“ AS BIG AS THE BEATLES !”

JONATHAN Poneman at Sub Pop called me out of the blue sometime early in 1990. They wanted me to work with Nirvana. He said they would be as big as The Beatles. I thought he was just being cheeky. A couple of days later, Bleach turned up at Smart, my studio in Madison, Wisconsin. I thought it was pretty one-dimensional except that one song, “About A Girl”, which to me did sound like a Lennon-McCartney composition, an amazing melody with a great arrangement.

We scheduled a week to record and about six weeks later Nirvana showed up in the Sub Pop van, pretty bedraggled. Krist was really friendly, Chad [Channing], who was drumming, seemed nice, Kurt was very likeable, quiet but polite. I fed them up at this blue-collar bar called the

Friendly Tavern, a real working man’s watering hole and dirt cheap – you could get a pitcher of beer for $2 and a bowl of soup and grilled cheese for a buck and a quarter.

In the studio, I was taking my time to set up and I could tell