If ever an underground icon swam with the music industry sharks and emerged with their integrity intact, it was Steve Albini. The acerbic Big Black and Shellac musician and studio engineer – he consistently denied the word ‘producer’ – whose death was confirmed yesterday (May 8) from a heart attack at his Chicago home, aged 61, was often a lone voice of anti-industry punk scene ethics, even as he worked with major labels on some of the biggest names in alternative rock.
Over almost 40 years as alt-rock’s most revered engineer, working on more than 2,000 albums, he shunned label interference and refused to exploit bands by taking royalty points on seminal albums such as Nirvana’s ‘In Utero’, Pixies’ ‘Surfer Rosa’, PJ Harvey’s ‘Rid Of Me’ and The Breeders’ ‘Pod’, thereby helping create a uniquely dry and visceral live sound that was at once raw and righteous. His opinion of the industry was made abundantly clear in his 1993 essay The Problem With Music, in which he described bands being offered a major label contract as swimming through “a trench…filled with runny, decaying shit” to sign it and broke down the financial realities of bands that make millions for industry and management figures ending up earning “about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11”.
Born in California in 1962 to a wildlife researcher father, Albini moved around with his family before settling in Missoula, Missouri. Here he learned to play bass while recovering from a broken leg and fell in love with the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, Devo and Pere Ubu. Moving to Chicago to study journalism, he became a divisive figure in the local punk scene thanks to his provocative zine writings, but also a pivotal one. His first major band Big Black, formed in 1981, packed their debut EP ‘Lungs’ with condoms and nosebleed tissues and sang songs of shocking violence, child abuse and misogyny, but made a coruscating noise on albums such as ‘Atomizer’ (1986) and ‘Songs About Fucking’ (1987) that invigorated the hardcore scene.
His next band, Rapeman – Albini would later express deep regret over his “indefensible” provocations from this era, akin to “getting a bad tattoo” – were short lived but the more refined abrasion of Shellac, formed in 1992 with Bob Weston and Todd Trainer, would become his primary musical outlet for the rest of his life, garnering acclaim for their five albums including 1994’s ‘At Acton Park’. A sixth Shellac album ‘To All Trains’ was due for release one week after Albini’s unexpected death.
It was with Pixies’ magnificently bare and aggressive 1988 album ‘Surfer Rosa’, though, that Albini made his name as an engineer. Recording was a ten-day blast of experiment, with Albini getting the band to play with metal picks, throw tennis balls at their guitars, record in the toilet and feed their vocals through guitars with, as Black Francis would say “all the needles on red”. Albini would later describe the record as “a patchwork pinch loaf from a band who at their top dollar best are blandly entertaining college rock” (and even later retract the slight), but this definitive proto-grunge album saw him become so sought-after by alt-rock acts such as PJ Harvey, The Breeders, The Wedding Present (whose ‘Seamonsters’ is an outstanding Albini classic) and The Jesus Lizard that his studio work would come to define the rest of his career.
In looking to return to their grittier roots following the multi-platinum success of ‘Nevermind’, Nirvana turned to Albini to record 1993’s savage ‘In Utero’, keen to emulate the Pixies and Breeders records which had influenced them. Albini obliged, penning a letter to the band laying out his process and ideology – that the label’s “front office bulletheads” should have no involvement, the band’s mood and opinions were paramount, Albini should be “paid like a plumber” and that “if a record takes more than a week to make, somebody’s fucking up”.
Objecting to the exploitation of artists by labels throughout his life, these were tenets Albini stuck by through a long, prodigious and celebrated studio career. He’d reputedly work with anybody who called him, from local Chicago hardcore bands to the likes of Page And Plant, Manic Street Preachers and Mogwai, always taking a variable flat fee. His style proved infinitely adaptable, making the intimate textures of Joanna Newsom’s ‘Ys’ (2006) or the dark dream pop of Low’s ‘Things We Lost In The Fire’ (2001) every bit as engrossing as the alternative metal of Helmet.
An agnostic atheist, food blogger and poker player – he won two gold bracelets at various World Series Of Poker tournaments – Albini would often surprise bands wary of his prickly reputation with an open and accommodating nature in the studio, insisting that he was merely there to serve their creativity. But, inadvertently maybe, his inimitable sound and aesthetic became a fundamental bedrock of much of the greatest alternative music of the past forty years. Turn it up.