and is currently in Shellac. He's also engineered albums from The Stooges, Slint, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Joanna Newsom, PJ Harvey, Low, Cloud Nothings, and many more. He's known for mixing however he wants and not being polite about it and he will only take projects that interest him.
In Come as You Are, Albini said that Nirvana was “R.E.M. with a fuzzbox” with “an unremarkable version of the Seattle sound.” This is exactly what Kurt thought about how Nevermind sounded. He took the job because he said that they seemed like “the same sort of people as all the small-fry bands I deal with,” who were abused by their record company. (A must read article by Albini is called "The Problem with the Music Industry" and you can check it out here). As an example of how Albini's recording process was different, Kurt was specifically interested in using a technique that Albini was known for. It was as simple as setting up microphones around a room to capture natural ambience, something that other producers refused to even try.
Of course, when the record label heard these mixes for In Utero, they hated it. The band eventually decided that the vocals and bass were too low in the mix and asked Albini to tweak it, but he refused as he was satisfied with the sound and didn't want to be trapped into endless remixing. So, unfortunately there were a couple of remasters to the album by other engineers before the final album was released. In the end, Albini said that the album “doesn't sound all that much like the record that was made” (from the book Verse Chorus Verse By Gillian G. Gaar).
There are only 2 tracks from the 1993 Albini mixes that have been publicly released. For the 20th anniversary of the album, Albini took the original masters and remixed them. He was able to capture and bring out little flourishes that, for me, makes it a great way (if not the best way) to listen to the album. That version can be heard on Spotify here.
The 30th anniversary Super Deluxe edition of Nevermind has some pretty disappointing bonuses, being four live shows. The 20th anniversary Super Deluxe is a much better set to explore, as it includes tons of b-sides and unreleased songs, the Smart Studio Sessions, the Devonshire mixes, "Boombox Rehearsals" and one BBC session.
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Check out other posts about Nirvana:
Nirvana :: I Hate Myself and I Want to Die
