I enjoyed the different side of him in this story about his beer league baseball team which the author shared on Metafilter:
https://themillions.com/2009/02/baseball-oasis-story-of-chic...
Steve Albini has died
111–120 of 191 posts
Re: Steve Albini has died
#112This is one of those threads where you may discover people you haven't seen for a zillion years are on Hacker News. And though I never knew him well, he was nice to me on the occasions I had to interact with him, though you know, there's also a kind of unapologetic misogynistic arrogance in his musical catalogue (umm, Rapeman?) that his legacy will need to contend with.
He's apologized at length for his edgy band names, song names, and zine takes which happed in his early 20s.
https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/steve-albini-counsel-cul...
Re: Steve Albini has died
#113"I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it's worth. The record company will expect me to ask for a point or a point and a half. If we assume three million sales, that works out to 400,000 dollars or so. There's no fucking way I would ever take that much money. I wouldn't be able to sleep." [0] https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/nirvana
I'm trying to reconcile that 'plumber' against George Martin with the Beatles. He was paid like a plumber for the first couple years, and... EMI treated him with such disdain that he ended up leaving. I'm sure the money was much better after he left, but... had EMI just been slightly nicer to him, they'd have owned him for many more years. That said, I think his relationship with his bands opened up areas for him to…
It's not hard to reconcile: Albini didn't want to be George Martin.
Re: Steve Albini has died
#114In 2009 my band traveled from Nashville to Chicago for the honor of recording with Steve at Electrical Audio. We loved his drum tones and his use of analog tape in a live band setting. He was quirky, brilliant, quiet, and kind of hilarious to work with. He wore disheveled blue coveralls with a lowercase "e" on the back for 5 straight days. They fed us as many lattes we could stomach for all hours of the day, and he d…
My brother is an audio engineer of a sort† and just this afternoon told us that he felt like his team at the venue he works needed a uniform, and he asked Albini about, and as a result everyone ended up with the same Red Kap coveralls Albini wears.
† (I say this only because I don't know precisely what sort he is)
Re: Steve Albini has died
#115Hard to overstate Albini's influence, both as a musician and producer. Big Black? No one was doing stuff like that in the mid-80s. His production on PJ Harvey's Rid of Me took her compositions to a new level. He also produced a lot of very fine albums in the 80s and 90s by the Pixies (Surfer Rosa), Nirvana (In Utero) and various albums by The Jesus Lizard, Superchunk, and others. Yes, he was cantankerous. Marched to…
He was a legend as musician, and as producer, despite destroying PJ Harvey's Rid of Me. What a major fuckup! Anyway, the way he talked and explained the music business was always legendary.
I didn’t start listening to PJ Harvey until later in her career, but Rid of Me is one of my favorite albums. It had a sort of harshness that put me off at first, but once I got past that it really grew on me, and now that perceived harshness is an inseparable part of the final product for me. I don’t know how much of that to attribute to Albini or what the album might have been with a different producer, but what it did become still stands out strongly in my musical experience.
Re: Steve Albini has died
#116Guy was as Chicago as a polish sausage.
Contributions to the remembrance thread:
Albini on Steely Dan ("the Dan"):
https://twitter.com/electricalWSOP/status/162260720209465753...
His old cooking blog, where I learned that cutting the casing off a hot italian and smooshing it flat is called a "torpedo" (at least at Paulina Market):
https://web.archive.org/web/20180125095923/http://whatimadeh...
Later
Another: his interest in uniforms, designs, and the jumpsuits they wear at Electrical:
https://paullukas.substack.com/p/talking-uniforms-logos-and-...
Re: Steve Albini has died
#117This is one of those threads where you may discover people you haven't seen for a zillion years are on Hacker News. And though I never knew him well, he was nice to me on the occasions I had to interact with him, though you know, there's also a kind of unapologetic misogynistic arrogance in his musical catalogue (umm, Rapeman?) that his legacy will need to contend with.
He's apologized at length for his edgy band names, song names, and zine takes which happed in his early 20s. https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/steve-albini-counsel-cul...
Yes, he evolved! But that work (fwiw more the actual lyrics than the band name itself) still is part of a legacy.
Re: Steve Albini has died
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Martin was so involved in the creative process he was closer to a 5th bandmember, and was sometimes called such by the Beatles. He had more involvement in the creative product than most producers, including writing and arranging the strings, brass, and winds parts that are all over later Beatles records, and appeared as an instrumental performer on over 25 Beatles tracks.
So much that EMI have been fixing his work for 60 years now, in particular his decision to split the Beatles tracks arbitrarily between the two speakers for all the stereo mixes, despite the Beatles personal involvement in the mixing process for the mono mix downs which sound infinitely better.
That was how everything was mixed in the early days of stereo. Beatles actually got away from it sooner than many.
Radio was all AM, which is mono.
Re: Steve Albini has died
#119This is one of those threads where you may discover people you haven't seen for a zillion years are on Hacker News. And though I never knew him well, he was nice to me on the occasions I had to interact with him, though you know, there's also a kind of unapologetic misogynistic arrogance in his musical catalogue (umm, Rapeman?) that his legacy will need to contend with.
He’s been fairly open and public recently about his relationship with “edgy” art, his feeling that it didn’t destroy any hidden hypocrisy, and regret for it’s legacy of a coarser society.
I don’t mean to express any apologies he didn’t make, but I’ve appreciated his public thoughtfulness about it.
Re: Steve Albini has died
#120This is hugely surprising. 61 is not old man. Is it me or does seem like the Gen Xers in the so-called counter culture are less long lived than their Boomer counterparts?
uhh because the only Gen Xers currently dying are the ones that are dying young?