On Wednesday morning, the cover of the new issue of the British music monthly Wire, with an illustration featuring a portrait of the American rock trio Shellac, went viral on the Internet. The trio is fronted by frontman Steve Albini with his typically disheveled hair, and the punkishly raw artwork from the artist who calls himself Savage Pencil fits perfectly with the aesthetic of the cult noiserock trio. However, on the same day in the afternoon, news of Albini’s death was already trending on social networks. The guitarist and producer died suddenly at the age of 61 from a heart attack, which he reportedly suffered right in the studio.
Albini was a key figure in the rock alternative of the eighties and nineties, played in several essential bands, recorded with Nirvana, Pixies and PJ Harvey among others, but also appeared as a sharp critic of conditions in the music industry. He was weaned by punk and transformed his philosophy of independence and intransigence into his musical practice – he never pretended to be a celebrity and treated stars and unknown bands with equal respect. During his lifetime he assisted in the recording of several thousand records.
He railed against big, dehumanized festivals, bands controlled by record companies or commercial dance music.
At first glance, it might seem that Albini fits perfectly into the pantheon of eccentric “studio magicians” such as Phil Spector or Martin Hannett, who are written down in rock history for their unorthodox approaches to recording records. Albini probably fulfills that as well – at least according to the famous historian, how when recording with the Pixies, he was not satisfied with the sound in the studio, moved the microphones to the toilets, and there Kim Deal recorded the backing vocals for the future indie hits Where Is My Mind? and Gigantic. But rather than a madman and an adventurer, Albini was a man of firm principles.
The biggest bands of the time strove for his presence in the recording studio, but he preferred to talk about himself as a “sound engineer” and told the musicians that it would be best if they produced themselves. “Musicians who record with me have to know what they want first and not wait for me to tell them,” he told me in a phone interview in 2008. When Nirvana recorded their third album In Utero with him, he charged her a regular list price and then refused to sign a contract guaranteeing him a percentage of the record’s sales. He never did that and he didn’t want his name on the record he was making because the band should always come first.
No barriers between the band and the fans
Steve Albini was born in Pasadena, California to a family with Italian roots. During his childhood, his parents often changed their place of residence. When Steve was a teenager, they settled in the college town of Missoula, Montana, and it was here that he first heard the Ramones. The fathers of punk changed his life at fifteen and directed him to play in bands, where he usually provided the bass guitar. He studied journalism and already wrote about music in several fanzines during his studies, he also hung around the Chicago publishing house Ruthless Records.
The founding punk wave was already a thing of the past by the early 1980s, but Albini believed that there was something timeless about the aesthetics of raw guitar riffs and the philosophy of the whole movement, and he held onto both for the rest of his life. When he founded the band Big Black at university in 1981, he wanted to distill the rebellious spirit of rock’n’roll and the uncompromisingness of punk into rough, uncombed music – best achieved on the records Atomizer and Songs About Fucking from the second half of the eighties. “We got into the studio, beat all the tracks and then got out again. It didn’t take very long, it didn’t cost much money,” he later praised the recording of the latter record, which is still considered a noiserock classic.
When Big Black broke up, he briefly played with the band Rapeman, named after a Japanese erotic comic, and in 1992 founded Shellac, whose sound he characterized as “minimalist rock”. In addition to records full of bone-crushing riffs, the band also became famous for their strict approach to concerts. They forbade promoters to compile a guest list, grant press accreditation or print large posters on quality paper. There was also no barrier between the band and the fans, which illustrates well the egalitarian approach that Shellac espoused. Their sixth (and likely final) album, To All Trains, is out next week on Touch and Go Records.
A raw sound and a gesture of defiance
Albini got his hands on the recording studio already during the recording of the first Big Black album, for which he meticulously provided all the instrument tracks except for the saxophone. From the mid-eighties, he was invited to the studio by local bands releasing on the Ruthless Records label, where he worked. In 1987, he produced the debut of the band Slint, and a year later Pixies recorded their first full-length album Surfer Rosa with him, one of the records that helped shape the wave of alternative rock of the nineties.
Albini’s approach was seemingly simple – the musicians basically played together in the studio to bring out the band’s chemistry, used a minimum of effects and puristly insisted on analog recording, which he believed digital could never replace. He usually did not interfere with the bands’ songs, trusting their judgment, but often had long and detailed conversations with them about their music.
Even Kurt Cobain fell in love with the album Surfer Rosa, and when Nirvana was about to record the follow-up to their breakthrough album Nevermind, he insisted that he wanted Albini in the studio. The record companies were giddy at the idea of their multi-million dollar acquisition being produced by a Chicago punk, and horrified even after hearing a finished record that was just as raw as Cobain wanted it to be. At the same time, Albini didn’t really love Nirvana’s music, he didn’t think they were anything special, but he wasn’t in the habit of rejecting bands that came to him. Cobain et al. moreover, he was sorry, he saw in them a band that had been absorbed by the music industry, and he took the punk sound of the third album In Utero as their proud gesture of defiance. This time, however, he refused to sign the contract, thereby losing a percentage of the sales.
The Nirvana case made Albini famous, and in the nineties he became one of the most sought-after names on the rock scene. With PJ Harvey, he records the breakthrough album Rid of Me, a few years later he has a part in the commercial blockbuster Razorblade Suicides by Bush and Low, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Neurosis, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion or Mono. Without his contribution, even the records of singer-songwriter Will Oldham aka Bonnie Prince Billy or harpist Joanna Newsom would not have been created. The Stooges or Manic Street Preachers invited him to record the album.
In 1997, Albini opened his own Electric Audio studio in Chicago, which continued to stick puristically to analog technology. When one of the studio engineers installed a ProTools computer in the studio, Albini allegedly refused to touch it. Among the several thousand bands that have recorded in the studio over the past two and a half decades, we also find the Czech (no longer existing) band A Banquet.
Deep in the shit
Albini also acknowledged his punk roots in relation to the music industry. His oft-cited article The Problem With Music from 1993 depicts the apocalyptic vision of a young band that decides to sign to a major record label, unwittingly entering into voluntary servitude. In the text, he calculates in detail the real costs of making a record, which often ends up being a band’s debt, as well as the resulting record company profits, ending with the line: “Some of your friends are probably this deep in the shit.” At the same time, he said of the Pixies that they would control by your manager.
Albini may have developed a reputation in music fan circles as a harsh commentator who opposes all news. He railed against big, dehumanized festivals, bands controlled by record companies or commercial dance music. He liked to write ironic remarks on Twitter. But Albini also welcomed the advent of the Internet, which gave musicians a chance to be more independent from the hated music industry. “I don’t identify with the music industry, but with the community, the band, the musician. And when it comes to these people, who I consider to be my partners, and their ability to get their own music out there at zero cost, it is undoubtedly the best thing that has happened to music culture in the last forty, fifty years,” Albini stated ten years ago in interview for the Figure8 portal.
Albini’s death at 61 is untimely and senselessly cruel to the independent scene. It also comes a week before the release of the new Shellac album. But Albini apparently died doing what he loved most: recording in the studio.
The author is the editor of Alarm.
