This is a Call (36 page)

‘I love that record,’ said Grohl. ‘I like it more than
Nevermind
because there was nothing in between the band and the tape. Nothing at all. We weren’t nervous to make it, we had a collection of songs that we thought were challenging and interesting and powerful and beautiful. That album is about as pure as an album can be.’

The band left Pachyderm in high spirits. They would soon be brought crashing down to earth. Just two weeks after leaving Cannon Falls, Kurt Cobain phoned Steve Albini to tell him that his A&R man Gary Gersh hated the record.

‘When we turned that record in to the record company, the first listen they called back and said, “Are you guys fucking kidding me? Is this a joke?”’ recalled Grohl. ‘We’re like, “No, that’s our record.”They’re like, “No, no, no, no, no, no, this isn’t your next record. That’s a joke.” We basically said, “We are Nirvana. That is our new record.”’

This bullishness on Nirvana’s part didn’t last. Some weeks later, Steve Albini received a second phone call from Kurt Cobain. This time Cobain was rather more sheepish.

‘He said they were starting to believe that they were unhappy with the record and they wanted to remix some stuff,’ Albini recalls. ‘And I said, “Okay, well, I’ll give it a listen and if I feel I can do any better or if I feel like there’s specific stuff I can change then I’ll be happy to give it a shot.” And so I listened to the master again at home in Chicago and I really felt pretty strongly that I couldn’t improve on what we’d done. And after doing that, I called Kurt back and said, “Well, what exactly did you want to do, like how many songs and what did you want to do?” And he said, “Well, basically everything.” And at that point I knew that there was something going on other than them actually being dissatisfied. Like somebody had put a bug in their ear about something. Kurt might have been in a vulnerable state at that point – I don’t know if his drug use kicked back in or if he started to fear for his pension or whatever, I have no idea what happened – but as soon as he said that I realised that there was something up and that it didn’t have anything to do with whether or not they were actually satisfied with the record.’

On 19 April the
Chicago Tribune
ran an article by writer Greg Kot titled ‘Record Label Finds Little Bliss in Nirvana’s Latest’. In Kot’s story Albini baldly stated that Geffen hated the record he had made with the band: ‘I have no faith this record will be released,’ he said. Kot backed up Albini’s comments by quoting unnamed sources at Geffen who claimed the album was ‘unreleasable’. The article was seized upon by media outlets across the world, including
Newsweek, Billboard
and
Rolling Stone
, with every story drawing attention to what was perceived as corporate interference in Nirvana’s art. Such was the furore surrounding the album that on 11 May Geffen felt compelled to issue a press release refuting the now commonly held belief that they were going to bury the record.

By this point R.E.M. producer Scott Litt was already remixing two songs from the album – prospective singles ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ and ‘All Apologies’ – at Heart’s Bad Animals Studios in Seattle.

‘Up to the point where we finished the mixes on that record I had a pretty good time working with Nirvana,’ says Albini, ‘and it remains a pretty good memory for me. After that – once the management company and record label started turning the heat up on the band and they started dropping shit into the press – it got really ugly.

‘I have to admit, though, I was surprised at how devious their record company people were, doing really bizarre shit, like planting lies about me in the press. I didn’t expect them to be that petty. In my view the whole thing was being done just as a way to manipulate the band. It wasn’t that they were genuinely dissatisfied with the record, the record stands on its own merits, but it was made in a way away from their comfort. It was kinda seen as a dangerous thing if a band was allowed to make a record on their own terms like that. And so the record label people tried to scuttle that effort however they could, because they were afraid that a record made unconventionally might be successful and then they would have to allow that into their paradigm.

‘I don’t harbour any bad feelings towards the band,’ Albini insists. ‘It was people external to the band who were pulling this bullshit. I’ve said this before, and I still think this, the three guys in the band were perfectly reasonable and easy for me to deal with, but literally every other person involved in that record was an asshole.’

Asked in 2007 how the recordings that Nirvana took from Pachyderm compared to the version of
In Utero
that hit record stores worldwide on 13/14 September, Dave Grohl said the two were ‘pretty similar’. This both is, and isn’t, true, as can clearly be heard when the Albini mixes (later released unofficially on the Small Clone label) are played alongside Geffen’s version of the album. While ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ and ‘All Apologies’ were the only two tracks remixed – with Scott Litt doubling Cobain’s vocals, cleaning out some of the distortion and feedback, compressing the guitar lines and adding reverb to Grohl’s snare – the mastering of the album served to put an entirely new sheen on Albini’s natural, atmospheric recordings.

And it’s arguably Grohl’s drum sound which suffers most, most noticeably on the album’s heavier tracks – ‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’, ‘Milk It’, ‘Scentless Apprentice’, ‘Serve the Servants’ – where the drums are backed off to allow Cobain’s vocals more space to breathe. While Albini didn’t bury Cobain’s vocals as deeply as he customarily buried David Yow’s vocals on The Jesus Lizard’s albums (where Yow yelps, slobbers and moans like a man being strangled while drowning in quicksand), on his original mixes Cobain sounds more desperate, urgent and anguished as he struggles to be heard above the instrumental swamp; on the mastered version there’s more clarity, more separation and less audible distress.

It would be too simplistic to say that, with the final version of
In Utero
, Nirvana bowed to commercial forces – ‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’ and ‘Tourette’s’ in particular are no one’s idea of crossover hits – but the fact remains that given the opportunity to deconstruct the radio-friendly sheen of
Nevermind
, as Cobain always maintained was his intention, the band took a conscious decision to step back from the raw ambience captured by Albini to present a more conventional, less challenging version of the recordings to the world. Just as Cobain was careful not to tip the album too far into noise territory – the ‘pop’ moments outweigh the more abrasive ‘punk’ tantrums seven to five – so the final version of
In Utero
offers a sound knowingly compromised for public consumption. Given the constant conflicts and contradictions in Cobain’s attitude to success, such a stance could hardly have surprised those who knew him best.

Beyond the specifics of mixing and mastering, however,
In Utero
ultimately stands or falls upon the strength of its songs, and in terms of craft and composition Cobain’s songwriting here eclipses anything in his past. Knowing just how much scrutiny would be placed upon the opening track of the follow-up to
Nevermind
, his decision to introduce
In Utero
with the lyric ‘
Teenage angst has paid off well / Now I’m bored and old
’ is truly fearless. ‘Serve the Servants’ also packs Cobain’s thoughts on the media’s demonisation of his wife, his memories of childhood neglect and his reflections upon his new-found celebrity status into four scathing minutes: it is a bravura performance. ‘Scentless Apprentice’, based on Patrick Süskind’s 1985 novel
Perfume
and built around a gnarled, ascending Dave Grohl-authored guitar riff and earthquake drumbeat, is the album’s second undeniable
moment
, and although Cobain later haughtily dismissed the central riff as ‘a cliché grunge Tad riff ’ it’s the most memorable guitar line on the whole album. But it’s ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ that is the album’s undisputed artistic highpoint: the darkest of love songs, it incorporates familiar Cobain lyrical themes – entrapment, dependency, addiction – into an achingly beautiful meditation upon obsessive, consumptive love.

In truth,
In Utero
is a profoundly confused and conflicted album which is neither the unlistenable career suicide note many feared nor in truth a set of songs leaving grunge formulas in the dust. As writer John Mulvey noted in his superb analysis of the album in
NME, In Utero
sounds like the work of a band looking for a direction they can psychologically deal with. For every petulant punk rock hissy fit – the lyrics of the scouring ‘Tourette’s’ are listed simply in anagram form as ‘
Cufk Tish Sips
’ – there’s a moment of sublime, delicate beauty, from Cobain’s cracked, tender vocals on ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ through to the gorgeous simplicity of ‘Dumb’. Amid the dark, brooding anger there are moments of levity: ‘Very Ape’ is a wonderful swipe at the competitive one-upmanship found within indie rock circles – and ushering in the scabrous ‘Rape Me’ with the chords of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ is brilliantly knowing. But overall a pervasive sense of ennui and listlessness weighs heavily. It was an album that raised more questions than it answered about Cobain’s state of mind.

Reviews for the album were mixed.
Melody Maker
noted that ‘Nirvana’s hungrily awaited third album is not quite the rubbed-raw, confrontational, fan-alienating catharsis it’s been talked up to be’, but concluded, ‘we still need people who can speak the truth like this’.
NME
said the album was ‘a mess, but a bloody entertaining one’. Writing in
Rolling Stone
, David Fricke said, ‘
In Utero
is a lot of things – brilliant, corrosive, enraged and thoughtful, most of them all at once,’ while observing, ‘None of this unrepentantly self-obsessed rant & roll would be half as compelling or convincing if Nirvana weren’t such master blasters.’ As anticipated,
In Utero
débuted at Number One in both the UK and US album charts, but the band’s management, record label, music critics and fans alike were fully aware that this was but a prelude to the real story: the world was waiting to see how Kurt Cobain would cope with operating in the spotlight once again.

Autumn 1993 found Nirvana doing something they hadn’t done in two years – a US tour. When the band stepped onto the stage of the Veterans Memorial Coliseum at the Arizona State Fairgrounds in Phoenix, Arizona on 18 October they did so as a four-piece, with former Germs guitarist Pat Smear newly installed in the line-up. By then Dave Grohl had already declared – and withdrawn – his intention to leave the band.

Amid the many dark, disturbing images in Anton Corbijn’s acclaimed, arty video for
In Utero
’s lead-off single ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ there’s a tender human moment which went largely unnoticed that autumn. Three minutes into the promo clip, Krist Novoselic gently wraps his right arm around Dave Grohl’s shoulder and draws the drummer closer; Grohl reaches up and clasps the bassist’s hand in his own. The sickness at the heart of Nirvana was taking its toll upon both men. The elation Grohl and Novoselic felt as they left Pachyderm with the masters of their new album had long since dissipated. The summer months had been filled with drama – overdoses, allegations of domestic violence (charges that both Cobain and Love flatly denied), band arguments and veiled threats – and tensions within the band were mounting: that Pat Smear was recruited as Nirvana’s second guitarist without Cobain bothering to flag his decision up with the band’s rhythm section was symptomatic of the lack of communication within the unit at the time. And even as preparations for the tour got underway Grohl became aware that his position in the band was under review. On a flight from Seattle to Los Angeles the drummer made up his mind to walk away from the madness.

‘We got on a plane,’ he recalls, ‘and Kurt was kinda fucked up. And I heard him talking about how shitty a drummer I was. He was two rows back from me and I overheard him and I got off the plane and said to Krist, “Hey, what was that all about?” He was like, “Oh man, it’s nothing, he was just saying he thinks you should get a smaller drum set and play more like Danny [Peters] or something.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah? Okay.” I mean at this point the two camps had done this …’ here Grohl spreads his arms wide to indicate the widening gulf between Cobain and Love on one side and Novoselic and himself on the other ‘… and back at the hotel I called our tour manager Alex and said, “You know what? I’m out, dude … that’s it. Stop booking shows. I’ll finish the shows, but I’m out, I don’t want to fucking do this any more, I don’t need this, people are insane. I just want to fucking play music, I don’t want to have to deal with any of this craziness.” It was not fun. But then he talked me back into it.

‘We were the most dysfunctional fucking band you could possibly imagine. We were all so terribly passive. Kurt was not a confrontational person. If he had a problem with you, you could feel the vibe, but it’s not like he would scream at you for doing something wrong. I don’t remember ever seeing him do that, once, to anyone, ever. And Krist and I were sorta the same way. It was eggshells, for sure. So a lot of those conflicts were just either ignored, or resolved quietly. There wasn’t a whole lot of band meetings. It was very weird.