As a kid/teenager, Nevermind was always the better record over Bleach, but the idea of getting a major label deal & a slick producer & a $50,000 budget were all completely impossibly unattainable. But that line about just $600 to make Bleach... that was inspiring. That was an amount I could conceivably save up for. It made the idea of making an album yourself seem possible, reachable.
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/sub-pop-posts-...
MTV's 120 Minutes was essential stuff back in the day.
I grew up in Seattle - friends were telling me for years before Nevermind about Nirvana. They were building a reputation slowly across the US. Subpop was helping, they had a national network, but not fast enough. Once Nirvana had a major label marketing for them - things went crazy.
Nirvana was that magic mix of punk/hard rock and pop that broke the dam - and the audience was ready to go.
The Ramones debuted at CBGB in 1976, The Misfits there in 1977. Black Flag formed in Hermosa Beach in 1976 as Panic. KROQ was airing punk by the late 1970s, as well as alternative radio stations and college radio. The Clash signed with Columbia (then CBS Records), an American label, in 1977, and their 1982 single, Should I Stay or Should I Go, was on wide radio rotation throughout the 1980's. So by Nevermind in 1991, Punk was very well established. Although it is a general rule that any punk bands that formed in the 1980's often didn't get wide recognition until the 1990's, but The Ramone's (Sedated) and The Clash got plenty of airplay from the late 1970's up until today. But I think it is more accurate to put Nirvana with the other Seattle and LA groups and change its genre label to Grunge.
Nerding about the audio production, IIRC - Vig was using Dave Grohl’s drum tracks to trigger digital samples into reverb, mixing just the wet reverb in. Albini had a bunch of mics in weird places capturing room acoustics and mixed between them. Really different approaches and even if listeners don’t know, they hear it.
Cobain was such a tragic roman candle of talent, but I really think collaboration with producers was necessary to get albums as good as these. Somehow I suspect industry economics have changed in a way that I don’t think rewards elite producers assembling great albums, although digital tech lowers the cost and great sounding stuff still happens.
Cobain's suicide was a result of uncomfortable fame, struggling with heroin addiction, but especially clinical major depression. If you consider that LA since the dawn of the record industry always had a massive music scene, and performers there always had considerable talent, with many were jaded because success and notoriety is in many instances very arbitrary and so difficult to obtain in a such large pool of highly talented and technically proficient musicians... then why Cobain out of Seattle? He was not any more talented than any professional unsigned musician in LA during that era up until today. Cobain, though he could compose, sing and play well (like so many others), was extremely attractive, and I think his comeliness, his piercing blue eyes and blond hair, is what set him apart to Geffen and the teenage girls that usually drive record sales.
> Somehow I suspect industry economics have changed in a way that I don’t think rewards elite producers assembling great albums, although digital tech lowers the cost and great sounding stuff still happens.
Definitely, but low fidelity sounds even worse on the radio, so they are passed over by radio programmers. The techniques of high fidelity production have long solved the issues of not knowing how the sound is going to be reproduced after being broadcast to individual receivers. Car radios and home component systems vary widely in their quality. Somehow Hotel California still sounds pretty good on a crappy radio. That is the trick, and that is why production is so expensive, because it transcends the limitations of the end-unit receivers, and that takes a skilled engineer and a lot of time, and the more skilled, the more in demand and the more expensive their time becomes. High Fidelity and skilled producers and engineers, regardless of analog or digital tracking, are still required to get wide radio adoption. LoFi comes to us through means other than broadcast radio, by seeing an act, and buying the record, and through download sites like iTunes, Amazon, Zune Marketplace, Rhapsody and venues like YouTube, but usually not radio. Once playing on radio stations in major cities, record sales immediately follow. LoFi is more organic and word of mouth, thus there is far slower adoption. I think without airplay, Nirvana could not have achieved "overnight" success. Fame would still have occurred, just much, much more slowly.
And staling fame is often a tactic. Bands have only so much time, so much energy. Once the whole nation wants them, the art itself becomes more difficult to produce, because of the distractions of fame taking up all their time. If it is clear from isolated performances that fame is inevitable, and they are generating plenty of revenue, a band may forgo marketing singles altogether, and only get on the radio once the secret finally gets out, and they have enough money to isolate themselves from manic hoards. Both DMB and Phish were incredibly popular among their growing fan base long before they released any singles for radio play (which, again, were high fidelity professionally produced recordings, and not the low fidelity bootlegs that everyone was collecting).
The songwriting and the production. Nevermind has really good songs; better than on Bleach. Butch Vig has produced tens of records, many of which were good and popular. Yet Nevermind and Siamese Dreams - made two years after Nevermind - are the impactful standouts because the songs and the sound are jointly incredible.
In Utero, produced by pop-unfriendly Steve Albini, and distinctly non-smooth, was also a huge record, but I'd absolutely concede that it may not have broken through if Nevermind hadn't come before.
Another example of the point I was making was Superdrag, who's very high fidelity Head Trip in Every Key was produced by industry professional Jerry Finn (his fee alone was $50K). Head Trip was extremely popular, with its singles on heavy radio rotation; Do the Vampire still gets airplay. Their subsequent self-produced record, In the Valley of Dying Stars, which can not be described as high fidelity, basically failed and sadly dropped them back into relative obscurity. I don't think one can find a better or more consistent song smith and performer than John Davis.
But there are exceptions, like Dinosaur Jr, who still came to wide loyal popularity even though J Mascis self-produced many imperfectly produced records, but that still sold very well. But though they were never quite produced correctly to national standards, they weren't really low fidelity records, either, though often classified as such. Elliot Smith is another exception, with tracking on his classic analog equipment and bazaar levels of analog compression. Beck's Mellow Gold is another exception, probably saved by professional mastering, it is entirely a basement recording that somehow broke through the high standards long set by major labels and consumers.
Generally, you can have a band with a singer that can not sing (such as Fred Schneider or Black Francis) and/or a guitar player that is embarrassingly limited (such as Peter Buck or The Edge in their early days), but if your rhythm section (bassist and drummer) is decent, and the records produced to sufficient quality, the band can do very well. Also, if you have a band that is touring constantly to promote their music, the hard work seems to pay off (The Grateful Dead, REM, DMB, Phish).
Everything I have written is just my own opinions, btw. Everyone seems biased towards the idea that an artist is intrinsically great, but most nationally recognized are often put together, so to speak, part of the evolution from obscurity to fame involves changes made often against the artists' ethic or wishes. Elvis and Frank Sinatra didn't do it all by themselves, there was massive support and significant image crafting.
Not really. Bands will tour Europe and Asia in small clubs, but until they make it in the US, they haven't really made it. Only after a band becomes big in the US can they then become a global sensation. The British Invasion is a good example of this. Beatles had exploded in England, but only after their US tour did they then fill large venues in Europe. Same with the rest of the British Invasion that followed them. What you almost never see is a band take over the rest of the world filling large venues, and then come to the US. If they're touring internationally prior to US recognition, they can only headline in small venues like clubs and small theaters.
Likely the only reason Femmes were even in Australia is they had by then saturated their US market and couldn't sell enough tickets domestically to justify the cost of any available venue. I was a Femmes fan, saw them in 1989 promoting 3 in a tiny venue called The Boathouse that literally was a small converted boathouse. Indigo Girls opened for them. The entire show was awful, bad sound, bad performances, and I regretted not going to see REM, playing that same night. REM was playing a coliseum, a huge venue, and I prefer smaller venues and try to avoid big crowds, but anything would have been better than what I was subjected to that night, and reportedly, REM delivered a fantastic show. I like the Violent Femme's records, but unless they played big festivals with lots of other artists, they never performed before a large audience, say, of 5000, and I'd be surprised if they ever saw an audience of 1000. Of course, Nirvana ultimately would find their biggest audiences in Brazil, with 100K+ people night after night, which is difficult to even comprehend.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Tour_(Robbie_Williams)
Sound City put out the demo Reckless Life where as the full second album was put out by Geffen.
The story really begins with Motley Crue wasting a million dollars of their record label's money and not really having a viable product to show for it. Major labels were fed up with rock star behavior, and things were about to change.
SubPop was really central to the Seattle grunge scene. I don't honestly know for certain, but I suspect SubPop was a small operation that helped their members promote their own recordings. It is absolutely normal today and how most labels operate, but back in the 1980's, only the major record labels released national records, and unless a band was signed to a major label, they probably could not afford to record in a professional studio, have their tracks professionally mixed and mastered, and certainly not afford to market the product nationally or get shelf space in record stores. So SubPop would (my conjecture btw) take the recordings made by the bands, which traditionally were only considered demos, and just release them as is as the national product. It saved bundles of money, and SubPop, being small, didn't have the resources to front their members studio time anyway. I am nearly certain Mudhoney's first record was probably self-made, and SubPop helped them market their amateur recording --they were already professional musicians by 1985, i.e. they got paid to perform, but IMO none of the early Grunge records, such as Nirvana's Bleach, sound professionally engineered... they're amateur only in the sense that a national quality producer and engineer and studio probably wasn't involved, but probably recorded in the proverbial garage, except actually at a "pro" studio, in the sense that was a studio, and it cost them something, maybe $15-$30/hour, as opposed to $800/hour, or whatever places like Abbey Road Studios charge.
Motley Crue's infamous failure and this idea that SubPop came up with of releasing demo quality records as national product, changed everything. Bands signed to major label no longer were given any money for signing. A lucky artist that made it to the majors would be loaned enough money by the label to record a professional demo (kind of a oxymoron). It was pro quality, but only a few tracks. If the label thought it was any good, they might release it as an EP, or loan the band money to go on tour and promote themselves. But the bands now had to pay the labels back.
SubPop also cleverly shopped their members' product to the big labels. They sold Mudhunny to Reprise, and they sold Nirvana to Geffen. But I believe Nirvana was the first to seriously rain mountains of money, so to speak, and I think it was incidental that it was Nirvana.
What is important about Nevermind is the production. It is not amateur, like all the other Grunge records of the era, and it was like nothing ever heard before at the national level, either. Butch Vig, who had already produced a few successful Sonic Youth records, and later of Garbage, had pioneered a novel production style that I have never heard duplicated by anyone but Butch Vig, specifically, Smashing Pumpkin's Siamese Dream. If you compare the production of these two records, they are identical in class. That's what Butch Vig and what was once Smart Studios (closed) sounds like, that slick, liquidy sort of sound. Nirvana doesn't sound like that, and Nevermind stands out as an atypical record among their discography, and Cobain was very critical of it because it was too polished and too Popy. It is also the only record of Nirvana's that Vig produced. And I believe it was a certified "gold record" within two months of its release, which is, of course, very very good and not at all easy to do.
All anyone thinks about is the artist, but national releases have little to do with the artist. It's about money, it's about having product that can be widely sold, and that depends a lot on marketing, but it especially depends on having a national quality product.
Case in point is Weezer's Blue Album, which has similarly fast gold and platinum status (which is based on sales btw, 500K for gold, 1M for platinum in the US). Their second record, Pinkerton, after a decade still had only sold like 200K copies. Why the poor performance? It is theorized that it is because Pinkerton was produced by an amateur, namely, Rivers Cuomo, who is a professional musician. If he ever did, by the time he personally mixed Pinkerton, he didn't have national quality engineering skills, and the record was of poor production quality. The tracked sounds are still of sufficiently high enough fidelity, it just wasn't produced and mixed by a professional, national quality engineer. Why would it matter? Mudhunny's amateur demos were sold and distributed nationally. Maybe it's because Weezer isn't grunge, or from Seattle? Who knows. Thankfully, Weezer's subsequent records were professionally produced and financially performed very well compared to Pinkerton.
And Nirvana did the same thing with Nevermind and subsequent records. Bleach wasn't as popular. Similarly, if you look at any early 90's lofi act, such as Flaming Lips or Superchunk, you'll notice that as they became more successful, and had the money to afford to properly record their records, each subsequent record became higher and higher fidelity until it doesn't really make sense to refer to them as lofi acts anymore. Though the music didn't really change, the genre changed from "LoFi" to "Indy." And Grunge is not really Punk, but it depends how you define Punk. If punk is a fashion statement and political, then maybe. But Punk has a musical form, and it is really the same as that of Polka. If you can't square dance to it, if the signature is not 4/4, then it probably isn't legitimately Punk. Grunge didn't necessarily have that form, and what Nirvana released was a reaction to and departure from Punk with unique chord structures never heard in Punk, and not always 4/4 signature (such as "If You Must," and "Beeswax").
Anyway, SubPop (not Apple with iTunes Store and iPod, which fed off the trend to great success) is the reason every new artist for the last 30 years tries to self-release or own their own label. Last band I am aware of that went from unsigned straight to major label record deal was Dave Matthews Band, but only because they had their own distribution list of something like 100K names and addresses and were already touring nationally on their own independent label. They already had a proven national product with their self-funded tours, so RCA was probably throwing money at them to get them to sign, almost like the old days of big acts in the 1950s through the 1980s.