Nirvana - Love Buzz single [Full]

Single Name: Love Buzz
B-side: Big Cheese
Released: November 1988

Impressed by the "Dale Crover demo", Jonathan Poneman offered the band a chance to record a single for Sub Pop. Poneman liked their cover of Love Buzz by Shocking Blue and felt that it would make a strong single. While Kurt Cobain would have preferred an original song as the band's first offering, he eventually came around to the idea. So the band returned to Reciprocal Recording that summer, complete with a new drummer, Chad Channing, and a new name, NIRVANA.

The first session began with Blandest, then considered as a B-side. The recording didn't turn out too well, however. "It wasn't very tight", says producer, Jack Endino. "It was kind of sloppy. It was the first song of the day. Nobody was warmed up, and it just didn't sound that good." Blandest was followed by the first takes of Love Buzz and Big Cheese, plus early versions of Mr Moustache, Sifting, and Blew.

Endino favored Big Cheese over Blandest and urged the band to consider it for the B-side. "It is a much stronger song and they readily agreed", he says. "It wasn't called Blandest for nothing! It was also not a very good take of Blandest. So we went over it later by mutual agreement, expecting to do a much better take, which somehow they never got around to doing." "[Blandest] was very flat and very dry with no added ideas to it", explains Channing. "We all agreed that the song obviously wasn't ready yet." A new version of Spank Thru was subsequently recorded over Blandest, and a second take of Big Cheese recorded over the first version of Love Buzz. A third take of Love Buzz was also recorded over the early version of Blew and part of the just-recorded Floyd The Barber, but it was determined that take two of Love Buzz had been the best, so no vocal was laid down.

The second takes of Love Buzz and Big Cheese were then mixed for the proposed single. But, upon hearing the mixes, Poneman decided that the vocals on Love Buzz needed to be re-recorded. "Jonathan didn't like the first vocal take for some reason and asked me to ask Kurt to re-sing it", says Endino. Cobain duly returned to the studio on July 16 to cut a new vocal, which Endino then mixed, though he admits to being hard-pressed to tell the difference! Take two of Love Buzz, with Cobain's re-recorded vocal, is what eventually made the record.

The single mix of Love Buzz features a 10-second sound collage intro (originally 30-seconds long, but cut to 10 at Sub Pop's behest) and another sound collage dubbed into the instrumental break. "It's just barely audible underneath the guitar noise", says Endino. "We had to do it live when we mixed because we had used up all eight tracks. So when we were mixing we had to have this cassette going through the mixing board along with the eight tracks from the eight-track machine. And when we got to the middle part of the song, he had to reach over and press 'play' on the cassette deck right at the right time, every time I went through the mix. So we had a sort of virtual ninth track!"

Later, when the time came to remix Love Buzz for the album (Endino: "the single mix ain't that great"), Cobain forgot to bring the cassette, so the sound collages are absent on that release.

Cobain would later criticize Love Buzz as sounding too lightweight: "We just couldn't get a good sound out of it", he told NIRVANA biographer, Michael Azerrad. "It sounded really clean and just didn't have any low end. I think it's the wimpiest recording we've ever done."

This single launched the 'Sub Pop Singles Club'. Limited to 1000 handnumbered (in red ink) copies, in a fold-over sleave, on black vinyl.

(0:00) 1. Love Buzz
(3:45) 2. Big Cheese