Butch Vig produced it at Sound City in Van Nuys, California, a room with a console and not much glamour. Andy Wallace mixed it. DGC Records put it out in 1991 expecting a respectable cut of the underground, modest numbers, a band that sold to people who already knew the band.

That is not what happened. Nevermind kept selling. It climbed, then it kept climbing, and on the Billboard 200 dated January 11, 1992, it hit number one and knocked Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the top. The label had braced for a small win. They got Diamond, more than ten million copies in the US alone, one of the best sellers of its era.

The bigger thing it did was open a door. Underground rock, the stuff that lived on independent labels and college radio, walked through it into the mainstream and did not leave. A lot of records sold after Nevermind because Nevermind sold first.

It opens on the song that pulled all of this behind it. Press play on Smells Like Teen Spirit and listen to the part most people never quite hear.