Video Editing: Celia Gorman. Video Footage & Animation: Lyle Chamberlain, Piasecki AircraftAn autonomous helicopter picks a landing site: See how the system sees and evaluates the terrain below.
We’re standing on the edge of the hot Arizona tarmac, radio in hand, holding our breath as the helicopter passes 50 meters overhead. We watch as the precious sensor on its blunt nose scans every detail of the area, the test pilot and engineer looking down with coolly professional curiosity as they wait for the helicopter to decide where to land. They’re just onboard observers. The helicopter itself is in charge here.
Traveling at 40 knots, it banks to the right. We smile: The aircraft has made its decision, probably setting up to do a U-turn and land on a nearby clear area. Suddenly, the pilot’s voice crackles over the radio: “I have it!” That means he’s pushing the button that disables the automatic controls, switching back to manual flight. Our smiles fade. “The aircraft turned right,” the pilot explains, “but the test card said it would turn left.”
Photo: Sebastian SchererThe sensor technology under the nose of Boeing’s Unmanned Little Bird (ULB) helicopter maps terrain, plans routes, discerns safe landing sites, and avoids obstacles—all by itself.
The machine would have landed safely all on its own. But the pilot could be excused for questioning its, uh, judgment. For unlike the autopilot that handles the airliner for a good portion of most commercial flights, the robotic autonomy package we’ve installed on Boeing’s Unmanned Little Bird (ULB) helicopter makes decisions that are usually reserved for the pilot alone. The ULB’s standard autopilot typically flies a fixed route or trajectory, but now, for the first time on a full-size helicopter, a robotic system is sensing its environment and deciding where to go and how to react to chance occurrences.
It all comes out of a program sponsored by the Telemedicine & Advanced Technology Research Center, which paired our skills, as roboticists from Carnegie Mellon University, with those of aerospace experts from Piasecki Aircraft and Boeing. The point is to bridge the gap between the mature procedures of aircraft design and the burgeoning world of autonomous vehicles. Aerospace, meet robotics.
The need is great, because what we want to save aren’t the salaries of pilots but their lives and the lives of those they serve. Helicopters are extraordinarily versatile, used by soldiers and civilians alike to work in tight spots and unprepared areas. We rely on them to rescue people from fires, battlefields, and other hazardous locales. The job of medevac pilot, which originated six decades ago to save soldiers’ lives, is now one of the most dangerous jobs in America, with 113 deaths for every 100 000 employees. Statistically, only working on a fishing boat is riskier.
These facts raise the question: Why are helicopters such a small part of the boom in unmanned aircraft? Even in the U.S. military, out of roughly 840 large unmanned aircraft, fewer than 30 are helicopters. In Afghanistan, the U.S. Marines have used two unmanned Lockheed Martin K-Max helicopters to deliver thousands of tons of cargo, and the Navy has used some of its 20-odd shipborne Northrop Grumman unmanned Fire Scout helicopters to patrol for pirates off the coast of Africa.
Photos: Left: Northrop Grumman Corp.; Above: Lockheed MartinThe U.S. Navy’s carrier-based copter, the Northrop Grumman Fire Scout [left], can fly itself onto and off of a moving deck. The U.S. Marine Corps’s K-Max ferries cargo to soldiers, dangling a “sling load” to work around its weakness in landing on rough ground. To rescue people, however, a robocopter needs better eyes and judgment.
So what’s holding back unmanned helicopters? What do unmanned airplanes have that helicopters don’t?
It’s fine for an unmanned plane to fly blind or by remote control; it takes off, climbs, does its work at altitude, and then lands, typically at an airport, under close human supervision. A helicopter, however, must often go to areas where there are either no people at all or no specially trained people—for example, to drop off cargo at an unprepared area, pick up casualties on rough terrain, or land on a ship. These are the scenarios in which current technology is most prone to fail, because unmanned aircraft have no common sense: They do exactly as they are told.
If you absentmindedly tell one to fly through a tree, it will attempt to do it. One experimental unmanned helicopter nearly landed on a boulder and had to be saved by the backup pilot. Another recently crashed during the landing phase. To avoid such embarrassments, the K-Max dangles cargo from a rope as a “sling load” so that the helicopter doesn’t have to land when making a delivery. Such work-arounds throw away much of the helicopter’s inherent advantage. If we want these machines to save lives, we must give them eyes, ears, and a modicum of judgment.
In other words, an autonomous system needs perception, planning, and control. It must sense its surroundings and interpret them in a useful way. Next, it must decide which actions to perform in order to achieve its objectives safely. Finally, it must control itself so as to implement those decisions.
A cursory search on YouTube will uncover videos of computer-controlled miniature quadcopters doing flips, slipping vertically through slots in a wall, and assembling structures. What these craft are missing, though, is perception: They perform inside the same kind of motion-capture lab that Hollywood uses to record actors’ movements for computer graphics animations. The position of each object is precisely known. The trajectories have all been computed ahead of time, then checked for errors by software engineers.
If you give such a quadcopter onboard sensors and put it outdoors, away from the rehearsed dance moves of the lab, it becomes much more hesitant. Not only will it sense its environment rather poorly, but its planning algorithms will barely react in time when confronted with an unusual development.
True, improvements in hardware are helping small quadcopters approach full autonomy, and somewhat larger model helicopters are already quite far along in that quest. For example, several groups have shown capabilities such as automated landing, obstacle avoidance, and mission planning on the Yamaha RMax, a 4-meter machine originally sold for remote-control crop dusting in Japan’s hilly farmlands. But this technology doesn’t scale up well, mainly because the sensors can’t see far enough ahead to manage the higher speeds of full-size helicopters. Furthermore, existing software can’t account for the aerodynamic limitations of larger craft.
Another problem with the larger helicopters is that they don’t actually like to hover. A helicopter typically lands more like an airplane than most people realize, making a long, descending approach at a shallow angle at speeds of 40 knots (75 kilometers per hour) or more and then flaring to a hover and vertical descent. This airplane-like profile is necessary because hovering sometimes requires more power than the engines can deliver. The need for fast flying has a lot to do with the challenges of perception and planning. We knew that making large, autonomous helicopters practical would require sensors with longer ranges and faster measurement rates than had ever been used on an autonomous rotary aircraft, as well as software optimized to make quick decisions. To solve the first problem, we began with ladar—laser detection and ranging—a steadily improving technology and one that’s already widely used in robotic vehicles.
Ladar measures the distance to objects by first emitting a tightly focused laser pulse and then measuring how long it takes for any reflections to return. It creates a 3-D map of the surroundings by pulsing 100 000 times per second, steering the beam to many different points with mirrors, and combining the results computationally.
The ladar system we constructed for the ULB uses a “nodding” scanner. A “fast-axis” mirror scans the beam in a horizontal line up to 100 times per second while another mirror nods up and down much more slowly. To search for a landing zone, the autonomous system points the ladar down and uses the fast-axis line as a “push broom,” surveying the terrain as the helicopter flies over it. When descending nearer to a possible landing site, the system points the ladar forward and nods up and down, thus scanning for utility wires or other low-lying obstacles.
Because the helicopter is moving, the ladar measures every single point from a slightly different position and angle. Normally, vibration would blur these measurements, but we compensate for that problem by matching the scanned information with the findings of an inertial navigation system, which uses GPS, accelerometers, and gyros to measure position within centimeters and angles within thousandths of a degree. That way, we can properly place each ladar-measured reflection on an internal map.
Illustration: Emily CooperTopography for Robots: The unmanned helicopter can land in an unprepared site to evacuate a patient. Using a ladar system, the craft can construct maps, select landing sites, and generate safe approaches to them, giving itself a fallback option in case the situation changes.
To put this stream into a form the planning software can use, the system constantly updates two low-level interpretations. One is a high-resolution, two-dimensional mesh that encodes the shape of the terrain for landing; the other is a medium-resolution, three-dimensional representation of all the things the robot wants to avoid hitting during its descent. Off-the-shelf surveying software can create such maps, but it may take hours back in the lab to process the data. Our software creates and updates these maps essentially as fast as the data arrive.
The system evaluates the mesh map by continually updating a list of numerically scored potential landing places. The higher the score, the more promising the landing site. Each site has a set of preferred final descent paths as well as clear escape routes should the helicopter need to abort the attempt (for example, if something gets in the way). The landing zone evaluator makes multiple passes on the data, refining the search criteria as it finds the best locations. The first pass quickly eliminates areas that are too steep or rough. The second pass places a virtual 3-D model of the helicopter in multiple orientations on the mesh map of the ground to check for rotor and tail clearance, good landing-skid contact, and the predicted tilt of the body on landing.
In the moments before the landing, the autonomous system uses these maps to generate and evaluate hundreds of potential trajectories that could bring the helicopter from its current location down to a safe landing. The trajectory includes a descending final approach, a flare—the final pitch up that brings the helicopter into a hover—and the touchdown. Each path is evaluated for how close it comes to objects, how long it would take to fly, and the demands it would place on the aircraft’s engine and physical structure. The planning system picks the best combination of landing site and trajectory, and the path is sent to the control software, which actually flies the helicopter. Once a landing site is chosen, the system continuously checks its plan against new data coming from the ladar and makes adjustments if necessary.
That’s how it worked in simulations. The time had come to take our robocopter out for a spin. So it was that we found ourselves on a sunny spring afternoon in Mesa, Ariz. Even after our system had safely landed itself more than 10 times, our crew chief was skeptical. He had spent decades as a flight-test engineer at Boeing and had seen many gadgets and schemes come and go in the world of rotorcraft. So far, the helicopter had landed itself only in wide-open spaces, and he wasn’t convinced that our system was doing anything that required intelligence. But today was different: Today he would match wits with the robot pilot.
Our plan was to send the ULB in as a mock casualty evacuation helicopter. We’d tell it to land in a cleared area and then have it do so again after we’d cluttered up the area. The first pass went without a hitch: The ULB flew west to east as it surveyed the landing area, descended in a U-turn, completed a picture-perfect approach, and landed in an open area close to where the “casualty” was waiting to be evacuated. Then our crew chief littered the landing area with forklift pallets, plastic boxes, and a 20-meter-high crane.
This time, after the flyover the helicopter headed north instead of turning around. The test pilot shook his head in disappointment and prepared to push the button on his stick to take direct control. But the engineer seated next to him held her hand up. After days of briefings on the simulator, she had begun to get a feel for the way the system “thought,” and she realized that it might be trying to use an alternative route that would give the crane a wider berth. And indeed, as the helicopter descended from the north, it switched the ladar scanner from downward to forward view, checking for any obstacles such as power lines that it wouldn’t have seen in the east-west mapping pass. It did what it needed to do to land near the casualty, just as it had been commanded.
This landing was perfect, except for one thing: The cameras had been set up ahead of time to record an approach from the east rather than the north. We’d missed it! So our ground crew went out and added more clutter to try to force the helicopter to come in from the east but land further away from the casualty. Again the helicopter approached from the north and managed to squeeze into a tighter space nearby, keeping itself close to the casualty. Finally, the ground crew drove out onto the landing area, intent on blocking all available spaces and forcing the machine to land from the east. Once again the wily robot made the approach from the north and managed to squeeze into the one small (but safe) parking spot the crew hadn’t been able to block. The ULB had come up with perfectly reasonable solutions—solutions we had deliberately tried to stymie. As our crew chief commented, “You could actually tell it was making decisions.”
That demonstration program ended three years ago. Since then we’ve launched a spin-off company, Near Earth Autonomy, which is developing sensors and algorithms for perception for two U.S. Navy programs. One of these programs, the Autonomous Aerial Cargo/Utility System (AACUS), aims to enable many types of autonomous rotorcraft to deliver cargo and pick up casualties at unprepared landing sites; it must be capable of making “hot” landings, that is, high-speed approaches without precautionary overflight of the landing zone. The other program will develop technology to launch and recover unmanned helicopters from ships.
It took quite a while for our technology to win the trust of our own professional test team. We must clear even higher hurdles before we can get nonspecialists to agree to work with autonomous aircraft in their day-to-day routines. With that goal in view, the AACUS program calls for simple and intuitive interfaces to allow nonaviator U.S. Marines to call in for supplies and work with the robotic aircraft.
In the future, intelligent aircraft will take over the most dangerous missions for air supply and casualty extraction, saving lives and resources. Besides replacing human pilots in the most dangerous jobs, intelligent systems will guide human pilots through the final portions of difficult landings, for instance by sensing and avoiding low-hanging wires or tracking a helipad on the pitching deck of a ship. We are also working on rear-looking sensors that will let a pilot keep constant tabs on the dangerous rotor at the end of a craft’s unwieldy tail.
Even before fully autonomous flight is ready for commercial aviation, many of its elements will be at work behind the scenes, making life easier and safer, just as they are doing now in fixed-wing planes and even passenger cars. Robotic aviation will not come in one fell swoop—it will creep up on us.
About the Authors
Lyle Chamberlain is a founder of Near Earth Autonomy and Sebastian Scherer is a Systems Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, which are helping the U.S. Navy develop an autonomous flight-control package for helicopters.
TWO YEARS AGO I published a book highly critical of religion, "The End of Faith." In it, I argued that the world's major religions are genuinely incompatible, inevitably cause conflict and now prevent the emergence of a viable, global civilization. In response, I have received many thousands of letters and e-mails from priests, journalists, scientists, politicians, soldiers, rabbis, actors, aid workers, students -- from people young and old who occupy every point on the spectrum of belief and nonbelief.
This has offered me a special opportunity to see how people of all creeds and political persuasions react when religion is criticized. I am here to report that liberals and conservatives respond very differently to the notion that religion can be a direct cause of human conflict.
This difference does not bode well for the future of liberalism.
Perhaps I should establish my liberal bone fides at the outset. I'd like to see taxes raised on the wealthy, drugs decriminalized and homosexuals free to marry. I also think that the Bush administration deserves most of the criticism it has received in the last six years -- especially with respect to its waging of the war in Iraq, its scuttling of science and its fiscal irresponsibility.
But my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world -- specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.
On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.
This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that "liberals are soft on terrorism." It is, and they are.
A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world -- for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.
This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims. But we are absolutely at war with those who believe that death in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered for apostasy.
Unfortunately, such religious extremism is not as fringe a phenomenon as we might hope. Numerous studies have found that the most radicalized Muslims tend to have better-than-average educations and economic opportunities.
Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb -- and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism.
At its most extreme, liberal denial has found expression in a growing subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe that the atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own government. A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspect that the federal government "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East;" 16% believe that the twin towers collapsed not because fully-fueled passenger jets smashed into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged them to explode.
Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of Western civilization. There are books, films and conferences organized around this phantasmagoria, and they offer an unusually clear view of the debilitating dogma that lurks at the heart of liberalism: Western power is utterly malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given sufficient economic opportunities.
I don't know how many more engineers and architects need to blow themselves up, fly planes into buildings or saw the heads off of journalists before this fantasy will dissipate. The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world's Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization and yet it is regularly misconstrued, ignored or obfuscated by liberals.
Given the mendacity and shocking incompetence of the Bush administration -- especially its mishandling of the war in Iraq -- liberals can find much to lament in the conservative approach to fighting the war on terror. Unfortunately, liberals hate the current administration with such fury that they regularly fail to acknowledge just how dangerous and depraved our enemies in the Muslim world are.
Recent condemnations of the Bush administration's use of the phrase "Islamic fascism" are a case in point. There is no question that the phrase is imprecise -- Islamists are not technically fascists, and the term ignores a variety of schisms that exist even among Islamists -- but it is by no means an example of wartime propaganda, as has been repeatedly alleged by liberals.
In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal.
Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise.
We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.
Increasingly, Americans will come to believe that the only people hard-headed enough to fight the religious lunatics of the Muslim world are the religious lunatics of the West. Indeed, it is telling that the people who speak with the greatest moral clarity about the current wars in the Middle East are members of the Christian right, whose infatuation with biblical prophecy is nearly as troubling as the ideology of our enemies. Religious dogmatism is now playing both sides of the board in a very dangerous game.
While liberals should be the ones pointing the way beyond this Iron Age madness, they are rendering themselves increasingly irrelevant. Being generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they aren't.
The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.
To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.
As fellow troopers aid wounded buddies, a paratrooper of A Company, 101st Airborne, guides a medical evacuation helicopter through the jungle foliage to pick up casualties during a five-day patrol of an area southwest of Hue, South Vietnam, April 1968.
This photograph is featured on the cover of the Associated Press' new book 'Vietnam: The Real War' (Abrams, Oct. 2013).
Like the soldiers he was photographing, Art Greenspon was in his 20s when he traveled to Vietnam to document the war. After five months in-country, Greenspon went on a two-day patrol with soldiers in the A Shau valley, just inside the Laotian border. There, after an ambush and subsequent firefight, Greenspon made a photograph that David Douglas Duncan, the famous TIME-LIFE war photographer, lauded as the “best picture yet of the Vietnam War.”
One week after that fateful patrol, Greenspon was wounded when a spent shell hit him in the face. Greenspon returned to the U.S., worked as a photographer for the The New YorkTimes, and transitioned to a successful career in finance.
But he wasn’t done. At the age of 69, Greenspon earned a masters degree in clinical social work with the goal of helping veterans. “I know how hard it is to recover from PTSD, trauma and addictions,” he says. “In the final years of my life, I am dedicated to helping troops recover from the horrors of war.”
TIME asked photographer Peter van Agtmael to speak with Greenspon about his career. Van Agtmael, age 32, has spent the past seven years documenting the United States’ extended conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as their affects back home. Their edited conversation appears below.
Peter van Agtmael: Tell us about your background. Why did you become a photographer?
Art Greenspon: My father had an old Zeiss Ikon he brought back from World War II. I loved it, but he would never let me use it. Instead he bought me a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye. I have fond memories of taking over the downstairs bathroom making contact prints under the red light we screwed in above the sink.
While I was working at WCBS-TV in New York I drove the old-time cameramen crazy asking them how their cameras worked and why they were shooting this or that angle. I was more interested in what they were doing than in some of the bullshit stories I had to cover. I quit the glamour job in TV news and took one as a darkroom assistant in a small commercial studio paying sixty dollars a week. I was happy as a clam!
Why did you go to Vietnam? Tell me a little bit about your time there before taking the famous picture.
The biggest news story in the mid-Sixties was Vietnam. On the weekends, I’d go out into the streets to shoot the protest and the support-the-troops demonstrations — but I always seemed to come away with better snaps of the “Support Our Boys” folks.
Courtesy Art Greenspon
Greenspon in December 1967, in South Vietnam's Central Highlands
Every Memorial Day, my dad would take the whole family to see the parade in Bridgeport, Connecticut. His eyes would well up with tears every time an American flag went by. He obviously had been very moved by his own war experience and my brother and I had been raised to honor and respect our country and the men and women of the armed services. I had no strong personal feelings one way or the other on Vietnam at first, but I knew I would never find the “truth” at home. The truth was over there in Vietnam.
And Tim Page! He blew into my life, into everyone’s life, like a twister. Chain smoking, hard drinking, reefer madness personified. Sex, drugs and rock and roll — that was Page. And he liked my pictures! “Garspon” he nicknamed me. “You’ve got to go. I’ll introduce you to Bill Snead at UPI.” And Snead liked my pictures, too. “I can’t get you there” Snead told me. “But if you get to Saigon, you can string for us.”
I got $600 for my Volkswagen beetle, bought a one-way ticket to Saigon, got a 10-day tourist visa and set out to show the world “the truth” about Vietnam. I arrived on Christmas Day of 1967. I was too naive to be scared.
Bill Snead and some friends at CBS showed me the ropes. I spent a few weeks going out with various units without much success. But I turned in my film to Snead, and he bought three pictures, let me crash at the UPI barracks, and was OK with me taking the outs over to Horst Faas at AP. Faas bought another eight, so I was flush with $165 and a safe place to flop. And so it went. I would go north — Khe Sanh, Hue — come back with my film, sell pics, eat well, prowl the streets and alleys and then do it all over again. And I wasn’t alone. Page was there with Sean Flynn and Dana Stone and quite a cast of characters. As Mike Herr wrote in Dispatches, “Vietnam was what we had instead of a happy childhood.”
On the personal side, I was beginning to suffer. I was having more sleepless nights and intrusive thoughts of previous combat experiences. I would always sit with my back to a wall, and shudder at loud noises. These are all classic symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress. I had been covering lots of combat for three and a half months, and it was beginning to take a toll.
Under what circumstances did you take the picture? Can you tell me a little bit a bit about that day?
By April of 1968, I felt I had developed into an accomplished war photographer. I really enjoyed talking war and photography with Fass and Eddie Adams, and Larry Burrows from time to time. You need to understand that of the six hundred accredited journalists in country at the time, only about fifty of us went into the field on a regular basis. The rest got their stories at the military briefings, the ”five o’clock follies,” as we called them. Many newsmen earned their stripes from inside Saigon’s gin mills and whore houses. We all knew who had balls and who didn’t, who cared about the grunts and who didn’t. It was a camaraderie that I have never again experienced.
Book courtesy Associated Press/Abrams Books
'Vietnam: The Real War' (Abrams, Oct. 2013) features Greenspon's iconic photograph on the cover.
The U.S. military had been embarrassed by the first Tet offensive, and several divisions of NVA were operating freely just inside the Laotian border in the hills surrounding the A Shau valley. In mid-April, High Command decided to airlift nearly the entire First Air Cavalry Division into those hills to drive out the NVA. As I hustled out of my chopper with Dana Stone and some TV crews, I was expecting heavy fire. But nothing — nothing but wave after wave of choppers and a swarm of journalists and photographers from around the world. I didn’t make a picture.
I jumped on an empty slick [supply helicopter] and headed back to Quang Tri city. I felt awful. Biggest operation of the war, and I get nothing.
I found my way to a PIO [public information office] and they told me several battalions from the 101st and 173rd Airborne Divisions were acting as a blocking force to the southwest of Hue. The aviation battalion supporting them was reporting heavy contact. Best of all, there were no other journalists out there. They were flying in ammo on a regular basis, and I was welcome to hitch a ride. But they warned me the weather was very bad, so they couldn’t guarantee I could get out when I wanted. That was fine with me.
It was about four in the afternoon when I got on the ground. We never really landed. I had to jump about six feet after they kicked out the ammo. It hurt hitting the ground with a 30-pound pack. But the landing zone wasn’t hot, thank God.
I found the CO and he briefed me. Alpha company, where I had landed, had been experiencing intermittent contact for several days. Charlie company, on the other hand, had been in nearly constant contact for nearly two days. It was getting dark and Alpha company planned to move down through the valley of elephant grass and then up the opposite hill to link up with Charlie company. The company first sergeant wasn’t shy about telling his superiors he thought the whole idea of moving through elephant grass full of NVA in total darkness was both suicidal and dumb.
After discussion of the pros and cons, the CO decided against moving out in the darkness. We moved out at first light, in total fog. We went into the elephant grass, which made the visibility worse. The first sergeant [the man with his arms raised in the photo] said he knew we would be ambushed and he was just glad he wasn’t walking point. Suddenly, chaos everywhere. Somebody pushed me to the ground from behind and held me down. I tried to crawl inside my helmet which was my usual first reaction to close-in combat. The bullets were whizzing through the grass, and I squeezed off maybe eight shots. Nobody near me dared fire. We couldn’t see more than three feet in any direction. The NVA fire lasted a minute or two. And then nothing. We were in it now, but nobody knew how bad it was going to be.
The man walking point was killed and the whole lead squad was decimated. After a few minutes of walking forward I came to where the wounded were being treated. I raised my Leica but the medic put his hand up and shook his head. This was bad, too many dead, too much loss too soon. I walked on.
We linked up with Charlie company, which had suffered heavy casualties. Nearly half the company had been killed or wounded. They were low on ammo, short on food and water and needed medical supplies. I wandered around handing out the cans of fruit I always had stuffed in my pack. I must have passed up 25 good pictures that day while troops were getting to know and trust me.
“Hey, camera guy,” they told me. “You don’t have to be here. You’re nuts, man.” I took pictures they wanted me to take. Buddies arm in arm and head shots for the local newspapers.
The weather was awful. Low dense fog, rain showers. Battalion told us no supply or medical missions were possible until the weather broke. We were alone on our hilltop in the middle of division-sized NVA units.
It rained hard that night and nobody slept. I was having trouble keeping my cameras dry.
Our challenge was to get the dead and wounded out. About two in the afternoon it started to brighten and a resupply slick was able to make a brief visual on us. We got ammunition first and then some medical supplies, but no food or water.
Battalion told us to be ready for a lift out of some of the wounded the following morning if the weather was better. I had powered milk in hot water for dinner that night. I had given everything else away.
By the next morning the wounded were being moved to the new LZ. I was making pictures. As the first medevac chopper hovered overhead I saw the First Sergeant with his arms in the air. I saw the medic shouldering wounded and then I saw the kid on his back in the grass. I have got to get all this in one picture, I thought. My heart was pounding. Was 1/60 fast enough? Screw it. Shoot pictures. I got three frames off, and the moment was gone.
I knew what was in the camera, but when I went to wind back the film, I couldn’t. The film in my Nikon had become stuck to the pressure plate from all the moisture. My Leica was soaked, too, and I wasn’t sure what kind of pictures it was producing.
The weather closed in again. I had given all of my food away so I didn’t eat for two days. I wrapped my cameras in a damp towel and put them in my pack. I guarded that pack like a mother hen.
I flew out with the second chopper loaded with body bags. A kid headed out for R&R and a floor stacked with KIAs [killed in action]. War sucks.
In Saigon, I told Fass what I had but I wasn’t sure my exposures were correct. I described the lighting as best as I could and we decided to push the Tri-X three stops. It wasn’t enough to save the elephant grass ambush pictures, and most of the hometown portraits were too thin to print. I’m grateful for what I got, but I’m still a little sad for what I lost. Mine was no lucky picture.
You were wounded about a week later in an incident that killed the photographer Charles Eggleston. After you recovered, did you continue to work in Vietnam?
Courtesy Art Greenspon
Greenspon after being wounded on assignment for LIFE in May 1968.
On May 5, 1968, while on assignment for LIFE, I was shot in the face. A spent round which [likely] had just exited the hand of another photographer smacked into the left side of the bridge of my nose and burrowed its way into my left sinus cavity. The wound itself was not grave. The military surgeons took the round out in a dentist chair by breaking my cheekbone from inside my mouth. No facial scarring that way.
What nearly killed me was dysentery. They had to pack me in ice to lower my 106 fever. The cold made the pain in my face worse, but I kept it all inside. I was on a ward with GIs who had lost limbs and two who were in casts from head to toe.
Following my discharge, I tried to keep shooting, but my hands trembled so badly I couldn’t work my cameras. I knew it was time to get out.
LIFE paid my hospital bills and bought me a plane ticket home. The Vietnamese staff at the CBS bureau told me how to bribe my way through the exit visa process. I had been an illegal alien the whole time after my tourist visa had expired.
Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy
The promotional poster for the 1986 movie Platoonwas based upon Greenspon's photograph.
Psychologically, I was a basket case. All I wanted to do was smoke opium or get drunk.
What did you do after Vietnam? Did you remain a photographer?
John Morris, the picture editor at the New York Times, a man very familiar with stressed-out war photographers, hired me to do some vacation replacement work during the summer of 1968. In the fall, he hired me on staff. I worked for the Timesfrom 1969-1971.
Channel 13 in New York hired me as a segment producer to develop essays using filmed stills for their avant-garde news program, “The 51st State.”
At the same time I had linked up with some artists and filmmakers who were doing single-frame animation of paste-up collages, but by 1975, nobody was making any real money. I was working part-time in a post production sound studio, and I even have a small credit for working on Barbara Kopple’s Oscar- winning documentary, “Harlan County USA.” One of the highlights of that period was a heated, drunken argument I had with Susan Sontag in a Greenwich Village bar over whether documentary photography depicts reality!
By 1976, I was tired of being broke. I wouldn’t do commercial photography and the film work I was getting was too irregular. I didn’t feel I had the talent to be an artist of any real distinction. I did want to get married and raise children.
I drove a cab, became a salesman, worked my way through night school at Fordham and, BA in hand, talked my way into a Wall Street training program. If I was going to go for bucks, I was going to go for big bucks!
I made a fair amount of money on Wall Street in 25 years as a portfolio manager for elite private banks. I retired in 2007.
At a reunion of Vietnam journalists some years ago, Horst Fass told the group we were standing in, “Greenspon did it right. He took one famous photograph and then became a proper businessman and lived happily ever after.” It wasn’t so easy.
You’re now a social worker advocating for better veterans’ mental health care. Why did you decide to work with veterans?
I got my masters degree in clinical social work in 2011 at the age of 69. I know personally how hard it is to recover from PTSD, trauma and addictions. The military’s suicide rate is the highest it has ever been. It has been estimated that something like 20 percent of our vets are coming home with some form of mental distress. Unfortunately, less than half of them are getting the help they need. In the final years of my life, I’m dedicated to helping them recover from the horrors of war.
After years of thinking about what a photograph is I’ve concluded that, for me, it’s a snapshot taken with a Brownie Hawkeye. For decades I’ve been trying to unlearn my knowledge of photography, to recapture the spontaneity and simplicity I had in my early pictures. I will know it when I see it, but so far it has eluded me.
Vietnam: The Real Waris available through Abrams. An exhibition of the images from the Associated Press’ book will open at Steven Kasher Gallery in New York on Oct. 24, 2013.
To all you youngsters out there who weren't around yet, you couldn't possibly understand the significance of this back in 1991 seeing it for the first time....
By 1990 rock & metal had become a bloated, hollow genre. It was all a giant, superficial production. Everyone wore makeup, tight leather costumes, and had big, blown out hairspray hair. The lyrics were shallow; the music was formulaic & mass produced. The concerts were all choreographed and rehearsed exhibitions bands performed to their audiences at the giant arenas.
Now imagine seeing this for the first time: Everything was stripped down and bare bones again. The guys worse boots instead of platform shoes. They wore Metallica t-shirts instead of tight leather get-ups. They had long hair instead of big hair again. They had wild, spontaneous energy up onstage that meant anything could happen, and they interacted with the audience instead of using scripted & choreographed moves to perform at the audience. They let the crowd jump up on stage and jam out with them, and the crowd would catch you if you stage dove out onto them. The theaters were smaller and more intimate now too. By the late 80s, if you went to a rock concert you were essentially going to watch a stage production performance.
Now, however, if you went to a rock concert, you standing out there in the audience was just as much a part of the show as the band. Both sides fed off one another. They stopped performing to the audience and began performing with the audience. It was all very democratic once again.
When you saw this for the first time in 1991, you immediately recognized something very important had just happened when you watched Eddie Vedder climb out onto the rafters like a monkey and leap into the awaiting hands of the audience below. On an instinctual level, you just knew something seismic had occurred in rock music when Eddie did that.
Ya see kids, everything prior to this had become one big, fake Los Angeles stage production. No longer. Finally-- finally! --rock and roll was organic, spontaneous, and natural again. The way it's supposed to be.
Nirvana in 1993
(from left):
Kurt Cobain,
Krist Novoselic,
Dave Grohl.
Anton Corbijn
Few bands ever reach the popularity, influence and status of the early-'90s rock group Nirvana. Anyone who's old enough to remember knows that the trio from Aberdeen, Wash., helped pioneer grunge rock. But more than that, Nirvana became a symbol for an entire generation of ideas and popular culture, from fashion and art to our collective conversations about the way young people were making sense of the world back then, and how they saw their place in it.
Remarkably, Nirvana did all this in a very short period of time, from about 1987 to 1994, and only released three albums during that period. The last one the band released — about a year before singer Kurt Cobain took his own life — celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. The album, In Utero, is being reissued with some remarkable additions: There's a remastered version of the original record, a remixed version, a DVD, a disc of live recordings, a bunch of previously unreleased demos, and tons of photos and liner notes.
All Songs Considered's Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton spoke recently with Nirvana's two surviving members, drummer Dave Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic, about the making of In Utero. The two shared their memories from when they were just kids in the studio, piecing together what would become the band's last studio album.
You can hear our interview, and the unreleased songs, by clicking the audio link on this page. Or you can read a full transcript of our conversation — and stream the individual tracks — below.
Dave Grohl: Well, let's see ... in 1993 I was listening to a lot of The Jesus Lizard, which was a great band that Steve Albini also produced. I think I was also listening to ... I was still listening to that last Pixies album, or there was maybe that first Frank Black solo record, which came out around that time, too.
Bob Boilen: Maybe if you pick something off of that Jesus Lizard, since it's a Steve Albini production. We can talk about something in the sound that attracted you.
Grohl: I gotta say, Steve Albini was really famous for his signature sound. The sound that he got on his albums, it was no accident. There's a science to what he does. It was usually mostly recognized in the drums. So if you listen to theBreeders' first album Pod or the Pixies' Surfer Rosa, or you listen to the Jesus Lizard album Liar,it sounds like a band in the room, but there's some sort of sonic element to it that nobody else could get. And Steve Albini was the only guy who could get that drum sound.
Boilen: Let's listen to some of that — because we'll hear some on In Utero.Let's listen to some of The Jesus Lizard and hear the drums, and then we can talk about the specifics and how he did it.
YouTube
Grohl: There's a song called "Boiler Maker," which is the first song off of the Liaralbum, maybe. That's a good one.
Boilen: You really do feel — especially coming off of the drum sounds of the 1980s, they were monstrously compressed and in your face — you really do get a sense of a big, open, spacious thing going on on drums here, and we'll play some of In Utero and hear some of that, as well. Would that be a good characterization of the difference there?
Grohl: Yeah, I think so. You know, I remember when we were making In Utero,one of the things that Steve talked about was trying to record or mix or equalize the sound of the band in a way that seemed natural — without the vocals seeming disconnected from the music. Like, I think what he tried to do was present the song to the listener in a way that sounded entirely real. But he would kind of embellish things in a way that made it more powerful. He is a brilliant dude. And going to make that record with him, I remember taking the Breeders' first album Pod to Sound City when we were making the album Nevermind and saying, "This is the drum sound." Like, "That's the sound. We love that sound! It's a great sound!" That was always, I don't know, it was something we always loved or related to, those Steve Albini recordings.
Boilen: Did you feel disappointed in the drum sound on Nevermind?
Grohl: No, dude, that record sounds great! I wouldn't change a thing.
Boilen: But the sound is so very different. It doesn't sound like the Steve Albini sound. That kick drum has heavy compression on it; it is really a different sound than the Albini sound. That's why I ask.
Grohl: Well, you know, it's one of the great things about recording in different places with different people, is that you get to experience their technique or their sound, and recording with [producer] Butch [Vig on Nevermind] was a lot different than Steve. With Butch, we would do multiple takes and we would try and get things to sound the way we would like, really craft these things, whereas with Steve, I swear, we'd do one take and he'd hit stop and say, "OK, what's next?"
Krist Novoselic: We had to prove ourselves to Steve. So, on the first day at the studio [for In Utero], we're all set up and ready to go and like, "OK, Steve, we're rolling, right?" And he goes, "We're rolling." And so we play that song "Serve the Servants." And you know Dave counts us in and just goes, "Bahhh!" And the song starts OK. And then we play this song and, of course, the ending falls apart, like every song on In Utero. And so we finish the song, and Kurt and Dave and I look at each other and we're like, "Yeah, that felt pretty good. How was it, Steve?" He's like, "Sounds good." And we're like, "All right! We're going to do another song," like in one take. We won Steve over after that.
Boilen: That's fabulous. We should listen to the first cut of In Utero to hear those drums we were talking about and get the feel of what it was like to be in Pachyderm Studios in Minnesota in February of 1993.
Boilen: It sounds so good. To so many people that don't know about recording and technique, the idea is ... I guess the question would be, what's so complicated about throwing a band in the room and just recording them? And, of course, it presents all sorts of problems when everybody's in the same room. Isn't that the mega problem that engineers face?
Grohl: I think so. I mean, it depends on what you want to do. But for the noise we made in the room, separation and isolation was usually a good idea. If you put the three of us in a room with microphones and hit "go," it would just sound like, "bahhhh." I remember that room was such a beautiful place to record in, too. If you've ever seen pictures of the studio or the house, I'm sure it's a beautiful place to hang out in in the summertime. Unfortunately, we were there in February. It's outside of Minneapolis. It was, like, subzero arctic temperature. But that room where we recorded the stuff, the room sounded great and it was a comfortable place to be. And I remember sitting at my drums and Kurt was to my left and Krist was to my right, and we had proper isolation and we would track live together.
Boilen: Describe what it means for proper isolation to somebody that doesn't know what it means. Is it foam or is it glass? What's between you and him?
Grohl: Well, there were probably some sort of baffles.
Novoselic: It was a sliding glass door between you and the bass amp. But I stood on your side of the sliding glass because I wanted to feel the kick drum, like, in my chest.
Grohl: Feel the power in your heart and your mind and soul!
Novoselic: I wanted to feel the power. That's it.
Grohl: You know, when you're recording multiple instruments in a room with multiple microphones, the sound of the room is bleeding into each microphone. Say you have a microphone that's pointed at a snare drum or is pointed at a singer's mouth: You want to try to contain or isolate those specific microphones so that not everything is bleeding into those, if that makes any sense. But you do want to be in the room with each other, so you can get the vibe of playing with that person.
Novoselic: And Steve Albini has these strategies — and they're rather sophisticated — about where you place the microphone in the room, and how you put it in one place. And he doesn't really use any type of, like, equipment. He calls it synthetic reverb and this and that, because he wants the real thing. It's very organic: non-GMO organic, no pesticides, labor-friendly junk food.
Boilen: There was a moment before you got there that the band ... Robin, you've got the letter. The [20th anniversary In Utero] box set has all this stuff...
Robin Hilton: Yeah, let's talk about it real quickly. There's a remastered version of the original album. It's been remixed — Steve Albini remixed it for this edition — tons of demos, previously unreleased tracks, a disc of live cuts, a DVD, and there really are some amazing liner notes. And it includes a five-page letter that Steve Albini wrote you guys before you even got in the studio with him. And I can just read the opening graph. It's a single-spaced, typed, five-page letter: "I think the very best thing you could do at this point is exactly what you're talking about doing: bang a record out in a couple of days with high quality but minimal production, no interference from the front-office bulletheads. If that is indeed what you want to do, I would love to be involved." Then he closes by saying, "If a record takes more than a week to make, somebody's f—-ing up." So you guys did this in two weeks, yeah?
Novoselic: We didn't screw up, though! We recorded and mixed in two weeks. We moseyed along, though. We were also well-prepared. We developed a great work ethic. We had a great work ethic. We would rehearse a lot. We were coming in and blasting out songs in one take, two takes, three takes at the most.
Hilton: The remixed versions, I'm really curious to hear what you think of these newly remixed versions that Steve did for this release. I'm really hearing a lot of things I've never heard before, little details — like, he added Kurt's voice to the top of "Serve the Servants." I noticed "Dumb" loses most of the string parts. It comes in at the end, but it's not throughout the body of the song. I'm wondering if you saw these remixes as a chance to fix things you weren't happy with, or a chance to re-imagine how it could all sound.
Novoselic: In Utero, with the remixes, just breathes a little more now. It was a little squished-sounding [before], I thought. And, well, it's remastered now; the original is remastered now.
Boilen: Tell people what that means, because it's always very complicated for people to understand.
Novoselic: When you remaster something, and it was remastered at Abbey Road in London ... so, when you record a record, there's, like, different levels and frequencies on each individual track. So when you master a record, you give it some uniformity where it doesn't, like, blow someone's speakers. One song's super-loud, the next one's super-quiet, or whatever. It just kind of evens everything out. And you put some EQ on things — that's what mastering is. But we went one step beyond that and remixed the record, too. So it was on multi-tracks and it was not done on a computer. There was no clicking or dragging — there was no "Command-V" or "Command-C." We weren't on hold with service people in Mumbai, India, "Oh no, it's crashed again! Hit Control-Alt-Delete! No, we tried that, we tried that!" "Unplug it and plug it back in." "OK, but the bass amp is going to go out if we do that!" But, anyway, it was all done on tape. And, again, that's Steve's way. And it was all set up in the recording. So, the way those microphones were stationed around the room, and we just, we were listening to each individual track. So, like on "Serve the Servants," it was listed on the track sheet: guitar, guitar 2. And it was like, "Whoa, we never used this in the mix we did." So we listened to it, and on the remixed [version], there's a different guitar solo. And we worked with, like, some vocals and just kind of freshened it up. And I listened to The Doors — there was a Doors anthology remix, The Future StartsNow, I think it's called, where they remix the songs. And that's where I got the idea. I go, "Well, The Doors sound all nice and fresh for the 21st century, and it's the 20-year anniversary [of In Utero], so it'd be a good time to try something similar."
Boilen: So did you approach [Albini] to do the remixes?
Novoselic: Absolutely. The man. We went to the man, Steve.
Grohl: Straight to the source.
Novoselic: We went to his studio, Electrical Audio in Chicago.
Grohl: He wears a jumpsuit when he works.
Boilen: What color?
Grohl: Blue. Well, sort of like a grayish. It looked like maybe it was cobalt at one point, but it faded in the wash. I'm not sure.
Hilton: Does he put orange hazard cones around the chair he sits in?
Grohl: He works in a onesie.
Novoselic: The place is OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) approved. It's a super-safe environment.
Grohl: He also serves that kind of coffee that those weird lemurs ... when they eat the beans, then they poop them out. They're very expensive, and you can make coffee with them. And they're good, too!
Novoselic: Cobalt is like a really happening color now. I feel like all the new cars have some shade of cobalt and kind of a smoked purple.
Grohl: Pelham blue, that's a nice blue, too.
Novoselic: He's into texture. Steve is into textures.
Hilton: So, you guys were sitting in on the remixes, then? You were with Steve when he did them?
Novoselic: Absolutely. He wouldn't have it any other way. He wouldn't remix a record without the band there.
Boilen: So, let's walk it through. We're back in Minnesota and we're in February and it's '93. You'd bust out a couple of songs in a day. Would you then try and go ahead and mix some of them, or was everything just performance, performance, performance?
Grohl: I think at first it was performance. We finished the drums in the first maybe three or four days, and then I think maybe after that it was bass and guitar stuff?
Novoselic: I maybe changed a few things here and there on the bass, and then there was Kurt, and he did his vocals.
Boilen: Wait a minute: I'm confused about something, because we just talked about the fact that the band was in the same room at the same time, and now you're telling me that people are doing parts separately. You do the drums in three days?
Grohl: Usually what you do is, there are basic tracks, and then there are overdubs, and so a basic track would be Kurt, Krist and [me] in the same room. And we would lay down the guitar, bass and drums in one take. And then you'd move on to the next song. So after you've done 13 basic tracks, then you go back and you listen and you think, "Does this need an extra guitar part? Does this need percussion?" And then you start overdubbing things, and if there's anything that you need to redo or fix, then you can do that, as well. But recording with Steve, there's minimal overdubbing and there are minimal fixes, and there's hardly any percussion or anything on the record. It's a really simple recording. So then it's just a matter of Kurt going in and singing all of the songs and putting harmonies on. I didn't even know if he had all his lyrics. I remember there were some days where, like, nothing would happen for hours and we'd just be sitting, waiting for something to go down, you know?
Novoselic: There was no Auto-Tune, no comp tracks.
Grohl: You know what I remember? There was this stuff that they used to clean the tape heads in the studio, and it was like pure alcohol and incredibly flammable. And so we started doing things like pouring it on someone's leg and lighting their leg on fire, or pouring it on someone's boot. I poured some on my head.
Novoselic: Flaming cymbals are so cool.
Grohl: Ask Gibby [Haines, founder of the Butthole Surfers, who often put kerosene on cymbals and lit them during live performances]. Yeah, a lot of time spent doing absolutely nothing, too.
Hilton: It's interesting to hear you say that sometimes you'd be recording and Kurt hadn't even worked out the lyrics yet, because there are some really cool demos in this 20th-anniversary set, and most of the demo tracks don't have any lyrics on them at all. And I thought we could play a little bit of "All Apologies," the demo for that, because it sounds like Kurt is still trying to work out the lyrics on it. Could we just hear a little bit of that?
Boilen: Sounds like they didn't have his vocal mic on. It sounds like he was somewhere in some room just near some open mic, right?
Novoselic: We found that on a cassette. Like, the multi-tracks vanished, so we couldn't even mix that.
Boilen: Oh, that's why the tape speed is so odd, too, right?
Novoselic: Yeah, that's what we got. So the [20th-anniversary] re-release is about, you know, those kinds of things. Fans really like those little chestnuts like that.
Hilton: Are there any surprises that came out for you in the remixing of these songs; anything that surprised you in any of the tracks?
Novoselic: [Long pause.] No...
[Laughs.]
Novoselic: It was all there. It was like, it's so straight-ahead: It's an old-fashioned record in some ways, like it was before the Internet. We made this record before computers. And, again, it's nice to have it breathe a little bit. So we just pried it open a little bit. And that was the mission: Kind of open the windows and kind of freshen it up.
Boilen: So you spend like two weeks in Minnesota. You do these recordings. You come home and everybody seemed pretty happy when they walked out the door, right?
Grohl: I think so.
Novoselic: We were out of the woods of Minnesota.
Grohl: Yeah, we were happy to be the hell out of there!
Novoselic: Because we were from Washington. Western Washington has a mild climate. We're just not used to those cold temperatures.
Grohl: You know what I remember? I remember that there was this sock that Steve had stuffed with mashed potatoes.
Boilen: Sorry, you said sock? S-o-c-k?
Grohl: Yeah, there was a sock that Steve had stuffed with mashed potatoes from dinner one night. And it was going back and forth from, I put it under his pillow at night, or then maybe it'd wind up on my drum stool the next day.
Novoselic: Ew.
Grohl: And I got home, I opened up my suitcase, and that sock full of mashed potatoes was in there.
[Laughs.]
Boilen: That's a beautiful love message, I'd say.
Grohl: You know, he and I really hit it off.
Boilen: The winter that was! So, do you come home with tapes, in other words?
Novoselic: We came home with cassettes. And we had this really raw and intense record. And then the conversation started regarding the obligations [we had] of being a No. 1 band on the radio and on the charts.
Boilen: And those conversations are with whom?
Novoselic: With, like, label people and people who deal with those matters. So we decided we'd pick the songs. Like, we could hear singles on the record for the radio, and a few months before we did In Utero, R.E.M. were in Seattle and they were recording Automatic for the People, so I'd go down there and say hi. And they'd be wrapping up things and, like, they'd play me a song. Like, I heard "Man on the Moon" right off the press and I'm like, "Michael, are you going to keep the yeah yeah yeahs?" He's like, "Absolutely!" I'm like, "Really good!" And so we all decided that [we had] obligations as a "professional rock band" and as "unit shifters," so we remixed the [In Utero] songs with Scott Litt, who recordedAutomatic for the People, so we had a little more work to do on the record.
Boilen: First of all, did you play these cassettes for the label, or did the label get more proper copies to listen to?
Novoselic: I don't remember what they got. That was before [CD-Rs], so they probably got a DAT, a DAT tape.
Grohl: A wax cylinder.
Boilen: Was the reaction, both from you and from them, "Hey, we need more single-y stuff?" I mean, this was not well-received. I wouldn't be wrong to say this wasn't completely well-received?
Novoselic: Well, we weren't going to have a song like "Milk It" be the first single, OK? Yeah, so it was like people have their roles. And, again, I call them "the obligations of being the No. 1 rock band." We worked our way through it. And part of the solution was working with Scott Litt.
Boilen: And how did Steve [Albini] feel about it?
Grohl: I think he was kind of pissed.
Boilen: I would think so. I mean, you go in there with this philosophy to do this one thing, and you walk out the door, and you go in with the people he tried to keep away from you, the record-label "bulletheads."
Novoselic: Are you saying we were conflicted? That we were a conflicted band?
Boilen: It kind of sounds that way.
Novoselic: Is that what you're trying to tell us?
Boilen: Yeah, I don't know if you've thought about this...
Novoselic: I've thought about it a lot.
Boilen: Yeah, I know, of course. Was that just this tear inside of all of you, or did some feel more than others that obligation? Or, in some way, you were running from the obligation and the rawness you walked out the door of Albini's place with, right?
Novoselic: We weren't necessarily running from it. But, you know, you've got to be rational. Like, "OK, we could make this if it's going to work on the record, work on the radio. And we signed the deal." And a lot of bands were, like, fiercely independent and never even signed on a major label. And, well, we were there already, you know? So we weren't really running away from it. And it was just, like, a solution, and it was a viable one.
Boilen: The 20th anniversary presents us with, let's say, a version of "All Apologies" that was Albini's mix, right, and the mix we are familiar with is not his mix, correct?
Novoselic and Grohl: Correct.
Boilen: Because I think in people's minds, they know those vocals, which sound doubled. Is that one of the things that got done after Albini on "All Apologies" — Kurt sang on top of himself, so to speak?
Novoselic: He added some background vocals, because I remember I went to his house and he's walking down the stairs and he goes, "Check out these background vocals for 'Heart Shaped Box.'" And, like, "Well, that sounds cool!" And I guess we were still working on the record at his house, and it just made sense to go in and remix it.
Boilen: How about if I play a little bit of the original Albini version? Would "Heart Shaped Box" be one of the tunes we're talking about?
Novoselic: Yes, let's do it.
Boilen: So, what do you all hear as the big difference when you listen to this version?
The version of "Heart-Shaped Box" that originally appeared on In Utero in 1993 was remixed by producer Scott Litt. This is the version producer Steve Albini intended to include on the record, before it was replaced.
Grohl: Well, when we were remixing those songs at Steve's studio Electrical Audio — it's been 20 years since we made that album — and I think in that time, Steve has gotten better at what he does. And, you know, when we were sitting there listening to the basic rough tracks, the recordings that we had done, you just hear a sound that you don't necessarily hear anymore, you know? A lot of modern recordings just don't hold that same sort of weight that Steve got then, and can still get now. And it's a weird thing when you isolate tracks of something that you recorded a really long time ago.
Boilen: Meaning that when you're listening back and the multi-track is playing, he hits a solo button and you just hear that one instrument in isolation.
Grohl: Yeah, or like a vocal mic, and you can just hear someone breathing in the room. It's a sonic document of a moment in time, and you listen to it back, and it really brings you back to that place. It's one of the funny things about this experience of this re-release and all of this nostalgia or retrospect or whatever it is, like, that time might seem a little blurry. But you remember the feeling of being there, and it was one of the reasons why Steve was the perfect person to make that record, because that's kind of what he did. Like, he was not into manipulating moments. He was into capturing them. So, when I listen back to this stuff, it's like it makes me sort of feel the way I felt then, because it's so real, you know? And I mean, I think about us being kids, like ... we were kids. It's so crazy that we were going through all of this stuff and these real sort of formative years. And this album was such a transition for us, too. Like, I have an emotional reaction to this record. I don't listen to it like I listen to, like, Saturday Night Fever. I have a more emotional reaction to it, because it's really raw and it's really real. So, as we were remixing these things, it was even more so. It was like, wow, now you can just listen to Kurt's vocals or just listen to Krist's bass, and it's, like, it really sort of breaks those memories into all these different pieces that are very defined and specific, you know?
Novoselic: I remember with "Heart Shaped Box," in the studio, on that version you just played, there was a long discussion about the solo. And Steve and Kurt had this idea on the solo to make it just very distorted and kind of out there, and I was against it. I was like, "Why are you doing this?" I was the sellout in the room or whatever. You know, this is a beautiful song; it's an epic song. You remember that?
Grohl: I remember that, too. I felt the same way — I just didn't say anything!
Novoselic: Remember, it was just like an hour and a half, and all these speeches were going down, and I'm like, "OK, that sounds good. Now, don't do it!" I understand. I completely understand."
Grohl: Please, I would say delete that. Mute, mute!
Novoselic: Delete-alt. It was an epic discussion. It's like, "Why are you doing this?"
Grohl: "You are making a career decision, my friend!" Yeah, I mean, it's just a different time, now. Well, at 24 years old, I was wearing shorts with long johns under them. What did I know?
Boilen: And making career decisions, lighting fires on your pants.
Grohl: I was changing the face of popular fashion with my long johns and high tops.
Novoselic: I was a mature 28. I was a 28-year-old.
Boilen: Yeah, you were the old guy.
Grohl: Yeah, he was the elder statesman of the band.
Novoselic: "Fellas, do it my way or the highway!"
Boilen: How old was Albini? Was he your peer?
Novoselic: He was our age.
Grohl: Well, he was one of our heroes, man. That was a big deal to be able to make a record with him. I had Big Black records and I loved Surfer Rosa. To make a record with him was a big deal. And I admit that when we walked in there, I was terrified and intimidated because his reputation was that [he was] really cynical, opinionated — and I heard stories that bands would send them their single and ask him to do their next record and he would smash it and send it back with no letter. Stuff like that. Like, "Oh my god, he's the [Colonel] Kurtz of the music industry! This is crazy; he's gone too far up the river and he's lost it!" And then we get there, and he's like a pussycat. He's the sweetest person in the world, and we had a blast. He and I got along really well, because we're both kind of goofs. But I remember at one point, I had taken that tape cleaner and poured it on my leg as he was taking a nap on a couch, and I lit my leg on fire, and I ran in there and woke him up with my leg on fire and said, "Steve! Steve! There's something wrong in the studio!" We had a laugh. Then, at night, he went back to sleep and I went back in the control room and poured some on my hat and lit my hat on fire and put it on top of my head, and I ran in there with my head on fire, "Steve! Steve, there's something wrong!" And before I could finish saying that, my hair kind of started, and I could hear my hair burning!
Novoselic: There was a bad smell.
Grohl: That sizzling and that smell. So, I take my hat off and I stamp it out on the ground and he's looking at me like, "You idiot."
Novoselic: The horror, the horror!
Grohl: And I nailed it to the wall and put a little piece of tape and just wrote "dumb" on it, and just had a burnt hat that said "dumb" on the wall. And I came back 15 minutes later and he had changed that piece of tape to say "drummer."
Boilen: Perfect! Were there a lot of drugs and alcohol in the studio?
Novoselic: No, no!
Grohl: What is this, Behind the Music?! C'mon, guys!
Novoselic: I don't remember even a beer, or pot. Nothing.
Grohl: I had stopped smoking pot, like, in 1990. So I was a sober guy. Plus, where the hell are you going to get weed in the middle of winter outside of Minneapolis? We weren't making a record at Tuff Gong! I mean, we were focused; that's the funny thing. I think maybe the reputation that Nirvana has is that we were three Sid Viciouses, Viciousuzzes, how would you pluralize that? Viscii?
Novoselic: It was kind of a family atmosphere.
Grohl: Ha!
Novoselic: [Kurt Cobain's wife] Courtney [Love] came over with [their daughter] Frances. And then Courtney wanted to add to the family atmosphere in that she wanted to bake us a roast, remember? And we were like, "Oh, no!" So I think we unplugged the stove and said it was broken. And were like, "Oh, the stove doesn't work!"
Boilen: You already had the mashed potatoes.
Grohl: Yeah, but those were in my suitcase!
Boilen: I got a note last night — do you know the musician Dan Deacon at all?
Grohl and Novoselic: Who's that?
Boilen: He lives in Baltimore. He does great community-oriented electronic music. Big parties. Anyway, Dan Deacon sent me a note last night and it made me think of what you were talking about. He said, "Why don't you guys release the stems, the original tracks of each of the records, because people can learn so much from what's on those tracks. Just hearing them."
Grohl: It's true. When digital technology started becoming the norm, you've got 50, 60, 70 years of recordings on tapes that are just deteriorating. Like, a two-inch reel of recording tape won't last forever. It dissolves. It will disappear. So when digital stuff became what everyone uses, people started taking these two-inch tapes and archiving them digitally so that the recording would last forever. The tape might disappear, but you download it into a computer and that will last forever. So, in doing that, all of a sudden on YouTube you started getting the isolated tracks. Like, Freddie Mercury's vocal track from "Under Pressure." And it's just his vocal. Or, like, Paul McCartney's bass line from "Hey Bulldog." And it's just his bass line, and it's amazing, man. I mean, any studio dork like me has spent countless hours listening to the bass track from Def Leppard's Hysteria or something, just wasting valuable memory space in my brain listening to these things you'd otherwise never hear. And it's really, really cool, because you hear things that you might not have ever heard.
Novoselic: The bass line to "Bohemian Rhapsody." I've [played with the stem], and it's on YouTube. There are Nirvana stems [recorded, but not available on YouTube].
Grohl: For sure, man. "Killer Queen"? You ever listen to the drums for that? You listen to it and you're like, "Oh my god, they decided they were gonna keep that?" It's raw! It's great! One of the great things about it is one of the reasons why an album like In Utero still sounds fresh today, is because it's the sound of three people. It really is. There's imperfection and inconsistency, you know? We didn't scrub it up and polish it and clean it up and hand it to you. We recorded it, sometimes only once, and then decided that's what you needed to hear, because it's real in that way. And I think that when I hear a song from In Utero come on the radio in between maybe other popular modern recordings, it really stands out, you know? Because it sounds like us, and the only people that sounded like us wereus, you know? That's the way a musician should be. A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. It's an individual-feel thing, you know? It's one of the greatest things about that record. Like, we totally achieved what I think what we wanted to do. There was an integrity in our band that we wanted things to be real, honest and real, and that's In Utero. It's entirely that.
Novoselic: In Utero is a testament to the artistic vision of Kurt Cobain. It's kind of a weird record, and it's strangely beautiful at the same time. And if you look at Kurt's paintings and his drawings — he even did a sculpture for me — it's a rising, tortured-spirit person. It's kind of weird. It's done well, but it's like what Dave was saying about having your own sound. Kurt was a great songwriter. He knew he had a good ear for a hook [and was] a great singer, great guitar player, and In Utero is a good representation of what he liked in art and how he expressed himself.
Boilen: That's beautiful. Anything to add to that?
Hilton: I feel like that's a good point to let you guys go. But I did want to ask you about some of these previously unreleased cuts. What can you tell us about the "Forgotten Tune" demo?
Novoselic: Well, "Forgotten Tune," we found it and were like, what is this song? And I don't really remember. And [we were], like, what do you want to call it? And I'm like, I don't want to give it a name, so let's just call it "Forgotten Tune" and let people make up their own minds what it is. But I remember the main riff in that tune was, like, from 1988 or something. Just trying to, like, bring back a riff. "All Apologies" was from 1990, and "Dumb" was a pre-Nevermind song. "Pennyroyal Tea," [Dave] and Kurt were getting crazy some night down in that apartment with a multi-track cassette recorder, and "Pennyroyal Tea" came out of that. It's just kind of, like, there were new songs we were trying to revisit, old ideas ... "Forgotten Tune" just represents that idea. "Let's see if we can make something out of this."
Boilen: So let's go out on that. We'll go out on "Forgotten Tune." And, so the 30th anniversary, then, will have all the stems of all the songs. You promise that, right?
Grohl: It will just be the drums.
Hilton: I'd buy that.
Boilen: Dave and Krist, thanks a lot. I really appreciate your time.
Grohl: Thanks a lot.
Novoselic: Thank you.
Note: At the band's request, "Forgotten Tune" is only available to hear in the audio of the full show, with the link at the top of the page.
Interesting tidbits I found, mainly for my own entertainment. I copied some sites, since after some time, I find they are gone.
Erdekessegek amit talaltam, foleg a magam szorakoztatasara. Nehany oldalt masoltam, mert egy ido utan eltunnek.
![Cover for In Utero [20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition]](https://media.npr.org/assets/music/programs/asc/2013/09/InUtero20th-6cc3b6bd8d2198006412b891ac9a840b97be0cad-s1.JPG "Cover for In Utero [20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition]")
