Butch Vig Looks Back At Nirvana's 'Nevermind' 25 Years Later

(Radio.com) Nirvana's landmark sophomore studio album Nevermind turns 25 this year, and its producer Butch Vig revealed new details this week about working with Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl to record the music that would launch them into an entirely new stratosphere of popularity.

Speaking with Yahoo Music, Vig recounted the long road between the first session he did with Nirvana (with Chad Channing on drums) at Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin, and what they recorded in L.A. some months later, after the band signed with Geffen Records on the strength of those initial sessions. And he stressed that the commerciality of the band's music was no fluke.

"Kurt wanted his band to be very successful," Vig explained. "He was very ambitious. If you've ever looked through any of his notebooks you'd see that he used to make drawings of the band playing these enormo-domes for 100,000 people. And he put together lists of what he was going to do when they were massively successful. He had a pretty intense work ethic when it came to songwriting and rehearsing. Nirvana may have come across as punk slackers, but that's definitely not who they were."

Even though Cobain, Novoselic and Grohl partied hard while working with Vig in L.A., they were still incredibly focused on the songs. "Nirvana had their fun when they were in the studio, but when it came to recording they were pretty focused," he said. Read more here.

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