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.

The credit under the producer credit

Two different jobs, two different people, and they get collapsed constantly.

Butch Vig produced Nevermind. He was in the room in Van Nuys with the band, getting the performances and building the takes. That part is famous.

Andy Wallace mixed it. He took the finished multitracks and decided what the record sounds like coming out of a speaker: how loud the snare hits you, how much air is around the guitars, how the whole thing sits when a radio station plays it between two other songs.

If you only read the front of an album sleeve, this story is invisible. The mixer is the person who turns a good recording into a record, and on Nevermind the mixer came from an address nobody would guess.

He came off three Slayer albums

Before Nevermind, Andy Wallace’s most talked-about work was with Slayer. He worked on Reign in Blood (1986), South of Heaven (1988) and Seasons in the Abyss (1990), engineering and mixing alongside Rick Rubin as producer. That’s worth keeping straight, because the headline version of this story usually promotes him to “Slayer’s producer,” which he wasn’t. He mixed them.

Reign in Blood is the reference point. Twenty-nine minutes, no fat, and a clarity that thrash records mostly did not have in 1986. You can hear every instrument. It is fast and legible at once.

So when Nirvana needed someone to mix a major-label debut for a band coming out of Seattle with punk instincts and pop songs, the name that came up was the guy who made the most extreme record on the shelf sound enormous. The same hands worked on Slayer in 1990 and on Nirvana in 1991.

Who actually made the pick is murkier than the internet suggests. The band wanted the Slayer mixer; whether that was Kurt Cobain’s personal call or a shortlist that came through the label and Vig, with the band pointing at the thrash guy, is not something I can nail down. The request is documented; the decision-making inside the room is not.

What “big” actually meant, in hardware terms

The size of Nevermind came from specific choices at the mix.

Wallace layered snare samples over the recorded drums, used reverb generously, and compressed. The result is a record where the drums hit with a force the room alone didn’t produce, where the guitars have width, and where a quiet verse and a loud chorus are both fully present instead of one burying the other.

That’s the craft that made Reign in Blood work too, pointed at a different kind of band. A thrash record needs to stay readable at maximum speed. A Nirvana record needed to stay readable on a car radio next to Bryan Adams. Same problem, in a way: make the thing land without losing what’s in it.

The part where the singer hated it

And then the record’s own singer spent the promo cycle apologising for it.

By 1993, talking to Michael Azerrad for Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, Kurt Cobain was saying he was embarrassed by Nevermind and describing it as closer to a Mötley Crüe record than a punk rock record. (I’m paraphrasing deliberately; the exact wording circulates in a dozen slightly different forms online and the primary source is the book.)

You can call that ingratitude, or posturing, or an artist trying to keep his credibility in a year when his band was on every radio in the northern hemisphere. But there’s harder evidence than a quote: he preferred Butch Vig’s rougher Devonshire mixes, and those finally came out officially on the 20th-anniversary reissue in 2011. Put them next to the album you know. The songs are the same; the scale is not.

It was never a decades-long grudge: the documented complaint is from 1993, and Cobain died in April 1994. That’s a short window, and a real one.

Wallace never flinched

Andy Wallace has never disowned Nevermind. In interviews since, including with Tape Op, he’s consistent: he thinks the record is brilliant.

He mixed Rage Against the Machine’s debut and Evil Empire. He mixed Jeff Buckley’s Grace. Go back further and he’s on the Run-DMC and Aerosmith “Walk This Way” collision, the record that dragged rock and hip-hop into the same room in 1986.

Slayer, Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, Jeff Buckley. Thrash, grunge, rap-metal, and one of the most delicate records of the nineties. Those records don’t sound alike. Wallace figures out what each one is trying to be and makes it that, at full size.

Which makes Cobain’s complaint more interesting. What bothered him was how well the mix worked.

Where to hear the argument

If you want to run the experiment yourself, the material is all out there. The 2011 20th-anniversary reissue carries the Devonshire mixes, Cobain’s preferred version. The 30th-anniversary set, released 12 November 2021, goes wider: around 70 previously unreleased tracks and four complete concerts (Amsterdam 25 November 1991, Del Mar 28 December 1991, Melbourne 1 February 1992, Tokyo 19 February 1992), all four recorded inside three months, 1991 into 1992. The live recordings are useful here for a reason that has nothing to do with completism: they’re the songs with no mixer in between.

There’s no 35th-anniversary reissue announced. This one is just a date.

The thread to pull next

The chain runs Rick Rubin → Slayer → Andy Wallace → Nevermind. But Rubin is also the Run-DMC end of that Aerosmith record, and Wallace is on that one too. Two guys from the same downtown New York orbit, working on rap records and thrash records in the same years, end up with fingerprints on the album usually filed as the start of the nineties.

The Seattle story gets told as a closed system: local bands, local label, local sound, then an explosion. The credits say otherwise. The man who decided how it sounded coming out of a speaker came from Rick Rubin’s orbit.

I want to map that properly: who else moves between those worlds in those years, and where else the New York hardcore/hip-hop engineering crowd turns up on records nobody associates with them. If you’ve got a candidate, @realrocklab on Threads or X.

Sources: Albumism: Nirvana’s Nevermind anniversary retrospective · Guitar World: how Kurt Cobain ended up working with Andy Wallace · Slate: the Nevermind version Cobain loved best · Tape Op: Andy Wallace interview · Rolling Stone: Nevermind 30th-anniversary reissue · Stereogum: Nevermind 30th-anniversary reissue · Wikipedia: Andy Wallace (producer)