Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [198]
CHRIS CORNELL When all the bands in the Seattle music scene went on to major labels and bigger success, there was this kind of “Let’s pretend that we don’t wanna be doing this and someone’s sort of forcing us to do it” attitude. I think everybody had it, including members of my own band. The only band I didn’t see acting like that was Alice in Chains, because they didn’t come from that indie-rock world. Everybody else sort of followed the punk-rock bible, and it wasn’t part of punk rock to be on a major label, to make money, to make videos, to spend more than $2,000 on making a record, to be on a tour bus instead of driving a van. And yet, that’s what everyone was doing.
BUTCH VIG Here’s one reason why I knew that Kurt was happy with that record: because he called me up and started bugging me to produce Courtney. He wanted me to do Live Through This. Kurt had so much respect for me, and I think that he knew that I could bring out in Courtney what I had brought out in Nirvana with Nevermind.
He started calling every night at the studio. I’d be at Triclops working with the Smashing Pumpkins and they’d go, “Butch, Kurt’s on the phone.” I’d talk to him and he’d go, “Butch, you gotta do Courtney’s record, man, you just gotta do it.” I was pretty fried from doing the Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream—it was super-draining; six months of pretty much working every single day—and there was just no way I could go right into another crazy record. Billy, who had dated Courtney and knew her really well, said, “You don’t want to go in a studio with Courtney.” That’s all he would say.
PATTY SCHEMEL We lived together for a bit, me and Kurt and Courtney, when I first moved to Los Angeles. They had this really great place, but Kurt would just sit in the closet with his guitar and amp in the dark and play. He liked it in there. And the closet backed up against the room that I stayed in, so I could hear it all. That’s where I heard all the In Utero stuff. The beginnings of “Rape Me” I heard in there.
STEVE ALBINI We did the record at Pachyderm, and I thought it was a plus that it was way out in the boonies of Minnesota. Given everyone’s concerns about Kurt falling off the wagon, being in a studio that was 50 miles out of town made that less likely.
I remember we got an awful lot done in the first week. I was very happy with the progress. Everything sounded really good, the band was in really good spirits, Kurt was sober, there were no flare-ups, no incidents, everything seemed kind of normal. There was one pretty funny episode one night where Dave Grohl and Bob Weston—who was there working on the session, as well—got bored, so they took off into this small town, Cannon Falls, Minnesota, and hit a QuikTrip or the 7-Eleven and bought all of the Reddi-wip in the dairy case. And then stayed up all night doing whippets.
When Courtney showed up at the studio later on? It sucked. She’s like a fucking lead weight on everything. You know, I don’t get any satisfaction talking about that person.
LORI BARBERO When they were at Pachyderm, I took Krist and Kurt to the Mall of America, and Albini kept saying, “You can’t go to the Mall of America—you’ll get swamped.” I’m like, “Nobody is gonna swamp you.” Albini’s like, “You’re gonna be sorry.” He was thinking that they were just gonna get attacked.
I took them to this store called Bare Bones in the Mall of America, because I knew Kurt would love it. It was all about anatomy: babies in jars and skeletons and brains and all that. That’s where he bought the woman figure on the cover of the album.
Back then, I really stood out with my blond dreadlocks, and I lived in the Twin Cities, so that was my stomping grounds. The only people that approached us