Kurt Cobain
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.
The 27 Club by the Numbers: What 1,046 Musicians and a BMJ Study Say About Rock's Most Famous Curse
Fifteen years after Amy Winehouse died, the 27 Club is still selling out tribute shows. So we did the lab thing and ran the myth against the actual data. What we found is stranger than a curse.
The club nobody applied to
Last week, on July 23, 2026, it was fifteen years since Amy Winehouse died of alcohol intoxication at her home in Camden. Her estate marked the anniversary with a tribute, and her mother Janis gave a rare interview calling her “a victim of her own success” (Rolling Stone). The coroner’s verdict in 2011 was “death by misadventure.” She was 27.