Nirvana
Pull a thread
Andy Wallace mixed Nevermind because he had made Slayer records: the producer chain behind six weeks of 1991
Between 12 August and 24 September 1991, five albums arrived that rearranged what rock radio sounded like. The thread nobody pulls runs through the people at the mixing desk, and it starts on a thrash record from 1986.
The six weeks, in order
Start with the calendar, because the calendar is the part people misremember.
Metallica released the self-titled album everyone calls the Black Album on 12 August 1991. Pearl Jam released Ten on 27 August. Guns N’ Roses put out Use Your Illusion I and II on the same day, 17 September. And on 24 September, a Tuesday, Nirvana’s Nevermind and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik both landed (1991 in music).
The Man Who Mixed Slayer Also Mixed Nevermind
Nirvana wanted the engineer behind Reign in Blood, South of Heaven and Seasons in the Abyss*. He gave them the biggest-sounding record of 1991, and by 1993 the band’s singer was telling interviewers he was embarrassed by it.*
Nevermind came out on 24 September 1991 on DGC. That makes September 24 the 35th anniversary, and the anniversary pieces will do what anniversary pieces do: the cover, the baby, the pool, the year everything changed. Fine. I want to talk about a name in the credits that almost nobody reads out loud.
September 1991: Guns N' Roses Sold 1.45 Million Records in a Week, Then Nirvana Released Nevermind
Thirty-five years ago this week, the biggest band on the Geffen roster put out two albums on the same Tuesday. Seven days later, the same label shipped 46,251 copies of a record from Aberdeen, Washington.
Tuesday, September 17, 1991: two records, one day
Guns N’ Roses did something on September 17, 1991 that nobody had really tried at that scale. They released Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II on the same day, on Geffen Records, as two separate full-price albums. Thirty songs across the pair. A nine-minute “November Rain”, a nine-minute “Coma”, an Alice Cooper cameo, a Bob Dylan cover, a Paul McCartney cover, a Charles Manson credit, and a piano ballad written from the point of view of a man mourning his own wedding. Excess was the plan, and the plan worked.
"Chop Suey!" Is Diamond, and Heavy Music's Entire RIAA Diamond Club Is Five Songs Certified in 30 Months
System of a Down’s 2001 single peaked at #76, got pulled from radio after 9/11 and never sold ten million of anything. On August 28 it became the fifth heavy song ever to hit RIAA Diamond. The other four got there since February 2024. That timing is the whole story.
What Diamond actually counts
Diamond is the RIAA’s ten million mark. For most of its life that meant ten million copies sold, which is why the club was built out of Whitney Houston and Elton John and almost nothing with a distorted guitar in it. Then the RIAA folded downloads and streams into the count, and “ten million units” stopped describing a purchase and started describing a habit. A song can get there now without a physical copy changing hands in years.