Steve Albini, the sound engineer, musician, and producer who left his mark on the alternative rock scene of the 1990s, died at the age of 61 of a heart attack, according to the staff of Electronic Audio, his prestigious recording studio.
Recognized as a key producer of the ’90s scene, Albini preferred to be remembered as a recording engineer. His work with Pixies and Nirvana (it is fair to also remember Rid of Me by PJ Harvey), without a doubt, marked both his personal experiences and his resume.
Before his family relocated to Missoula, Montana, Steve Albini was born in Pasadena, California, and had a nomadic childhood. As a teenager, his discovery of the Ramones transformed his “normal childhood in Montana” into a completely different and more wild entity. In the following years, while studying journalism in Illinois, he became attracted to the Chicago punk scene. He rose to fame in the early 1980s as the leader of Big Black, the trio known for their aggressive guitar-based rock that featured live playing with a snare drum without a drummer, a rarity for the time.
In his free time, Albini wrote articles for Matter magazine in the 1980s. With them he earned the reputation as a cultural agitator that accompanied him for the rest of his life. Throughout his career, he worked with artists such as Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, The Stooges, Pixies and PJ Harvey, among many others. On September 21, 1993, Nirvana released their third and final studio album, In Utero, for which the band turned to him as producer.
Interviewed by the Kerrang! site in 2021, Albini revealed a funny anecdote related to the production of the album. The story is that Nirvana had paid him $100,000 to work on recording the album, but the group had the opportunity not to spend a cent if they won a bet.
What did it consist of? The producer and sound engineer suggested they play pool. If any of the group members beat him, he would work for free. But if the producer won, the band had to pay him double. “I did it with all the bands I worked with, but no one accepted the offer. It’s not that I’m a great player, but I have the same chance of winning as anyone in a fair game. Ultimately, I wasn’t going to change my mind. if I was paid twice as much for the session or if I worked for nothing. But I guess Nirvana was a little more reluctant to take risks than me,” confirmed the rejection of the offer by the group led by Kurt Cobain.
Albini was far from being a big fan of Nirvana when he got the call to work with them. As the leader of “anti-establishment” rock groups like Big Black, he was quite skeptical when a mainstream band asked for his services. He eventually accepted a flat fee to work on the album instead of a standard contract that would have given him a cut of the royalties. “I think paying royalties to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible. I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the work, and you pay me what it’s worth. There is no way I would accept that much money. I wouldn’t be able to sleep,” she wrote.
Two years ago, before Primavera Sound landed in Buenos Aires, its creator, Gaby Ruiz, spoke with admiration and pride about Shellac, steve Albini’s band, and the fetish group of his festival. “When I see Shellac repeatedly on our lineup being one of the most complicated bands on the planet, they don’t sign a contract, they always shake hands, you know they’re going to look at your lineup, and if they don’t like it, they’re not going to come, a band that plays very little and for me is one of the pillars of that ethic within rock. It seemed very difficult to me to announce them in Los Angeles (they will also be in Buenos Aires), given the nature of that market and the fact that I saw their name in it. However, I was able to do so. I laughed at the poster alone,” said the Catalan producer.
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