“Pinpoint to a moment”: The album that changed Steve Albini’s life
Steve Albini sadly passed on May 7th, 2024, at his Chicago home, where he had run his Electrical Audio recording studio since 1997. Gone at the much-too-young age of 61, he did, however, pack quite a punch in terms of accolade, esteem and influence during his life and work as a musician, producer and engineer.
Long synonymous with the indie underground, he founded and led punk-rock bands Big Black and Shellac, but it was his work on recordings by the likes of PJ Harvey, Pixies and Nirvana that would carve out and cement his place in music history long beyond his six decades with us.
1993 saw the release of both In Utero from Kurt Cobain and co and Harvey’s Rid of Me, while Albini’s earlier discography lists Big Black’s Atomizer (1986), Pixies’ Surfer Rosa (1988), and The Breeders’ Pod (1990) to name a few. At the time of working together, PJ Harvey said: “That’s what his sound is like to me. It’s very tangible. You can almost feel the room.”
Someone with such revere inspires us to ask, where did it all begin? Music fans and musicians alike the world over can almost always pinpoint a time in their life, a specific moment that blew open their aural experience – for music lovers, it’s a life event almost synonymous to coming-of-age. You hear new sounds you hadn’t heard before; You form an ability to isolate instruments from each other but hear how they work together – essentially, each component of a song, album or piece of work is gifted space and time.
For Albini, this came in the unassuming environment of a school field trip around the age of 14. “I can pinpoint to a moment exactly when my interest in music started.” A classmate had brought along a cassette player, loaded with a cassette tape loaned by an older brother in college. Make way for a bus trip lasting hours that heard Ramones’ self-titled 1976 debut album play on repeat. “I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard. I couldn’t believe anybody would make music like that,” Albini recalls the thoughts of his younger self. Perhaps not the reaction you would expect to hear to an album that would go on to play a formative role in Albini’s musical development, but as time went on, he began to hear its charm and appeal.
He returned to his hometown of Missoula, Montana, and immediately made a visit to his local record store, asking if they could order this record for him. Admittedly “making a real nuisance” of himself, relentlessly calling to find out if the record had arrived, he finally got his own copy of Ramones weeks later. Playing the record, flipping it, playing again, flipping and after some time had passed during which we had declared to friends, “you gotta hear this record, it’s the stupidest thing ever,” there came a point where the novelty wore off, and a newfound admiration came to the forefront. Albini and his friends became “obsessive Ramones fans” – they found another record, ordered it, and then another record and ordered it.
“Every single thing that I’ve done in music or in this profession that has overwhelmed the rest of my life, I can trace to that one moment of hearing the Ramones cassette on a school bus.” He continues, “there are times where I think, I was really lucky that on that field trip when I was in that susceptible mode that, you know, I didn’t end up hearing a Rush record or a Grateful Dead record or something – who knows how my life would have gone if I had.”
