This one is personal. No one defined the Soundtrack of My Life more prodigiously or aggressively than Steve Albini, the Chicago recording engineer who died Tuesday at age 61. Born in the same year, we both hit our strides in the '90s, he helping create music, me gobbling it all up at Tower Records with the big-newspaper wages in my pocket.
Most people of our generation know the foundational albums he engineered (he shunned the term "producer," because he was just that way) -- such as the Pixies' debut "Surfer Rosa" and Nirvana's finale "In Utero," two albums that almost perfectly bookend the Heyday of the Planet of Sound. There was also P.J. Harvey's urgent "Rid of Me"; the Breeders debut "Pod"; and hardcore albums by Fugazi and the Jesus Lizard.
But Albini considered himself a craftsman, a technician, a hired gun, and he worked with a wide range of bands and artists. That includes some of my favorite, more obscure, albums from the '90s, such as the Poster Children's "Flower Plower"; the Wedding Present's "Seamonsters" (and a lot of David Gedge's subsequent output); Man or Astro-Man's "Project Infinity": "Fresh Gasoline" by Phono-Comb; "Sport Fishin'" by Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet; and the Bottletones' "Adult Time." He even contributed to peak Guided by Voices, with two tracks on 1996's "Under the Bushes, Under the Stars." The list goes on.
I could link to dozens of songs below. Better yet, seek out those albums and experience them in full. Albini's passing earned an outpouring of respect. Christopher Borrelli at the Chicago Tribune penned a thoughtful appreciation. Consequence of Sound did a nice job putting together this compilation of essential tracks. And the New Yorker's music critic, Amanda Petrusich, weighed in at the end of the week. As next-gen Petrusich put it: "When I was a teenager coming of age, in the late nineties, 'Steve Albini' was more of an idea than a person, a pair of words—melodious, mysterious—stamped onto every other record I loved or was terrified by."
It's not just nostalgia -- or the fact that Albini was about four months older than me -- that jolted me upon hearing of his unexpected death. He was a workhorse who dedicated himself to assisting artists in realizing their potential. He was a perfectionist, a meticulous craftsman, a clever writer, and an intellectual. I admired all of his qualities, as well as his measured humility.
I also simply dug his output. Here is a list of the bands whose Albini-led albums I have owned (in addition to his own bands Big Black, Rapeman and Shellac), a beefy 33:
- Pixies
- Nirvana
- Slint
- Urge Overkill
- Helmet
- Poster Children (the pride of Champaign, Ill.)
- Breeders
- Amps
- Jesus Lizard
- Pigface
- Wedding Present
- Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet
- Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
- Fugazi
- P.J. Harvey
- Melt-Banana
- Gaunt
- Superchunk
- Fleshtones
- Man or Astro-Man?
- Robbie Fulks
- Phono-Comb
- Guided by Voices (2 tracks from Under the Bushes, Under the Stars)
- Veruca Salt
- Sadies
- Cinerama
- Bottletones
- Mclusky
- Frames
- Desert Fathers
- Electrelane
- Joanna Newsom
- Cloud Nothings
I'll see the Cloud Nothings in June in Chicago, and before that, the Sadies in Santa Fe in late May. We'll catch the Pixies in Denver in late June. And we'll see GBV for the umpteenth tour, this time in Austin in late October. Those were all planned before the news of Albini's sudden demise. But it speaks to how indelible his impact on me has been across the decades, and endures.
Albini was a brash young man, who said and did things he later regretted and atoned for. He grew as a man. (In my 20s I once made a co-worker seek refuge in her car for a good cry. I got to apologize to her a decade or so later. And I corrected my behavior.) He could be devastatingly acerbic, such as when he penned the ultimate public fuck-you to a Chicago music critic whose year-end list hyped the record-company darlings of the day, the passing fads Smashing Pumpkins, Liz Phair and Urge Overkill (the latter one of Albini's clients). See his letter to the Reader alt-weekly, titled "Three Pandering Sluts and Their Music-Press Stooge." He later was a professional poker player. He was a multi-dimensional guy. No one is one thing.
Neil Steinberg, a longtime writer at the Chicago Sun-Times, visited with his old J-school classmate Albini in a 2021 story. Albini, a working-class hero to the end, demystified the secret of getting through life: "You can’t say, ‘I want a long and important career.’ What you can do is keep plugging away doing what you think is valuable, in a way that you’re comfortable with." And that's what he did.
Steinberg asked him to define success. Albini gave a zen-like answer: "I’ve always tried to see everything as a process. I want to do things in a certain way that I can be proud of that is sustainable and is fair and equitable to everybody that I interact with. If I can do that, then that’s a success." He then added "And success means that I get to do it again tomorrow.”
I've always shared that self-declared working-class persona, even as a privileged daily newspaperman and a labor lawyer. I get to go punch a clock tomorrow and the next day. Albini's work is done.
BONUS TRACKS
We featured a couple of Shellac tracks at the end of this review.
Check out the glorious, shimmery guitar solo in Guided by Voices' "Sheetkickers" from 1996:
Albini gave an extended tour of his studio about five years ago to EarthQuaker Devices, which produced this half-hour video:
And not an editorial statement, merely one of Albini's earliest and best productions, Kim Deal and the Breeders with "Hellbound":
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