(Credits: Alamy)
The idea of Nirvana becoming one of the biggest bands in the world was always going to be a mixed blessing for Kurt Cobain.
He liked the idea of becoming a successful musician, but after being treated like a god for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, he wanted to do nothing more than run away and avoid the spotlight altogether. But even if he had a legacy to uphold now, there were bound to be some people who realised what he was going for a lot better than others.
After all, he thought that Nevermind was in safe hands after working on the record with Butch Vig. The whole thing sounded punchy where it needed to be, and all of the songs were the purest pieces of music he could possibly write, but when it was handed over to Andy Wallace, things started to go haywire. Cobain had hired him because he wanted it to sound like what Wallace had done for Slayer, but when he heard the new mix, he felt they had completely sold out.
The underground punk style of record that he wanted had suddenly turned into the kind of album that could stand alongside the likes of Guns N’ Roses, so when Cobain was called to make another record, he had to move on. He had inadvertently made a candified version of grunge as far as he was concerned, so by hooking up with Steve Albini, he wanted to go as far in the other direction as possible.
You can definitely hear the kind of record he was going for throughout In Utero, but that wasn’t going to help the labels that much. They wanted something that sounded vaguely similar to tracks like ‘In Bloom’, and while a tune like ‘Rape Me’ was never going to be released as a single, they were at least on track when Cobain got producer Scott Litt to mix tunes like ‘All Apologies’ and ‘Heart Shaped Box’.
Although the band were proud of what Albini did, Cobain was the first to say that he had a tremendous amount of respect for what Litt did to their singles, saying, “We listened to In Utero for two months and we wanted something different. Scott was available and we loved the production of [his] R.E.M. stuff, so we thought ‘Why not try [him]?’. And it turned out great. He’s one of the greatest people I’ve ever worked with. I think we all want to do our next record with him.”
And listening to the singles on their own, it’s hard not to see Litt’s touch on a few of those tunes. For one thing, the vocals sound fantastic in the mix, and while Albini’s production style was important for the band so that the album sounded abrasive, ‘All Apologies’ strikes that perfect middle ground for being slightly overbearing while still having that pretty melody at the front of the mix.
There’s no telling what Cobain could have done had he lived, but had Litt signed on to work on the band’s next record, we might have been in for something more melodic. The band had already begun stripping things down when working on MTV Unplugged, so maybe there was that singer-songwriter side of Cobain ready to come out that fit in with what albums like Automatic for the People sounded like.
But, really, all of these ‘what-ifs’ are only wishful thinking on our part. Cobain was a star that shone far too bright for far too short a timeframe, and while we can speculate for years over what magic he could have made had he lived, we should spend more time celebrating the kind of music he left up with instead.
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