Butch Vig is perhaps best known as a succesful producer who worked with acts like Chainsaw Kittens, Depeche Mode, Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Soul Asylum, Smashing Pumpkins and U2. He is co-owner/co-founder/producer of Smart Studios and also works as a sound engineer. However, Butch Vig also knows how to hit the skins right. As a drummer he played with Spooner, Fire Town and Garbage. In the latter band he played along percussionist Pauli Ryan and Clyde Stubblefield.



Butch Vig was born in 1957 in Viroqua, Wisconsin, USA as Bryan David Vigorson. His hometown consisted of Norwegian farmers. In fact Butch's great-grandparents were from Norway.



Bryan's father was the town doctor. He is also responsible for Bryan's nickname. Since Bryan was two years old he used to cut his son's hair when his hair became too long.

"My father used to shave my head to a 'butch' haircut every two weeks. Since then, everyone called me that - and it's stuck."

His father often worked with motorcycle crash victims and therefore he was concerned about the dangers of his son getting a motorcycle. To scare him off he sometimes took Butch to the emergency room so he could see the wounds of the motorcycle-crash victims. However as soon as Butch got old enough he bought an old Crushman motorcycle, which he often rode to school.



Butch's mother, Betty, was a music teacher and she taught him to play the piano by the time he was in 6th grade. However one day he watched the Smothers Brothers on TV, where he saw The Who play.

"They totally smashed their gear up, and I thought, I've gotta do that too. After I saw Keith Moon, the piano was too wimpy. I bugged my parents until they got me a little Sears drumset, which I destroyed in about six months trying to be like Moon. He's still one of my favourite drummers, mostly because of the feel and abandon he brought to all those great Who records."

Then Butch joined his first band called The Schlits, named after the front man, Kevin Schlit, but the group lasted only one gig. The next band he joined was called Eclipse. Its singer was known as Bob "Worm Boy" Christianson. He earned his nickname because he would eat anything on a bet. They played a bunch of crazy covers, but they only had one original song.



Butch was interested in music, but when he was offered tickets to a Jimi Hendrix gig, he went to a Steppenwolf concert instead because he didn't know Hendrix. However he was influenced by this concert. The band was taking drugs and whipping the stage with a chain during the show. Another of his spare time activities was taking neighbours' cars for joyrides and returning them intact before sunrise.



After graduating from high school, Butch took two years of medical school at the University of Madison but dropped out to play drums in Spooner. This band was lead by Doug Erikson.

Later Butch attended two years of film school and became interested in writing electronic soundtracks for his arty films. He did the special effects and synthesized the sounds. He shot 16mm films, which he describes as "abstract, arty, very unwatchable." He also contributed soundtracks to many low-budget films, including the B-movie 'Slumber Party massacre'. In film school he met Steve Marker, who had bought a four-track with money he earned from a summer of mowing lawns. When the bandmembers heard about this, Steve started to record for them.



At the University of Wisconsin he started and chaired the Madison Roxy Music Fan Club. The members would gather for 'Roxythons', where people would talk and listen to Brian Ferry for two days straight without sleeping.



After "doing really crude demos" in Steve's basement, Butch and Steve decided to set up a Studio, and in 1983 they founded Smart Studios. They hired some space in an old warehouse and bought a Tescam eight-track and a Peavey 12-channel board with a $3,000 loan from Butch's parents. They glued egg cartons to the wall and produced and recorded local punk and hardcore bands' singles for $100.





They didn't have any previous experience, but they handled it as well as they could.

"We engineered, produced, tuned drums, made the coffee, and propped up the guitarist if he passed out. Forced to work with severe limitations and not knowing the correct way, we had to figure it out as we went along. A lot of bands wanted to come in and record everything pretty much au naturel. They didn't have any budgets, so it forced us to learn to do stuff really fast, especially since we didn't really have any kind of gear. We had to at least try to get the drums tuned well and move the mikes around the room to make sure everything sounded pretty good. Once it was on tape there wasn't a whole lot we could do with it."

Every cent the pair made out of recording was invested in additional gear for the studio.

"We'd been trying to collect a lot of older analogue gear, like old pre-amps and old guitar amps, just because we liked the old funky tube stuff."

On the days the studio was free or when bands cancelled studio sessions, they would record their own material.

"We would go in and just tinker around with stuff. At that time we sounded kind of all over the place. We would basically decide that one night we were going to record some punk music and we'd program a drum machine to and run it at mega-speed - like 175bpm or something - put it through an amp so it was really distorted, then I would play fuzz bass and Steve would overdub a bunch of guitars."

At this point they just experimented with the music and the instruments.

"We'd record a whole bunch of songs in one night, and that became our first band, Rectal Drip. We also think because we did so much work with punk bands, we got bored with it. Any chance we had we wanted to do something different. We didn't want to get stuck in a niche."

They only had one cassette with 10 songs each under a minute. Butch did the vocals, Steve did the guitar and a drum machine was processed through an amp and a compressor to totally shred it out.

"The rules were that every song had to be under a minute long, have one radical tempo change, and be recorded in under an hour."

Around 1989 Butch was very busy producing and working with labels such as Touch And Go, Mammoth, Slash, Twin Tone and Sub-Pop. Instead of $1,000 - $5,000 project, they were commanding $10,000 projects. The first one was the Smashing Pumpkins' debut LP 'Gish', which enabled them to afford their first 24-track machine and an old Harrison mixing board originally build for The Osmonds.

"I don't think they ever used it. It was in great shape and we got it for 9,000 bucks. They'd even signed it on the inside."

Soon after he was in charge of his biggest job as a producer ever, when he in April 1990 started working with Nirvana. He was recording a demo in with Nirvana, whose label was Sub-Pop. However, when Geffen signed them during the recording, the label wanted a different producer, but the band insisted on using Butch.



Krist Novoselic was very happy about working with Butch: "Butch was easy to work with. Laid back and really attentive to what's going on. He works hard but he doesn't work the band hard."



Actually the version of Polly, which ended up on 'Nevermind' was recorded in Smart Studios during the demo recording.

"Polly was done with a really cheap acoustic five string guitar that Kurt had. It had this plunky sound. The original strings were still on it. He never changed them, and he never tuned the guitar either. It was down about a step and a half from E."

The rest of the album was recorded at Sound City Studios, LA.



The initial budget was $65,000, but they ended up using $130,000, which isn't a lot compared to other major-label recordings.

"Kurt was enjoying himself when we made that record. That was before they got really big, and they had kind of a casual attitude toward making the record. There wasn't a lot of pressure - I felt more pressure making that record than they did. 'Cause it was really the first major-label record that I made."

Although Butch has gained a lot of recognition doing this album he prefers not to talk about it.

"It affected so many people and changed the music business but I don't want to get caught up in that. To try to put a perspective on it is scary."

Butch also began doing remixing jobs around 1992 for bands such as Nine Inch Nails and House of Pain.

"We'd erase all the tracks except for the vocals and record all new instrumentation - we'd put drum loops down, write new guitar parts, add new weird sampled sounds. Over a period of time, we started getting a kind of focus on that - we wanted to have hooks in them, we didn't want them to be purely dance remixes. That inspired us to start a band. We felt there weren't a lot of rules and we could bring various elements of hip-hop, techno, punk rock and pop and throw them all in the same melting pot."

Then they started experimenting with songs for what would become garbage material.

"The success of some of those records that I produced opened a lot of doors for me and we just started writing songs together and thought it would be cool if we actually did a band."

The early working process was unorganized and experimenting. Perhaps they were inspired by the remixing jobs.

"We started jamming and coming up with loose ideas. We were pretty much sampling ourselves. We would play for a couple of hours, then take a break, come back and listen to it and find two bars we thought were cool, and then sample and loop them. Then we'd start playing on top of that again - switch instruments and try to come up with something interesting."

The name 'Ggarbage' was introduced when Pauli Ryan heard some of the noise samples for the Nine Inch Nails remix that Butch was working on around 1994. He said, "this fucking shit sounds like garbage to me." And Butch replied, "yeah, but at some point I'm going to turn this garbage into a song." Later Pauli Ryan got to play percussion on the debut album.



They decided that they needed a female singer to front the band. Steve watched a band called Angelfish on MTV. They contacted the singer, Shirley Manson, and they first met in 1994 in London on the day Curt Cobain died.

"Steve saw Shirley, asked her to join and we were just gonna do it temporarily. We did it all low-key, there were very little media - at least when we were making the record. So when it came out we went out and did interviews everywhere, something like 5000 interviews on the first record, and we went to play punk clubs all over the place. The success of the first record took two years to happen, it was very grass roots, very traditional the way we did it. We had to go and find an audience."

Since then the 'garbage' project has turned into a success that takes up most of Butch's time.



(Source: www.garbage.suite.dk)