I can still remember the first time I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Nirvana. That was 18 years ago, and I was a college freshman. The first few bars of the song immediately turned me into a convert to alternative rock. Nirvana changed the way I listened to music, and I know it was also the same with many people during that time. Nevermind brought alternative rock to a large mainstream audience. Nevermind, which was released in September 1991 by Geffen Records, was Nirvana’s second studio album and major debut. The album has sold more than 10 million copies in the US and became number 1 on the Billboard charts.
Now, three of Nirvana’s albums (Nevermind, In Utero, and MTV Unplugged) will be re-released on 180-gram audiophile quality vinyl by an American company, Original Recordings Group (ORG). Nevermind, the album that catapulted the band to super stardom in 1991, will come out first. This was announced on March 21 at South By Southwest by Monti Olson, senior Vice President of Universal Music Publishing Group/Interscope Records and founder of Original Recordings Group. According to Olson, the albums were remastered by the award-winning American audio engineer Bernie Grundman.
“To our knowledge this is the first time ‘Unplugged’ has ever come out on vinyl. They might have done a limited promotional thing but I doubt it,” Olson has told Billboard Magazine. But Nevermind, In Utero and MTV Unplugged were remastered and re-issued on 180-gram vinyl in 2008 by Universal Music.
Vinyl recordings are not for everyone, and it’s is not a mainstream commodity; it is for a niche audience– the collectors and those who have the ear for the “real” sound of music. But Olson said that the vinyl business is growing because “more and more people are coming in with a curiosity about buying record albums. They are the best sounding records on the market.”
The company that first signed Nirvana, SubPop, also is working to make a vinyl release of the band’s first studio album, Bleach.
