In memoriam: As a '90s producer and music tastemaker, Steve Albini was brutally honest -- and usually right

CHICAGO — Steve Albini, who died on Tuesday in Chicago at 61, talked a lot.

Like, a lot a lot. The first time I met him was about 30 years ago. I was a graduate student at Northwestern University and assigned to interview somebody, and I had just bought “In Utero,” Nirvana’s follow-up to its blockbuster album “Nevermind.” Albini was the producer of “In Utero,” and one of my favorite albums, the Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa,” and so I called him, he agreed to chat, and while I remember little of what he said, I remember we talked for hours.

He had studied journalism himself at Northwestern, so he was generous. He had endless opinions on culture and music and what it means to stand by your convictions. I remember at point simply asking what a record producer did. He said he wasn’t a record producer, he was a record engineer. I asked what that was, and he said it was like a record producer.

A year ago, the last time I spoke to him, I asked about his first concert, and he replied as he replied to everything, with too much knowledge and detail and an opinion so insightful and provocative and hilarious that it sucked the air from the room. The concert was the Edgar Winter Group, Sept. 27, 1975, Montana, where he lived as a teenager. He recalled his father saying people only went to rock shows to buy drugs. He recalled, as Edgar Winter launched into a 20-minute keyboard solo, the “dead-eyed gaze” of Johnny Winter “navigating solo breaks in this tumultuous excess, like Ahab resigned to his fate in a dinghy, tossed by the sea and pernicious corpus of his brother’s prog rock white whale …” He didn’t know if the concert itself was exactly a good idea, but: “An impressionable young Steve thanks whoever set it up for those enduring images of madness and futility.”

Albini talked like that.

He was an intimidating guy, and eventually, a sweet guy. He was, as kids say these days, a “gatekeeper,” the prototypical record store owner who frowns at what you bring to his cash register — though he made records, he didn’t sell them. The day after he died, the satirical website Hard Times posted this headline: “Steve Albini standing outside gates of Heaven telling everyone how much he hates the Smashing Pumpkins.”

He could go off on corporate culture and its deadening effects on artists and consumers (and did so elegantly at times, for literary journals like the Hyde Park-based Baffler). He produced famous records and made lesser-known ones with his bands Big Black and Shellac, but also became, by dint of his taste, a sought-after totem of cultural integrity — a representative of a way of being. Or as comedian Fred Armisen told this newspaper several years ago: “Steve Albini became a huge influence on me, which I don’t know if he knows. He had this philosophy on how to live and be and gave me advice I still keep in mind.” As for Albini, he always kept it blunt: “I wasn’t a fan of Trenchmouth (Armisen’s Chicago-based punk band) — and so that’s not why we would have become friends.”

He was vintage Gen X sarcastic, ironic, contrarian, defiantly principled. One of the best things ever written on music was Albini’s 1993 essay “The Problem With Music” for the Baffler, in which he laid out finances, empty promises, unnecessary flourishes. It opens with quite the metaphor: a band (“some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances”) standing at one end of a trench filled with waste and at the other end is a music industry “lackey” with a fountain pen and contract. Whoever swims the trench first will get the deal. Only then, the industry insists: “Swim it again, please. Backstroke.”

Thomas Frank, the founder of the Baffler, told me in an email that he never knew Albini personally, but that essay for the journal would become its “consummate expression”: “Seeing through the falsehoods of the culture industry was the first order of business, and no one was better at it than Steve Albini.”

By credits alone, Albini became not only a glue stick of underground music, and a major influence around the country as Wicker Park became an early ‘90s music mecca, but a tastemaker for what was once called college radio music and later rebranded “alt rock.”

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