Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [197]
I wake up, and I’m all wet, and I’m laying over the toilet. I’m in a different room and I’m all wet. And he had had me in the shower and everything—I was obviously blacked out during that whole time. I was flatlined. And he’s crying and punching me in the face. I’m like, “What’s wrong? What did I do?” And he’s like, “You were dead for 11 minutes, Mike.”
I got home to California, and after that’s when it really began. Because I couldn’t forget about losing my band. It was everything to me, and it broke my heart, so I started shootin’ again.
CRAIG MONTGOMERY Nirvana decided to use the time in between shows to go into a studio and just get some ideas down for their next album. So we went to this pretty nice studio in Rio, and the band played all the songs they had written for In Utero, which was not that many, and nothing was very complete, but I remember we had “Heart-Shaped Box” and a few other songs.
“Heart-Shaped Box” was pretty good. Frankly a lot of it I thought was crap. It was just this improvisational, atonal stuff, just noisy. I could tell that Kurt wasn’t at one of his creative peaks at all. It was obvious—and he had said to me and to others—that he just wasn’t really excited about Nirvana anymore and he wanted to do something else. They were struggling to get enough material together for an album. And this is something I haven’t really ever said to anyone else before, but my feeling was like, Wow, good luck making an album, guys. You’re in trouble.
STEVE ALBINI I’d been hearing rumors that I was going to be asked to do the Nirvana record for a long time, and I had gotten a couple of random, drunken phone calls from Kurt—I assume it was Kurt, because I later identified that voice—just slurring that he wanted to make a record with me. I got calls from weirdos all the time, so I didn’t think too much about it.
Then I started seeing stuff, particularly in the English music press, saying that I was doing the next Nirvana record. It made me uncomfortable, so I actually wrote, I think it was Melody Maker, saying, “I don’t know where you’re getting your information. Nobody has spoken to me about making a Nirvana record. You’ve published this, and it’s now causing me some consternation because people are calling me up and hassling me about it.”
Eventually, Kurt called me and said, “If you’re up for it, we’d like you to do this record.” I said, “Sure.” I wasn’t a particular Nirvana fan prior to working on that record, but I grew to respect them a great deal, seeing them work and seeing their work ethic, seeing how they gave each other space to do stuff.
DANNY GOLDBERG Kurt was nervous about looking too mainstream after the huge commercial success of Nevermind, and I think he thought that Albini would add some punk credibility.
STEVE MANNING I remember seeing Kurt at an all-ages Fluid show at RKCNDY and feeling like he was being more reclusive than in the past. Must’ve been right after Nevermind. He was pressed up against the wall in the back corner. I remember walking outside and two young kids with Mohawks were screaming at him, “You killed punk rock! You killed punk rock!” Kurt was with a girl at the time, and I just remember looking at him and seeing the most dejected look on his face. I didn’t feel close enough to him where I could go up and say, “Ah, fuck them, don’t worry about it.” I’ve always wished I would’ve said something.
GILLIAN G. GARR I didn’t even realize that they had disavowed Nevermind until reading the book Come as You Are. It was mainly Kurt, and to some extent the others. He said he was embarrassed by Nevermind and that it wasn’t the kind of record he would listen to. He said it sounded closer to a Mötley Crüe album.
BUTCH VIG To me, that record doesn’t sound slick at all. It sounds like a band playing their asses