CHICAGO (CBS) — Steve Albini, an alt-rock musician, audio engineer, and producer who recorded albums for bands like Nirvana and Pixies and founded the Chicago recording studio Electrical Audio, has died at the age of 61.
Brian Fox, a fellow producer and engineer at Electrical Audio, confirmed Albini passed away Tuesday night from a heart attack.
“We are not ready to make any other statements yet. Maybe in the next few days, we could talk about his impact, which was immense,” Fox said in an email.
Albini’s death came little more than a week before his longtime band Shellac was set to release a new album, To All Trains, on May 17. It will be the band’s first album since 2014.
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First developing an interest in punk after being introduced to the Ramones as a teen, Albini voraciously consumed all the new music he could find growing up in his hometown of Missoula, Montana, and played in his earliest music projects. After graduating high school, he moved to Evanston, Illinois, to attend journalism school at Northwestern University, immersing himself in the scene as a fan and a writer for local music magazines.
Albini began his music career in 1981 when he formed the punk rock band Big Black while a student at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
He later went on to form two other bands, the controversially named Rapeman and Shellac, with the latter the longest-existing and arguably the most important band of his career as a performer. For Shellac, he performed vocals and guitar alongside bassist Bob Weston and drummer Todd Trainer.
He also helped record and track some of the most influential albums of the alternative rock era in the 1980s and 1990s, including Nirvana’s “In Utero,” Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa,” PJ Harvey’s “Rid of Me,” Veruca Salt’s EP “Blow It Out Your A** It’s Veruca Salt,” and multiple albums for Urge Overkill and The Jesus Lizard.
He also helped record music for legends such as Cheap Trick, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, and Foo Fighters, who recorded their hit song “Something from Nothing” at his Electrical Audio studio in Chicago.
An “icon of iconoclasm”
In a Chicago Magazine profile published 30 years ago this month, writer Mark Jannot described Albini as “the music industry’s avatar of opposition, its icon of iconoclasm.” The profile documented Albini’s quest for perfection in the recording studio as he sought to make recordings that emulated a band’s live sound as faithfully as possible – as well as the unabashed “streams of bile” he directed toward not only the record industry, but bands of which he disapproved.
On his meticulousness in the studio, Albini was quoted: “I honestly just feel that music like this deserves to be taken seriously. And that means people who record them should be as concerned about quality as if they were recording the f***ing Chicago Symphony.”
The profile also referenced a famous screed that Albini wrote directed at rock critic Bill Wyman of the Chicago Reader – not to be confused with the former bassist from The Rolling Stones. Wyman had sung the praises of three Chicago area acts that had made it big – the Smashing Pumpkins, Liz Phair, and Urge Overkill – in a 1993 year-in-review column, for what he called “an explicit rejection of much of the insularity that increasingly characterizes underground music and the fringes of alternative music in America.”
Ablini fired back in a letter to the paper and dismissed all three acts as generic and mainstream – calling Phair “a persona completely unrooted in substance, and a f***ing chore to listen to,” and comparing the Smashing Pumpkins to REO Speedwagon while calling them “ultimately insignificant.”
He also wrote, directed at Wyman: “Music press stooges like you tend to believe and repeat what other music press stooges write, reinforcing each other’s misconceptions as though the tiny little world you guys live in (imagine a world so small!) actually means something to us on the outside.” In Jannot’s article, Wyman was quoted that his comment about “insularity” in underground music, had, in fact, been a jab at Albini and what he perceived as Albini’s elitism.
Just last year, Albini was the subject of another profile by Jeremy Gordon in The Guardian. Gordon wrote that while Albini may have come across as an unpleasant person, he was at the end of the day someone who “defended punk’s credos – don’t sign to major labels, reject authority, say what’s on your mind, make a lot of noise – with uncompromising passion at a time when the counterculture was increasingly being assimilated, marketed and sold by the powers that be.”
Jannot’s story included a quote from Albini, “In a lot of ways, you spend the last 50 years of your life trying to get over the first 12.”
