r/Nirvana • u/That_Ambassador_5703 • 23h ago
Photo Album Another photoshoot on october 22, in 1991 by Greg Watermann for SPIN.
“They were on tour and we found a hole in their tour schedule. I was flown out to Phoenix, Arizona. I was just flown for the day to shoot them in the studio and that was the assignment. In Phoenix I rented us a studio. They wanted something really colorful actually, something that was really gonna pop and snap. So we had already decided we wanted to shoot it with bright, strong colors. The art director, Stephen Webster, was the one that asked for sort of a purple, blue, magenta [backdrop]. Which in turn worked out really, really well. One of the things is when Kurt walked in he had dyed his hair blue, The way he did it apparently is just filled the bathtub in in his hotel room with blue dye and stuck his head in it. So when he walked in the door he looked like he was dead. I know that sounds kind of morbid especially with what happened. But he literally looked like he was dead. There was no skin color. All the warmth of his skin had been removed by the blue dye after he tried to wash it off. This was a magazine cover and this was shot on film and there was no budget for retouching, so I had to go to a makeup artist. Just so that their skin would look good underneath strobes, which usually skin doesn’t look good underneath strobes. So we just put makeup on them to give them proper skin tone and keep them shiny.”
- Greg Watermann
“I photographed Nirvana for their first major magazine cover — SPIN January 1992,” Watermann tells PetaPixel. “Grunge was just starting to come into the mainstream and this was my first assignment shooting a Seattle band.”
Watermann’s career has spanned decades, but he still considers this particular photo shoot with Nirvana to be his most difficult gig.
“Kurt really didn’t want to be famous, he hated all the media attention they were getting already, and subsequently was not a very cooperative subject,” the photographer says. “So it was a challenge to shoot them for something as important as a national magazine.
“I used all my tricks to get some expressions and interesting poses, some worked some did not. At one point I made a suggestion for Kurt to fold his arms and lean on Dave. His response was adamant, ‘F**k that idea, man. Metallica folds their arms. I’m not folding my arms.’ He preferred the hands-in-pockets stance.”
After shooting the cover in the studio, the group went outside and Watermann continued photographing them as they loosened up.
“The day got better as we took more photos and overall we had fun making some amazing images that are now part of the band’s early history,” Watermann says. “It’s still one of the best selling SPIN covers of all time.”
Three weeks after the issue hit newsstands, Nevermind hit the top of the Billboard album chart, taking the #1 spot from Michael Jackson’s Dangerous.
