Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [199]
STEVE ALBINI We did a lot of prank calls. We called Eddie Vedder, and they had me pretend to be some famous record producer who had worked with Bowie. I told him that I wanted to get him in the studio with a real band that could really play. I don’t know if he could tell that there was something up or not, but he handled it with a lot of class.
Three days into the session, Dave called John Silva and said that he’d just been hitting the snare drums for three days and that I’d just been moving the microphone around that whole time. At one point, John Silva said, “Well, you know, it’s like we said …”—and then Dave totally cut him off. It’s like he was about to spill the beans on whatever Plan B was.
DAVE GROHL Our A&R man at the time, Gary Gersh, was freaking out. I said, “Gary, man, don’t be so afraid, the record will turn out great!” He said, “Oh, I’m not afraid, go ahead, bring me back the best you can do.” It was like, Go and have your fun, then we’ll get another producer and make the real album.
DANNY GOLDBERG So the record came back, and I listened to it and Geffen listened to it and Courtney listened to it and other people listened to it, and my feeling was that the voice was buried. Kurt, he’s got a very good, extremely recognizable voice, and he put a lot of care into the words.
STEVE ALBINI When the record was delivered, the record label freaked out. Because it wasn’t something that they had been involved in, they were suspicious of it, and they instilled a lot of doubt in the band. The label started this whispering campaign about me and how I’d ruined the record. I was getting calls from journalists saying things like, “I just got off the phone with Gary Gersh. He said you’ve ruined the Nirvana album.” And that was all done as a means of trying to coerce the band to redo the record in a more expensive, more conventional, big-record-label manner.
I got a call from Kurt, and he sort of explained to me what was going down with the record label. I’m not 100 percent certain of this, but the way he was speaking, the way his voice was affected, I had the impression that he was back on drugs, so I wasn’t that confident in his decision making. He said, “The record label hates the record, they want us to redo it all. I’ve been listening to it and maybe there’s stuff we could do better. So we’d like to try and remix some stuff.” I listened to a dub of the record and was content with it and told him, “If you want to mess around with stuff on your own, it’s your record. Whatever makes you comfortable. I don’t think I can help any.”
DANNY GOLDBERG Kurt lived with it for a few days, and I think a lot of other people told him the same thing, and so he says, “Well, who can we get?” We talked different names and one of them was Scott Litt, who had done R.E.M. Kurt met Scott, and he loved him. Scott ended up remixing “Heart-Shaped Box” and “All Apologies.”
STEVE ALBINI They sent me a copy of the record after it was done. I thought it sounded okay. There was very aggressive mastering done. The band had been made so paranoid by the people that worked for them; those people had somehow convinced them that this awesome record they made was terrible.
The hostile publicity campaign that the record label, in particular Gary Gersh, had waged against me actually did have an effect on my business. They made me seem like I was poisonous, so none of the bigger mainstream bands, certainly no one on Geffen, considered using me for their records. On the other end of the spectrum, all the smaller bands that had been my bread and butter started to associate me with this mainstream culture that had been creeping into the underground; Nirvana were viewed with some suspicion by those bands. And there was a certain category of people that didn’t know anything about me, that just assumed I’d be out of their price range because I’d worked on this big hit record. There was an extended period there where I had no work. It almost bankrupted