To our age group, the independent music scene started with Nevermind. Ten years before Nirvana, before independent music was considered commercially viable, only independent record labels stood for bands who were actively noncommercial. In the mid '80s Big Black, fronted by Steve Albini, made every effort to confront its audience with abrasive sounds and songs about rape and racism, molestation and guys who enjoy watching cows get slaughtered.
Since the breakup of Big Black, Steve Albini has concentrated on production work, producing The Pixies opus Surfer Rosa as well as albums for indie staples Tad, Guided by Voices, Dinosaur Jr, The Jon Spencer Blue Explosion and such mainstream mainstays as PJ Harvey, Nirvana and Bush. The Daily Cardinal recently spoke with Albini about garage music, overproduction and ZZ Top.
Daily Cardinal: Around the office we've been listening to The Living Things, but you've worked on far bigger bands like Bush and instant classics like The Pixies. How do you choose bands to work with?
Steve Albini: Basically it's whoever calls me on the phone.
DC: Do you give preference to bigger people?
SA: I don't get many calls from bigger people. Basically the people who come to the studio to work are, you know, underground level, independent bands. Every now and again a bigger band will come here to do some recording on the record which I may or may not be involved in. For example, The Living Things record-I was involved in it for a very short period of time.
Billy Corgan's new band Zwan, came to our studio and recorded here for a couple of months. But I personally didn't work on those sessions, our staff did. The bands I work with, by in large... every four or five years I get a call by a band working on a bigger record label and I end up working on that record, but most of the time those people don't approach me.
DC: It's kind of surprising though, because you instantly ooze indie credibility.
SA: You know, I don't think anyone really cares about that.
DC: Really?
SA: Who goes into a record store and asks \Do you have anything which has any secondary, second-hand indie credibility? Because that was what I was looking for, something with second-hand indie credibility."" I don't know what that means, when you use that term; I have heard people use that term before. I know what genuine credibility means, when someone makes a statement, and you have to evaluate whether or not it's a credible utterance. But I don't know what indie cred, with respect to the business means.
But in a lot of ways the independent music scene has become a dollhouse version of the regular, major label record scene. There are some bigger indie labels, which have manipulative contracts and bad relations with their bands, and are quick to sue and that sort of thing. I think that the political will within the record labels isn't reflected within the bands necessarily all that often. You see bands quite willing to do whatever it takes to get out of the indie scene and into the mainstream.
DC: How did that change, from the days of SST and Big Black?
SA: If you're thinking of, say, the early '80s, there were no options for smaller independent bands, especially punk bands. No big record label was going to sign them, so if they wanted to put out a record, they had to do it themselves. No one was going to help them put on a tour, so they had to do that themselves. So bands like Black Flag literally invented the underground touring network, and the independent music labels.
There had been independent specialty labels for things like klezmer [traditional Jewish folk music] and that sort of stuff before then. As far as rock bands having a viable career in a literal sense in the independent scene, that was all invented during that period. Now it's taken for granted that if you want to you can be on an independent label and do it that way and play small clubs, but if you want to be on MTV2 or on the Warped Tour.
The underground music scene has matured to the point where it's developed its own breed of assholes. I don't, in any way, equate the independent music scene to the major label music scene. The major label music scene is 100 percent liars and fuckers. The independent music scene is maybe five percent liars and fuckers.
DC: When did it change?
SA: I think it's been a process, and I don't think it changed at any one point. But during the '90s after Nirvana got popular I did notice a change in peoples' attitude. I did notice that bands started to think in terms of a career rather than in terms of fun or excitement. Like a band who would tour not because they enjoyed touring, but because they thought it would help sell records, or that it was expected of them. I would see bands going into a studio and do something in an active sense to mimic other bands who had been successful. And that was a relatively new phenomenon.
DC: Did you hear your sound being mimicked, from Big Black, in modern music?
SA: I would hear vague glances and vague nods towards the music that surrounded me during the '80s. There are bands which do a cabaret version of noise rock or new wave music or whatever. It's hard for me to take those people seriously. But there was a period where there were bands which were doing industrial music.
In the '90s the term industrial came to mean something different as a descriptive term then it did in the '80s. There's industrial music which developed around Ministry and The Revolting Cocks and The Thrill Kill Cult and Nine Inch Nails. But it sounded like them in a really unflattering way. I was a big fan of the early industrial scene-Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Suicide, The White Noise, White House all had that sort of stuff.
This really, really unpleasant, noisy stuff-I was really a fan of it. And then the term industrial became applied to these bands who were basically electronic disco outfits through fuzz, and a lot of that stuff, Ministry in particular, sounded like they were imitating some aspects of Big Black, and that was annoying, but not that annoying. What bothered me was the co-opting of what I thought was a very fertile train of thought in the early industrial music scene. I thought there was a lot of very interesting stuff being done there, and that all got abandoned for disco. And that was a shame. But as far as specific influences on bands that I've done, I hear little winks of it every now and then.
DC: What do you see as the difference between being a producer and recording engineer?
SA: Producers, in the classical sense, are responsible for everything on the record. Monolithic record companies would have a staff of producers, and they would be required to come up with records every year. They would pick the artists from a staff of artists, and they would pick the material from a pool of material, and they would pick the musicians from a pool of musicians and assemble the whole thing, arrange it, see to its recording, pay every one involved with the record labels money and turn the record into the record company. And there you are, that's your job.
I certainly don't do that. And I know that most people who take producers credits don't do that either. What they are is decision makers, people who sit in the room and make decisions, like ""I think we should have a cello here"" or ""Here, don't bother playing that drumroll."" I'll get the session drumroll player to come in and do it. And I don't do that either, even on the most basic level. In the situation where I'm working on the record, the band is the one making those fundamental decisions. So if anyone is producing the album, it's the band.
DC: Do you think there are albums that have been ruined by people producing them?
SA: A lot, actually. The AC/DC catalogue after ""Back in Black,"" pretty much all of Robert Plant's solo records, later Cheap Trick albums, Thin Lizzy records, later Aerosmith records. These are bands, the people sought intentionally because they each had a run of great records.
And then production came in, and they put out a slew of really bad records. They're capable of greatness up to a point, but at that point production stepped in and it got weird. I didn't even mention the best example ever of a band fucked by their own producer: ZZ Top. What a brilliant band! What a perfect band! What an absolutely untouchably finely tuned machine! And then somebody dragged a drum machine out of the closet.
DC: What do you think about this deluge of new lo-fi garage bands?
SA: Whatever. There's been a garage scene festering underground for a long time. I can't fault those people, people like the White Stripes; they've been doing this a long time and I can't say that it isn't a genuine part of their soul or that they shouldn't take whatever credit for doing what they've always been doing.
At the start of any trend, there's always a germ of something interesting. Otherwise, people wouldn't have taken interest and made the trend. But when things become so superficial and so identifiable with specific given traits, it's a good indicator that there's nothing going on inside.
DC: Who are you working with these days?
SA: Rock bands, folk singers, punk bands, electronic bands-the electronic bands are pretty old school very BEEP as opposed to UMPST-UMPST-UMPST-and a country western guy. I'm not too keen on talking about people in the specific, because I'm not that comfortable associating myself with somebody who didn't want me to make that association.
DC: Do you dig all the music you work on?
SA: Do I like the music that I work on? A small portion of it. The majority of the music that I work on never registers with me on an aesthetic level. In the same way that if I was a gynecologist, I wouldn't expect to be turned on all day, I don't think that if you work on something in a professional capacity that it has the same effect on you when you deal with it in your civilian life.
I might hear a song two or three hundred times in an analytical sense, but it's not the same thing as my hearing the song to decide if I like it. It's not possible to have the same relationship to music that you work on to music you hear as a fan. If I tried to do that, either strictly work on music I enjoyed as a fan or even evaluated the music I worked on in that way, I would do a worse job. I would not be paying attention to the principle job, which is getting it on tape and not fucking it up.
I have been surprised by albums that I've worked on years later. I'll be like ""What's that"" and it will turn out to be a record I worked on for a few days. That has happened to me, I have been surprised after the fact by a record I have worked on.
DC: That's all I have for you. Anything else I should ask you?
SA: Hmmm... anything else? [Pause] You guys must be pretty bummed that The Onion left town, huh?
