“I literally cried tears of joy”: After years of searching, YouTuber finally uncovers the identity of Kurt Cobain’s mystery In Utero amp

Aaron Rash, the guitarist who has been obsessively chasing Nirvana‘s In Utero guitar tones, has uncovered the amp Kurt Cobain used to track its peculiar cleans – and it was hiding in plain sight.

While 1991’s chart-smashing Nevermind is widely regarded as the grunge giant’s magnum opus, it’s the record’s successor, In Utero, that has so enraptured Rash’s imagination.

He’s been on the case of its clean tones for four years now, and as his latest video explains, it’s been an uphill battle.

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“There are no official records,” he says, “nothing was documented. [There were] only eyewitness accounts [and] 90% of what I’ve been told, I believed to be false.”

Fortunately, he had the record’s producer, Steve Albini, on speed dial to help with his tireless quest, which led to one strange quirk – the Fender Quad Reverb combo amp that Cobain used for the record featured only one working power tube.

“I didn’t really know what to think when Kurt told me about the Quad with one tube,” Albini states. “But when I looked in the back of it, sure enough, there were three shattered tubes and one working one pumping away.”

The issue is that a single power tube wasn’t enough to produce clean tones, and that, alongside a Randall RG-120 PH Commander head, was dismissed. But there was faint hope.

“On a song-by-song basis, Kurt would decide which amp would be the main sound and which would be the overdub sound,” Albini notes. “So the Randall, Quad, and one other amp – I forget which – would be done live, the other guitar part overdubbed.”

So, what was the mystery third amp? Well, for four years, Rash hit dead end after dead end. A Marshall Plexi modded by Cobain’s guitar tech, Earnie Bailey, designed to be a clean amp, was ruled out, as was his beloved 1982 Ultra-Linear black-panel Fender Twin Reverb. And there was no evidence that Cobain used an amp belonging to Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota.

“I started to feel pretty hopeless, like I’d wasted four years trying to figure out this stupid guitar tone,” Rash sighs. “I can’t tell you how many times I was close to giving up.”

The answer came from an interview with Bailey, in which he mentions a Rivera Twin Reverb, a dramatic revamping of the Fender amp by esteemed amp builder and modder, Paul Rivera. Billed as the Twin Reverb II, and released in the early ’80s, the joyous laugh that comes out of Rash after plugging into the amp says all you need to know.

“I felt like I’d just found the cure to cancer,” he beams. “I literally cried tears of joy.”

Photos from the studio sessions show the Twin Reverb II lurking in the corner, confirming that this was the amp that produced the tones that have been turning Rash inside out for four whole years.

Rash has previously produced an IR pack for other players chasing the album’s tones and vowed to update it with the new discovery.

In recent Nirvana news, Kurt Cobain’s 1969 Competition Mustang from the Smells Like Teenage Spirit video recently sold for a record-breaking sum.

A freelance writer with a penchant for music that gets weird, Phil is a regular contributor to Prog, Guitar World, and Total Guitar magazines and is especially keen on shining a light on unknown artists. Outside of the journalism realm, you can find him writing angular riffs in progressive metal band, Prognosis, in which he slings an 8-string Strandberg Boden Original, churning that low string through a variety of tunings. He’s also a published author and is currently penning his debut novel which chucks fantasy, mythology and humanity into a great big melting pot.