Steve Albini, who died on Tuesday in Chicago at 61, talked a lot.
Like, a lot a lot. The first time I met him was about 30 years ago. I was a graduate student at Northwestern University and assigned to interview somebody, and I had just bought “In Utero,” Nirvana’s follow-up to its blockbuster album “Nevermind.” Albini was the producer of “In Utero,” and one of my favorite albums, The Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa,” and so I called him, he agreed to chat, and while I remember little of what he said, I remember we talked for hours.
He had studied journalism himself at Northwestern, so he was generous. He had endless opinions on culture and music and what it means to stand by your convictions. I remember at some point simply asking what a record producer did. He said he wasn’t a record producer, he was a record engineer. I asked what that was, and he said it was like a record producer.
A year ago, the last time I spoke to him, I asked about his first concert, and he replied as he replied to everything, with too much knowledge and detail and an opinion so insightful and provocative and hilarious that it sucked the air from the room. The concert was the Edgar Winter Group, Sept. 27, 1975, Montana, where he lived as a teenager. He recalled his father saying people only went to rock shows to buy drugs. He recalled, as Edgar Winter launched into a 20-minute keyboard solo, the “dead-eyed gaze” of Johnny Winter “navigating solo breaks in this tumultuous excess, like Ahab resigned to his fate in a dinghy, tossed by the sea and pernicious corpus of his brother’s prog rock white whale …” He didn’t know if the concert itself was exactly a good idea, but: “An impressionable young Steve thanks whoever set it up for those enduring images of madness and futility.”
Albini talked like that.
He was an intimidating guy, and eventually, a sweet guy. He was, as kids say these days, a “gatekeeper,” the prototypical record store owner who frowns at what you bring to his cash register — though he made records, he didn’t sell them. The day after he died, the satirical website Hard Times posted this headline: “Steve Albini standing outside gates of Heaven telling everyone how much he hates the Smashing Pumpkins.”
He could go off on corporate culture and its deadening effects on artists and consumers (and did so elegantly at times, for literary journals like the Hyde Park-based Baffler). He produced famous records and made lesser-known ones with his bands Big Black and Shellac, but also became, by dint of his taste, a sought-after totem of cultural integrity — a representative of a way of being. Or as comedian Fred Armisen told this newspaper several years ago: “Steve Albini became a huge influence on me, which I don’t know if he knows. He had this philosophy on how to live and be and gave me advice I still keep in mind.” As for Albini, he always kept it blunt: “I wasn’t a fan of Trenchmouth (Armisen’s Chicago-based punk band) — and so that’s not why we would have become friends.”
He was vintage Gen-X sarcastic, ironic, contrarian, defiantly principled. One of the best things ever written on music was Albini’s 1993 essay “The Problem With Music” for the Baffler, in which he laid out finances, empty promises, unnecessary flourishes. It opens with quite the metaphor: a band (“some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances”) standing at one end of a trench filled with waste and at the other end is a music industry “lackey” with a fountain pen and contract. Whoever swims the trench first will get the deal. Only then, the industry insists: “Swim it again, please. Backstroke.”
Thomas Frank, the founder of the Baffler, told me in an email that he never knew Albini personally, but that essay for the journal would become its “consummate expression”: “Seeing through the falsehoods of the culture industry was the first order of business, and no one was better at it than Steve Albini.”
By credits alone, Albini was not only a glue stick of underground music, and a major influence around the country as Wicker Park became an early ‘90s music mecca, but a tastemaker for what was once called college radio music and later rebranded “alt rock.”
He held it to ideals that no popular cultural business could entirely satisfy.
He recorded a who’s who of ‘90s Chicago bands (including Urge Overkill, Veruca Salt and Jesus Lizard); alt superstars (PJ Harvey, Bush); and the occasional icon (Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, The Stooges, Cheap Trick). He became known for applying loving sonic care to acts best known by their fields of distortion. He captured, as the cliche went, how a performer sounded live. But attaining clarity, power and honesty seemed deceptively easy. As Albini told Chicago magazine in 1997: “I honestly just feel that music like this deserves to be taken seriously. And that means people who record them should be as concerned about quality as if they were recording the (expletive) Chicago symphony.”
Yet, at the peak of his influence, he also said: “If you wanted to take punk seriously on a more significant level, you could. If you pretend to take dance music seriously on a more significant level, that is a delusional pretension. There really is no substance to it.”
Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick said they first met in the late 1970s. A teenage Albini sold him a guitar. Nielsen’s son Miles, now of the Rockford-based band Rusted Hearts, even helped Albini physically build his Electrical Audio recording studio in Avondale. When Albini later produced Cheap Trick, he was “a stickler, but excellent,” Nielsen said. He had “this reputation as a tough guy,” though Nielsen suspects “a lot of it came from record execs because Steve was so different. He was the most honest person in the music business.
“And that’s a list without a lot of company.”
Still, as Albini got older, he came to regret some of the hardline things he spouted. (He once wrote for a music zine that the Replacements’ breakthrough “Let It Be” was a “sad, pathetic end to a long downhill slide.”) Michael Azerrad, biographer of Nirvana and author of “Our Band Could Be Your Life,” posted Wednesday on X that Albini “was a great artist and underwent the most remarkable and inspiring personal transformation.” With years came warmth, pleasantness. He faced his incendiary urges. After all, here was a man who once, for a Northwestern art class, invited 100 of his enemies to throw stuff at him as he swore at them behind Plexiglass.
People threw dog poop, bricks, bowling pins.
Martin Atkins, former drummer of Public Image Ltd., a Pilsen resident and an industrial mainstay with bands such as Pigface, Nine Inch Nails and Killing Joke, recorded with Albini for years. “We would argue,” he said. “He didn’t like the idea that Pigface was touring in a bus. He would say, ‘Oh, what a bunch of (expletive) rock stars!’ And I would go, “Steve, there are 16 of us! What would you want us to do — tour in five mini-vans?
“I remember in Minnesota, coming back from one of his favorite studios, he agreed to drive me to the airport and we argued music for so long that he drove 40 minutes past the airport and I missed my flight. Things were often very cut and dry to Steve, but always centered on the glorious movement of sound. Whatever personal, spiritual, creative problems he might have had, he worked hard to clear them out to get you your sound.”
Indeed, of all the legendary tales of Steve Albini, one of the best is the long letter that he wrote to Nirvana before recording “In Utero,” to lay out his philosophy and expectations:
“I do not want and will not take a royalty on any record I record. … I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible. … I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it’s worth. The record company will expect me to ask for a point or a point and a half. If we assume three million sales, that works out to 400,000 dollars or so. There’s no (expletive) way I would ever take that much money. I wouldn’t be able to sleep.”
Nirvana, eager to retain a shred of indie cred after becoming the biggest band in the world, was a natural fit with Albini. The problem was, after they made “In Utero,” the record company hated its sound; the band itself began airing doubts. And so, before release, changes were made. Moreover, Albini’s reputation as a pedantic, prickly and iconoclastic collaborator, quick to question someone’s ideology, caught up to him.
He told interviewers major labels didn’t want to work with him; critics accused him of selling out by working with them at all, then being fast to complain if it went badly.
But as goofy as it sounds now, since the concept has lost its meaning: He never could sell out. Not the way we assume artists inevitably do. He retained a pure righteous punk intention, except when such astringent logic failed. Talking about his younger, uncompromising self, he gave himself little room to hide. Last year he told the Guardian newspaper: “The one thing I don’t want to do is say: ‘The culture shifted — excuse my behavior.’ It provides a context for why I was wrong at the time, but I was wrong at the time.”
In an Instagram post on Wednesday, Armisen said that just the other day Albini had texted him about cymbals. He didn’t get cymbals: “Like I can tell the difference between this one and that one but if I’m honest they both sound like cymbals and I don’t care.”
Armisen concluded: “I always loved hearing him say ‘I don’t care.’”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
