Musician, studio engineer, champion of the artist: the remarkable life and legacy of Steve Albini, arguably the most influential man in U.S. alternative music…
“Operate as much as possible apart from the ‘music scene’,” went one commandment in the liner notes of Big Black’s posthumous live album Pigpile, disdain dripping from those inverted commas. That band’s founder and frontman Steve Albini certainly kept the mainstream at arm’s-length in the decades after that record’s release – but his influence on and importance to the development of alternative rock is incalculable.
Steve, who sadly died of a heart attack this week at the age of 61, came up in the early ’80s Chicago punk scene as a promoter, DJ and fanzine contributor. He quickly established a combative reputation, happy to adopt contrarian attitudes and savage both peers and heroes. It isn’t often you’ll hear this sentiment expressed in memoriam, but it would somehow be a betrayal of his truth-telling stance to ignore the fact that he could be an absolute arsehole.
This negativity and iconoclasm fed directly into Big Black. Punk had blown Steve’s world open, introducing him to new ideas and experiences; in return, he redefined it with this drum machine-backed trio. Stripped-down and direct, but rejecting macho cliché and rock excess, their fearsome racket birthed a new strain of alternative American music alongside contemporaries like Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers and Scratch Acid. Their non-compliance with standard industry practice – booking their own tours and refusing to employ lawyers or even management – proved no barrier to underground success. “The band had persisted in making this hideous music and proven that if you have a valid set of working principles, you can do it on your own terms and never have to kiss anybody’s ass,” Steve reflected to The Guardian in 2023.
After Big Black ceased operations in 1987, Steve’s second major contribution to leftfield noise began. Recording bands – he rejected the term producer, preferring to be credited as an engineer – became his day job, with work for Slint, Pixies, The Jesus Lizard and TAD establishing him as a highly-regarded go-to man when you wanted somebody to capture an accurate and potent representation of your sound. Clad in overalls – often seen as some sort of affectation, but actually because of the practicality of workwear when you’re crawling around the studio and working with your hands – his famously hands-off attitude and insistence on capturing reality, while also having a genius technical knowledge of how to do it properly, was entirely at the service of the band.
He could still be prone to spikiness, writing on clients in Forced Exposure, “I will do a good job for them, but this does not include shouldering any responsibility for their lousy tastes and mistakes.” But at the same time, his moral code meant he charged affordable rates and refused to take royalties, telling the writer Michael Azerrad, “It’s an insult to the band to say that because I recorded this album, you’re selling more records and therefore I want a cut.” Bear this in mind when you consider that he charged a flat fee of $100,000 for the record that could have continued to pay out considerable sums for the rest of his life.
The scene that he was helping to document (and he would later muse that he was a keeper of historical record, capturing culture in the moment) exploded into the wider consciousness when Nirvana released Nevermind in 1991. Plagued by a very real fear that its success represented a sell-out of their punk rock ideals, Kurt Cobain alighted on the idea that Steve was the person they needed for its follow-up. The engineer advised in a letter that Nirvana should, “Bang a record out in a couple of days, with high quality but minimal ‘production’ and no interference from the front office bulletheads.” He was duly employed.
Steve reflected to Kerrang! in 2021 on the experience of recording what would become In Utero: “I didn’t try to become a bosom buddy of Kurt’s, because I knew that everyone around him was trying to weasel their way into his world parasitically. But I got to see him at work, and I saw that he was genuinely serious about his music, and his passion was genuine.” This respect wasn’t reciprocated by Nirvana’s label Geffen, who drafted in another producer to remix Steve’s work. “The three members of Nirvana I have absolutely no gripe with whatsoever,” he told The Guardian. “Every other person they worked with was a manipulative piece of shit.”
After that experience, Steve continued to work with underground bands like Melt-Banana and Killdozer, as well as PJ Harvey's Rid Of Me, while facing financial difficulties after opening his Electrical Audio studio. Unlikely saviours came in the shape of Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, who recruited him to record their 1998 album Walking Into Clarksdale. Somewhat improbably, the former said he was a fan of Big Black’s Songs About Fucking, so the royal rock duo knew what they were getting into. Charging more than he would have done for, say, Superchunk, Steve did an excellent job while netting enough payment to ensure the survival of his new studio. It wasn't always easy, having more than once covered his bills via his side-hustle as a formidable poker player, but this just underscores his refusal to take more than he needed from the artists with whom he worked.
Alongside recording bands, Steve formed another essential noise-rock power trio in Shellac, with Bob Weston and Todd Trainer. Something in the taut control of this rhythm section and the primal power of Steve’s slashes of guitar sounded a little, funnily enough, like early Led Zeppelin, albeit a parallel universe version possessed of mordant wit, underground sensibilities and absolutely no songs about vikings, Lord Of The Rings or squeezing lemons. Working at a slow rate, Shellac released five official albums between 1994 and 2014, including the absolute classics At Action Park and 1000 Hurts. Their sixth album, To All Trains, is released next week.
Amongst all these achievements is another beyond music. In an age when many people in the public eye will refuse to apologise for past transgressions, often doubling down or issuing denials, Steve has displayed a rare willingness to reckon with his former persona as a pungent edgelord. He told Kerrang! the naming of his short-lived post-Big Black outfit Rapeman was “an inexcusable, indefensible mistake”. Recalling the way he would clumsily invoke racism, misogyny and homophobia in lyrics and statements – albeit with an intended irony – he maintained to The Guardian that “It was all coming from a privileged position of someone who would never have to suffer any of the hatred that’s embodied in that language.” Compare this to the way certain punk figureheads have stubbornly congealed into bigoted old men and realise that, once again, Steve was showing an alternative way to conduct yourself.
No other individual was directly involved in so many key albums over the past four decades, and we’ve barely scratched the surface here. Among many, many others, bands as varied as Jawbreaker, Fucked Up, High On Fire, Mogwai, Trash Talk, Sunn O))) and Code Orange all made some of their best works with him at the helm. Kerrang!, your record collection and the entire alternative music scene owe Steve Albini boundless respect and gratitude.
