The controversy surrounding Nirvana’s final album, 1993’s In Utero, has been well documented. The band had deliberately set out to make a rawer, less polished follow-up to Nevermind, enlisting Steve Albini to record the album in just 10 days. But reports that executives at their label, DGC, were unhappy with the finished record’s abrasive sound and commercial potential led to a contentious post-production process.
Nirvana ultimately stood by most of Albini’s work, but they did bring in Scott Litt to remix “Heart-Shaped Box” and “All Apologies,” both of which would become singles. While Kurt Cobain said he felt the vocals weren’t prominent enough in Albini’s original mixes, bass guitarist Krist Novoselic has now revealed that he had a rather different objection to “Heart-Shaped Box” — one he had raised with Cobain and Albini while the album was being recorded.
The trio — Kurt Cobain on guitar and vocals, Krist Novoselic on bass and Dave Grohl on drums — had decided to go back to basics ahead of their session with Albini. They wanted the album released warts and all, despite concerns that its roughness would make it an unsuccessful follow-up to Nevermind.
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But by the time they decided to remix All Apologies and Heart-Shaped Box, as Novoselic told Mojo, the latter song had been nagging at the bassist for a while.
“That was the thing with Steve. It felt like once the record was done it was completely done,” he said. “That’s when the record label kinda stepped in and said, ‘Hey!’ We had a confrontation about the situation.”
He continued: “But you know why we had to remix Heart-Shaped Box? You should hear the original version of that song — the guitar solo has this effect on it. It just sabotages the whole song. Steve and Kurt were colluding!
“I would go to Kurt, ‘Why are you sabotaging this beautiful song by putting this hideous abortion in the centre of it?’ He’d be like, ‘Well, I think it sounds cool.’”
He added that he couldn’t clearly remember the reasons Cobain and Albini offered for having tracked it that way. “Some statement against commercial radio or something — the popular mainstream aesthetic… I dunno!”
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When Litt was hired to remix the two tracks, Novoselic reflected: “Maybe I should have spoke up at the time [of recording].”
But he countered his own position: “I think it’s a great-sounding record. It’s a highly artistic record. I don’t know who else could have produced it except Albini.
“It’s my favorite Nirvana record, and I’ll tell you why. There was a lot of stuff going on with the band; externally and internally, there was a lot of pressures. But when we walked through that door we left all that stuff outside the door. We just played music, we worked together really well, we were laughing, we were concentrating, we were open.
“And that really shows on the record. We didn’t mess around. Nobody got bombed, everybody was focused and clear-headed. I’m really proud of it, it’s a beautiful record.”
He went on: “Sometimes the lyrics on In Utero are really creepy. I listen to ’em now and it’s like, ‘Why didn’t I hear that back then?’”
