Arts & Entertainment
In Resurfaced 2001 Interview, Music Maker Steve Albini Talks Motivation and What Sets Chicago Apart — Part 1
Steve Albini is interviewed by WTTW News on Aug. 30, 2001. (WTTW News)
Steve Albini’s sudden death in May at age 61 shocked Chicago, his vast network of friends and music fans around the world.
Hearing the news, I recalled a 2001 interview with him but couldn’t find the transcripts. With help from the WTTW Tape Library, the raw tapes were rediscovered and re-transcribed.
It was Aug. 30, 2001, when WTTW News visited Electrical Audio studio for a conversation with Albini about music and motivations.
We visited for a special report on local music for the series “Artbeat Chicago.” We also spoke with Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick, Neko Case, Andrew Bird, Lonnie Brooks and Alejandro Escovedo, among others.
Albini was 39 years old and already a legend. As a recording engineer, he had recorded Nirvana, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, the Breeders, the Pixies and PJ Harvey. As a musician, he made his mark with the bands Big Black and Shellac.
He also had a well-earned rep for acerbic commentary, a nice way of saying he didn’t suffer fools easily and would call you out if he thought you were stupid.
So, we went with a bit of trepidation — or at least I did — but when I first asked how he’d like his name onscreen, he said, “Just call me Steve. I’m not that touchy. I used to be touchy,” he added with a smile.
As it turned out, Albini was a generous host who made good, strong coffee while his Italian greyhound ran around the studio and jumped onto the pool table.
His intellect was intimidating. Notice how he speaks in complete, thoughtful sentences — highly uncommon! I did my homework and reminded myself not to pretend to know more than I did (always a recipe for trouble).
What follows is Part 1 of our interview, in which Albini talks about the music industry and what sets Chicago apart. Part 2 follows tomorrow, with his words on Cheap Trick and punk rock.
WTTW News: We’ve been speaking with established recording artists as well as newer ones. Do you think the new ones know what they’re getting into with a career in music?
Steve Albini: I look at being involved in music the way I’d look at any other thing that I would do as a passion, like cooking or skiing. I don’t genuinely think that the world requires musicians to the extent that people want to be musicians, so I think it’s unrealistic to expect that something you’re doing because you want to do it is going to ultimately be your career.
I think it breeds disappointment for people to have the expectation that they can sustain themselves, that the world will carry them along on its shoulders just because they want to play music for a living. I think that’s an unrealistic expectation for most people. I think it’s healthier to be involved in music because you want to be involved in music, and on rare occasions someone will pay you because you’ve done it.
So more of a vocation and less of a career?
Albini: Yeah, ultimately everyone earns a living somehow, whether it’s by begging or theft or honest endeavor. Everybody earns a living, and some of those people play music, and sometimes playing music becomes a career, but that’s a trajectory that you really can’t predict. If you make that a goal for yourself, I think more often than not you will be frustrated or compromising yourself for the sake of earning a living. And if you can take earning a living out of the scope of your musical endeavor, then the endeavor becomes pure pleasure, a complete aesthetic enterprise. It becomes creative expression unassociated with any of the mundane aspects of your life, and I wouldn’t have it any other way, personally.
I know people who have either by accident or act of will turned their bands or their musical pursuits into their jobs, and the job aspect of it then consumes their lives. People end up resenting their bands and their music. They end up feeling beholden to them or hemmed in. And that wouldn’t be a rewarding way for me to be relating to music, because I’ve always seen music as being its own reward.
Steve Albini performs. (Credit: Freekorpos / Wikimedia Commons)
You’ve written about how musicians sell their soul to the company store — they get signed, they think they made it, but their troubles are just beginning…
Albini: The greater music business has had a very consistent track record, and it’s had a predictable mode of dealing with band members and artists of all types. For 50 or 60 years the mainstream music business has done things on basically a sharecropper model. The musicians and artists are responsible for all of the costs associated with making the records, and only after those costs have been absorbed from the artists’ royalty — which is the only fee that the artist gets paid for making a record — only at that point does the artist make money off of his record.
Throughout the manufacturing cycle, where costs are being ascribed and invoiced out, the record label is making a profit on the records, but the artist isn’t. That model has been in place from the very beginning of the music business. It started with sheet music and carried on through player piano rolls, wax cylinders and phonograph records and ultimately CDs and radio airplay. The artist is not the first but rather the last person to make a penny off of his work. And that system is so entrenched and the people who work in that system are so ingrained in that way of thinking that they no longer even see how preposterous it is, and the music business itself has come to view itself as being legitimate and honorable despite this sort of obvious inequity.
By making the step to be a part of that, you are acquiescing to being treated this way. If someone decides to be part of this stratum of the music business, then it’s sort of the same as being a race car driver or a jet pilot. You know you might crash or get killed or at the very least you’re going to be uncomfortable most of the time, but the ride is worthwhile and that’s the tradeoff that people are making.
Now there is a secondary tier to the music business. There’s an independent label tier where there are entrepreneurial owners of record labels and people who came up through the ranks of independent rock bands who are much more in tune with the fraternal spirit of it and who, generally speaking, treat the artists fairly and don’t take advantage of accounting procedures or disruptive modes of business.
In that world it is possible to function honorably, to be paid well and treated with respect, taking it as a given that you will never achieve superstar status. You’ll never be a household name because that only comes with an enormous promotional push and investment of professional energies and money, which is not available in the independent level. But if you’re comfortable working on a smaller scale, if you’re comfortable playing to what I would describe as your natural audience, that is, people who buy your records purely because they like them and not because they’re this week’s heavy rotation single or whatever, and that audience likes you for your intrinsic qualities and not because you fit into a certain stylistic niche — those kinds of relationships and careers can last a long time, be fruitful, and everyone can maintain respect for everyone involved. You won’t find bands becoming household names, you won’t see people on the covers of magazines, and you won’t see your video on MTV — chances are you won’t even make a video — but that is a more sustainable and generally speaking more honorable part of the music business to work in.
There are some shysters in the independent scene as well. I don’t mean to say that all independent record labels are good, because there are some dishonorable people and some who work in the independent world as though they were operating in the mainstream and take advantage of the loopholes.
The next level under that, the third level, would be the deep underground — people who are literally making music for themselves and a small self-selecting audience that they find, and they don’t engage in commerce really. They don’t generally make records and they’re playing purely for enthusiasm and purely for enthusiasts. And that sort of presupposes that there will be no money changing hands, and that can go on forever. As long as everyone is under the same understanding, there won’t be any surprises.
Where does Chicago fit in as a good/bad/doesn’t matter place to be in a band?
Albini: At all of these levels — at the underground, the independent music scene, and in the mainstream music business — Chicago has a lot of participants. There are high-powered managers, booking agents, lawyers, promotions people, record label affiliates, things like that at the mainstream level. And there are recording studios, quite a few places to play, rehearsal spaces and scads of musicians.
At any given time, there will be a sort of temperament to the crowd of people that are making music — the music scene, as it were. And that temperament has different intensities and emphasis over time. There’s been a long association with Chicago and sort of ‘outsider music,’ whether it be free jazz or experimental music or long-haired heavily composed 20th century abstract music. Chicago has a pretty long association with music that is outside the can of normal mainstream pop music. That said, it also has a great history with respect to soul music and blues music and nowadays hip-hop and pop music.
Geographically it’s a central location, so shipping things to and from Chicago is easy. Going on tours if you’re based in Chicago is easy — you can put together a two-week loop that will take you pretty much to any part of the continent. There are a lot of secondary resources here; there are good guitar repairmen, which sounds like a trivial thing, but there are a lot of places where you literally can’t get your guitar fixed if it breaks, and that’s not true in Chicago. There’s a very deep infrastructure in Chicago for making music.
I suppose it can seem insular and sort of daunting because there’s so much of it. There’s so many clubs — which one do you go to? There’s so many bands — how do you get acquainted with all of these bands? But with exposure and familiarity you realize that for the same reason there are many books in the bookstore that are not worth reading, a great many of these other options are not worth investigating either. It takes a while to discern from their external characteristics which ones are and aren’t worth your time.
From my experience, it seems there’s a great deal of accessibility, too. The fact that I can call Electrical Audio and someone can say, ‘Hold on, I’ll get Steve.’
Albini: Although there is a lot of music done in Chicago, it’s not a music professional center in the way that New York, LA and Nashville would be. In those places there are more layers of bureaucracy between people and the people they want to talk to, and I think that’s why it’s so easy to get things done in Chicago. You don’t have to fight your way through as many managers and lawyers and intermediaries. You can basically call and talk to anybody you want to ask a question of. That’s not true in other cosmopolitan cities that have a big infrastructure, just because all of the people between you and the other people have to defend their turf, otherwise their jobs would be meaningless. And so you have people whose sole function is running interference and preventing you from getting in touch with someone you need to get in touch with or meting out access for reasons of their own power insulation.
Coming Tuesday, Dec. 31: Part 2 of WTTW News’ 2001 interview with the late Steve Albini, with his comments on punk rock, Cheap Trick and more.
Note: This article has been updated to correct the names Robert Plant and Jimmy Page.
Marc Vitali is the JCS Fund of the DuPage Foundation Arts Correspondent.
