Hoped would be their first live shows in a very long time.īutch, thanks for chatting with us. We checked in with both masterminds recently just as Garbage’sįirst new singles were about to drop, and the band were planning what they Unlocks creative possibilities for guitar sounds-and even, often, drum partsĪnd vocals-as well as enabling them to work quickly, efficiently, andĮconomically. Racks and zero conventional amplifiers, Helix is critical to both men. Whether they’re in Vig’s home-based studio, Red Razor’sīuffed-out tracking space, or on the road, where they carry a good dozen Helix Studios is where Garbage finishes and bags up stunning tracks like “Magnetized” Of sound into gold is Billy Bush, the notable mixer/engineer whose Red Razor
Vig’s right-hand-man in converting those scraps Who Rule the World” show a band sticking to their crunchy creative compost: soundįX, potent machine-man grooves, and biting guitar tones from punchy, angularĬleans to rafter-rattling fuzz. Lead-off singles like “Wolves” and The Men Gods, No Masters, their first album since 2016’s Strange Little Birds. Twenty-five years on, Vig remains both drummer and producer Garbage would go on to sell more than 17 million albums. Also featuring guitarists Duke Erikson and Steve Marker, With Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, and Sonic Youth helped define the new sound of But the band was theīrainchild of one of rock’s most acclaimed producers, Butch Vig, whose work Rains,” it was Scottish singer Shirley Manson, with her diabolic blend ofĭefiance and allure, that captured the public’s attention. With edgy, ultra-modern singles like “Stupid Girl” and “I’m Only Happy When It When the band Garbage first shot out of the cans in 1995, It may be extreme to some people who aren’t used to it, but I think it’s kind of lame, myself.Garbage In, Garbage Out: Super Producer Butch Vig Digs Through Helix for Trash & Treasure Talking about “Teen Spirit,” he told Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad, “It’s such a perfect mixture of cleanliness and nice, candy-ass production. Andy Wallace, who’d worked with Slayer, gave Nevermind its incredible sonic sheen – something Cobain never admitted to being comfortable with. The band decided to hire an outside engineer. Vig eventually won the argument, but his mixes didn’t make it onto the album. Your vocal performance is as intense as the drums and the bass and the guitar.'” “Kurt kept trying to bury his voice,” says Vig. Mixing the record, the band and producer hit another snag. Inside the 20th-Anniversary Reissue of ‘Nevermind’ I pulled a couple of mikes in, and we built the whole song around it.” “Kurt walked into the control room and said it just had to sound like this – he was barely whispering, and playing the guitar so quietly you could barely hear it. “No matter how subtly they’d try to play,” Vig says, it was too aggressive. Rowdy lifestyles aside, Vig says the recording went smoothly, except when it came time for the restrained “Something in the Way.”
I’d go into the studio at noon and they’d wander in around four.” They’d stay up every night and go down to Venice Beach until six in the morning. There’d be graffiti on the walls, and the couches were upside down. “They were living in this apartment complex, and it was chaos,” Vig remembers. Vig spent a little more than a month recording and mixing the album with Cobain, Novoselic and Grohl at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California. Vig, along with mixer Andy Wallace, made sure that Nevermind‘s brilliant songs didn’t get lost in the same cheap production as on the band’s first album, Bleach. But I could hear the start to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ and I knew it was amazing.”
, Kurt sent a cassette, which was done on a boombox,” said Vig. The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: Nirvana, ‘Nevermind’īut as the sessions were about to get under way, neither the band nor producer Butch Vig knew just what they had on their hands. Cobain’s slashing riffs, corrosive singing and deviously oblique writing, rammed home by the Pixies-via-Zeppelin might of bassist Krist Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl, put the warrior purity back in rock & roll. Though Nevermind‘s success would take a toll on Nirvana’s tortured leader, Kurt Cobain, no album in recent history had such an overpowering impact on a generation – a nation of teens suddenly turned punk. Nirvana‘s second album shot up from the Northwest underground – the nascent grunge scene in Seattle – to blow hair metal off the map, kick Michael Jackson off the top of the Billboard album chart and turn the band into overnight stars.