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, 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.”
