Kurt Cobain was never exactly shy about the influences behind Smells Like Teen Spirit. “I was trying to rip off the Pixies,” the Nirvana frontman told Rolling Stone in 1994. “We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard. Teen Spirit is such a clichéd riff. When I first came up with it, Krist [Novoselic] looked at me and said: ‘That is so ridiculous.’”
This, combined with a phrase scrawled on his wall by Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna and a lyric steeped in youthful ennui and Gen X disillusion, were the main ingredients that conspired to make a 90s grunge classic.
But over the past few years, a new component to Smells Like Teen Spirit’s magical alchemy has been proposed, with Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan claiming that the song ripped off his guitar sound.
This is a somewhat recent development in the long-running saga between the two bands. At the time that Nirvana existed and Kurt Cobain was alive, there was always a bit of needle between their camp and that of the Pumpkins.
It seemed to be down to a few things: that they shared a producer in Butch Vig, that Courtney Love had gone out with Billy Corgan before dumping him for Cobain, and that, let’s not forget, they were all young, ambitious and in rock bands. There was probably no shortage of egos floating round.
It’s only over the past few years, though, that Corgan has started to introduce the idea that he should be credited with Teen Spirit’s muscular, explosive guitar sound.
The back story to his claim comes down to the fact that when Vig worked with Smashing Pumpkins on their 1991 debut Gish, the producer's focus was on building the sound around Jimmy Chamberlin’s powerhouse drums with Vig happy to let Corgan take the lead on the guitar sonics. “Butch left the guitar department to me, like, ‘I don’t understand what you’re doing over there, you do your thing but I’m focused on rhythm and propulsion’,” Corgan said in an interview with US YouTuber and producer Rick Beato two years ago. Vig, Corgan said, was his group’s first real producer to the point that him and his bandmates jokingly called him ‘dad’.
But Corgan remembers the moment when ‘dad’ got the call to go and join a new family. “I was at Smart Studios the day Butch got the Nirvana job for Nevermind,” Corgan recounted, explaining that Vig was originally meant to co-produce Nirvana’s second record alongside an older, more experienced producer who dropped out, leaving Vig to oversee the record’s creation on his own. “We were very close to Butch and Butch bangs off to do what became Nevermind,” he said.
Soon after Vig had completed work on Nevermind, he was hanging out with Corgan and asked the Smashing Pumpkins frontman if he wanted to hear the new Nirvana record.
“He’s got a boombox, he presses it and it’s Teen Spirit and as the sun is going down on a beautiful Wisconsin summer day, I had two reactions,” Corgan remembered. The first was that Teen Spirit’s indelible riff reminded him of the chord sequence to Boston’s More Than A Feeling. The second was ‘hold on, I recognise that guitar sound’.
“When the song kicked in, I looked at Butch and said, ‘You ripped up off my guitar sound, motherfucker’," Corgan said. "He was like, ‘I guess I did’, because everything he took into that was stuff I taught him. Butch didn’t need me to teach him how to mic up a cabinet but the way I would layer guitars, Butch was like, ‘I’ll take that’. So now, Nirvana is on the radio every 18 seconds and every time I hear the guitar I’m like, ‘There’s my guitar sound’.”
It caused some very complicated feelings at the time, he said. “It was a bit of sibling rivalry, to use the term loosely, and our guy is now the number one rock producer in the world, literally overnight,” he said, adding that the Pumpkins were also with Vig the night he found out Nevermind had gone to Number One. “We were having an Italian dinner in Madison, Wisconsin, we literally toasted Butch Vig, ‘Congratulations, you’re the number one producer in the world’. If you go back a couple of years, we met on a Wisconsin street, he’s Butch Vig the nobody and we’re the Smashing Pumpkins, we’re nobody. In that short time, we have a major label deal, we have the biggest selling independent album of all time and now he’s Butch Vig, the big rock producer. It was like, ‘How do we navigate this new thing?’.”
Corgan went to say that he thinks the fact Vig stuck with the Pumpkins – together, they would make the record that would become their classic second album Siamese Dream - at a point when he was the hottest rock producer in the world and getting offers left, right and centre came down to Vig’s love for the band.
“Butch loves us and loved us and I think the way he repaid his love to us was ‘I’m gonna make sure you guys get that opportunity, I’m gonna go all the way’,” Corgan stated. “It makes me emotional because I get it now as an adult in a way that I wouldn’t as a child, ‘I’m gonna give you everything I have including the gravitas of my buzz, I’m gonna make sure the Pumpkins get across the line too’. It’s very emotional when I look back on it now because I realise he did us a good deed.”
An act of loyalty, perhaps, that means Corgan can let him off on the supposed borrowing of his guitar sound on …Teen Spirit, even if no-one else thinks they sound the same apart from Billy Corgan himself.
