Saturday, May 11, 2024

"I'm a weirdo; all my friends are weirdos" — more from Steve Albini


 

     When a reader makes a suggestion, I sometimes testily reply that I'm not a Holiday Inn lounge pianist or short-order cook. I don't take requests. Other times I nod and get busy. I suppose the difference is what the request is..
     A reader pointing to a line in my second 2021 piece about sound engineer Steve Albini — "I only wish I could have printed more of our conversation" — and observing that now, with his untimely death last Tuesday, would be an apt moment to fulfill that wish, well, I nodded and checked, and found a lengthy transcript. Normally I like to flit from one topic to the next, but it's a pleasure to hang with Steve, let's do it a little longer. I hate to pile on, but the New York Times gave his obit 2/3 of a page on Friday, so it's not just me. I'll begin with a few observations from a version of the story that never ran.


     "I miss Steve," I thought, which was odd, because I hadn't seen him in nearly 40 years, when we were both students at Northwestern. I helped run the humor magazine, Rubber Teeth, and he drew for the magazine. He also was a punk musician, and I was on the far periphery of the campus music scene because my freshman roommate had been guitarist in a popular band.
     Albini had made a name for himself, as a student, by confronting the calcified strata of mouth-breathing frat certitude that encrusted Northwestern like a coral reef. He was most notorious for inviting his enemies to throw things at him — a stunt I witnessed, or remembered witnessing, Steve crouched behind a plexiglas shield as a kind of performance art piece....

     Like any old college classmates, we talked about school, and teachers who inspired us. Albini said he really admired David Protess, who taught journalistic ethics and ran The Innocence Project. I said I felt lucky to study drawing with Ed Paschke.

     "He and I became friends," Albini said. "My wife threw an elaborate birthday party for my 35th birthday, I was really touched he showed up. When he died, I met his son, corresponded with his son.
     "He was easily the best educator at Northwestern. He had a really interesting relationship with his own work that I really admired. He had a regular thing he would do where he would take his class to his studio, and he would have work all around his studio, and he would tell his students they were free to add anything they wanted to to his paintings. If you wanted to do something to one of his paintings, go ahead. I didn't understand that at the time. We talked about it afterward, and he said, 'Every once in a while someone would do something really intrusive and really bold. Or sometimes people would just do some really tiny thing, continue filing in a color, something like that.' He said that was an interesting display of their relationship with someone else's work, whether they would be respectful, or make their mark on it.
     "The most important thing it did for him, it gave him a problem to resolve, he saw most of his work as solving the problems that are presented by the image. If you are trying to convey something , and it's not there yet, that means there's some problem you need to find the problem and address the problem and that will get you on your way to finishing the image. I really admired that for a number of different reasons. It was very playful. His paintings were sold on subscription, anything, they were selling for astronomical sums, $100,000 and more, and here he was willing to let some sophomore fuck it up."

     We talked about Northwestern.

     "What was a big shock to me, I had never been around people with money before," said Albini. "People my age who had no concern with money. Bottomless wealth at their disposal. One of my first roommates, Lauren James Godfrey III. He had a leather valise. A freshman going through his stock portfolio. . . "

     I mentioned my roommate Kier helped widen my musical horizons. I showed up at school liking Bob Dylan and Elton John, and he was playing the Talking Heads and the Buzzcocks.

     "Kier Strejcek is actually an important musical figure," Albini said. "His brother, Nathan Strejcek was in The Teen Idles with Ian MacKaye who later started Minor Threat and Fugazi."
     "Can I tell him you said that?" I asked. Albini was nothing if not an arbiter of cool.
     "He knows that," Albini said. "It's his brother..."
     "No," I replied. "...that he's an important musical figure."
     "He was revered. He was the big brother, well literally, to the hardcore punks in Washington DC. who started a movement. He was sort of seen as the older brother who knew... he learned to play guitar before everybody else. He was in bands before everybody else. He moved away, he had a band when he moved out here. He's a seminal though not necessarily critical figure."

     I told him a story about Kier and I giving a ride to Nathan Kaatrud, the future Nash Kato of Urge Overkill, a pompous poseur who sneered at people like Kier and myself as grinds who work for a living while artists like himself soared into the empyrean.

     "That's an early indication of what a piece of shit that guy was," Albini said. "He was my roommate for years. Putting everyone else down is super fun."

     We talked about how to live a moral life.

     "My ethics are principally about my behavior," Albini said. "On a personal level I don't want to be involved in things I don't respect. As professional, whatever walks in the door I have to do a good job on it doesn't matter what it is. I'm not very selective with my clients. That surprises some people just because I am fairly rigorous about the way I conduct myself and the way my band behaves.
Electrical Audio

     "The money is not really a big part of it here. Everything operates on a knife edge in the music scene at the moment. Pandemic aside, the margins people operate on in the music scene are so so small. The amount of money that can be made off a recording has dwindled over the years because physical formats are less and less, though recently there has been a huge resurgence in vinyl, which is heartening. A lot of record labels will do a release, it's an official release if there is vinyl. That's the only physical format that sells anymore.
     "It's weird being involved in music," he said. "You're at this nexis between youth culture and broader culture and artistic ambition, creative impulse and whatever, and then all these secondary material concerns that impinge on it in a million different way. I love making records and love working with musicians, people I admire and respect. The people that work in the studio, I would take a bullet for any of those people. But that I have to do it in a capitalist system is oppressive, that I have to do it as a business owner, and be the president of the organization in order to have standing in certain scenarios.
     "When I first got into music, the music I was attracted to was weirdo music. I'm a weirdo. All my friends are weirdos." Here he laughed. "My peer group is weirdos. All the music that I've ever done has had, it's never bothered me who listened to it. My main consideration was I wanted to do it and I wanted to do it in a way I felt good about. The way my bands have always conducted themselves has been internally consistent. We knew why we were doing things the way we did. We had a process we were going through . The end result was we were going to make music and we would perform it if people would have us. Other people just don't enter into it. I described it once as an extremely selfish enterprise. Shellac of North America — we are the only three people on earth that matter, in terms of opinions about our music. We don't do press releases, don't do advertising. We don't do any kind of promotion for our records at all. We will announce our tour dates, and when a record comes out there is an announcement that it is coming out. But we don't advertise it, we don't do active promotion of any kind because I've always been bothered by things being thrust at me. I detest advertising. I have TIVO for watching television at home. I haven't seen a commercial in 10 years. I have ad blockers on all my computers. Don't see ads on YouTube videos. I don't see it. That's intentional, I don't like having that kind of commerce intrude into my experience. I think it's cheap and crass when someone is trying to make money from my attention. Someone wants my attention, and their purpose is to try to extract value from me. That seems like a dishonest relationship and I just won't participate in it.
     "How many of our records sell? I have no idea. We make money. I don't know how we do relative to our peers. I don't know what a good selling record is, what a bad selling record is. We make music exclusively for ourselves and we're lucky enough that other people like it and buy it.
     "The music scene, because it's so cliquish, with so many different subcultures contained in the music scene. My band is well known, within our circles, right? But I'm smart enough to know our circles aren't very large."
     He laughed again.
     "If you took a random sampling of people, I used to say from the phone book, random sampling from any neighborhood in Chicago, if you got a thousand people you might find one that knew my name. And that's in the city I live in at the time I'm alive."

     There's more, but that should do. We did talk about what he'd do when his hearing went, I suggested he write a book. He said that he did get asked to write things pretty regularly, and that he would love to write "a comprehensive manual of recording practices" including "all the institutional knowledge we have inside the building." I put him in touch with my editor at the University of Chicago Press, but nothing came of it, which is a pity, because Steve Albini was a true professional and unique, unsparing, fearless voice. He will be missed by many.






14 comments:

  1. I’m sorry to hear about this. Big hugs, my friend.

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  2. This is something wonderful, thank you for sharing. My musician boyfriend and I were driving down Belmont last week and he pointed out the studio, mentioned Steve Albini, the owner, who was an acquaintance of his, and noticed that the light were still on in there pretty late into the evening, just 4 days prior to the light going out.

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  3. All this, and you didn't ask him about Zappa?

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  4. I miss him already.

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  5. Thank you. I trust you did pass the compliment on to Kier. But tell me about transcripts. I assume this means you have them for all the interviews you've done, and from what I gather from earlier columns, you don't actually have a team of eager young assistants listening to hours of tape and transcribing it all. On the other hand, if you do it yourself, I don't see how you have time to do much else. Are you using one of the AI services like Otter or Temi? I do oral history interviews for our local museum and transcripts are the bane of my existence.

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    1. Neil did tell me about Steve's comments on the day of the interview. I called Steve to let him know that no one in DC is revering my place in punk history. He said he thought I was "patient zero" in the DC punk movement.

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  6. As Warren Zevon said : "try to enjoy every sandwich".

    He knew his death was coming , but dont we all? Steve seems to have lived his life true to his beliefs . I have tremendous respect for the man.

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  7. I'm the reader that suggested the additional information. Thanks for publishing it.

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  8. I have never been a follower of hard rock, so all this info about Steve Albini is new to me. The story about Ed Paschke plays in beautifully to the extended expressions of Albini. Both were totally independent and true to their own values as artists. The depths of being an artist are imbedded in the discoveries we make as a result of trusting our instincts. What you have chosen to extract from your notes is nothing short of intoxicating. Thank you N.S. for writing this inspiring tribute.

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  9. Thanks for this, Neil. It’s excellent and completely consistent with the Steve I knew. (If you will excuse a moment of pedantry I think you meant arbiter of cool, not arbitrator. But maybe you didn’t.)

    Although I share his disdainful view of Nash Kato, I’m amused that Steve’s justification was that Nash’s MO was to speak poorly of others. Despite his positivity and enthusiasm on many subjects, no one ever spoke more poorly of more others than Steve did, and I say that with love. He was known for it literally around the world.

    He did it pointedly, intelligently, generally out of disappointment in people’s attitude or behavior but sometimes out of disdain for their music. (He did come to retreat from aspects of his punk rock attitude later in life.) So there was often a positivity to Steve’s negativity, if that makes sense.

    The shit-talking around his poker table — aimed at those present and absent alike — was epic, hilarious, at times mercilessly hard-edged, and surely what kept some of the players coming back.

    I’m taken aback that you went to college with Steve. In my mind you occupy separate universes.

    Steve was riveting, patient, generous, brilliant. A true polymath. A great texter. Whenever I texted him he responded immediately with something worth reading. I take that as a compliment, but I bet he was that way with many people.

    Thanks to the card game I was fortunate to spend time with him frequently over many years. I will miss him terribly.

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    1. No worries about pedantry — a good man's failing. Fixed now. I know what you mean about separate universes. I'm very glad I reached out to him three years ago — pure loneliness. I was surprised he agreed, but then he had mellowed, and I always made a point to be extravagantly nice to him in school — though that was something of a flex of my own, because I sensed that Steve WANTED normies to hate him, and I didn't want to give him the satisfaction.

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  10. i'd not heard of hime before your writings. just listened to a couple cuts of his 'songs about fucking' cd-i get it now, pretty damn good

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  11. He could have written a book about being true to your ideals - a book that would be useful to many of our brethren.

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  12. I went to Northwestern from '78-80 - was in Medill but took more Poli Sci, Philosophy, and History courses than journalism, and was, rather miserably, in Navy ROTC. Kier was simply *the* campus rock star. I lived at the NU Apartments, knew several excellent musicians, and my closest friend studied fine art. We'd stay up all night getting stoned and listening to Talking Heads, Wire, Eno, Pere Ubu, and ALSO Neil Young, Dylan, Hendrix, the Dead.

    Had no idea that Steve was a (near?) contemporary at NU, or that he went there at all. Very cool and illuminating piece - thank you for posting!

    Dale Geist

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