Our Band Could Be Your Life

by Michael Azerrad

  Being confrontational as an art statement was a commonplace in places like New York, but in Chicago it was still something of a novelty. “He’s very sharp and biting and he said exactly what he thought—and pissed a lot of people off,” says Touch & Go’s Corey Rusk. “I also think sometimes he’d say something just to piss somebody off, even if it wasn’t exactly what he thought, just to fuck with somebody. And if that person wasn’t bright enough to catch on that they were just being fucked with, then they might go away thinking that yeah, he is a racist or he is a homophobe.”

  “There can be no light without generating heat,” adds Durango. “And confrontation generates heat and light.” And when Albini’s statements went a little too far, Durango took it with a grain of salt. “It was just a matter of rolling your eyes and going, ‘There he goes again,’ ” says Durango. “But sometimes you think it’s really calculated in a way. Because it keeps him in the limelight. You have to wonder whether it’s not sort of contrived and not genuine, more of a publicity stunt.

  “But on the other hand, I roomed with Steve, so I knew what a putz he was,” Durango continues. “I would see people getting really upset with him about stuff and taking him really seriously, and then I knew that this was the same guy who couldn’t find his underwear in the morning.”

  ALBINI CUT QUITE A STRIKING FIGURE ONSTAGE. HIS T-SHIRT READS: “SO MANY MEN, SO LITTLE TIME.”

  GAIL BUTENSKY

  Albini defended his rather un-PC creations by insisting that he knew in his heart he was not a prejudiced person. “So once that’s given, once you know what you think, there’s no reason to be ginger about what you say,” he said. “A lot of people, they’re very careful not to say things that might offend certain people or do anything that might be misinterpreted. But what they don’t realize is that the point of all this is to change the way you live your life, not the way you speak.

  “I have less respect for the man who bullies his girlfriend and calls her ‘Ms.,’ ” he added, “than a guy who treats women reasonably and respectfully and calls them ‘Yo! Bitch!’ The substance is what matters.” Dubious reasoning like that, along with lines like “I’m God’s gift to women / Except for that college girl / I’ll kill her” (“Racer-X”) did not exactly endear Albini to the feminist community.

  Nor did the steady stream of gay jokes that spilled from the Big Black stage, but Albini defends those as well. “Given how intermingled the gay and punk subcultures were, it was assumed by anyone involved that open-mindedness, if not free-form experimentation, was the norm,” Albini says. “With that assumption under your belt, joke all you like. The word ‘fag’ isn’t just a gay term, it’s funny on its own—phonetically—like the words ‘hockey puck,’ ‘mukluks,’ ‘gefilte fish,’ and ‘Canada.’ ”

  The problem was most people who heard Albini’s lyrics and stage banter hadn’t met him personally, so they didn’t know where he was coming from. He gave absolutely no clue as to his real beliefs; the listener was left to guess whether he was an unabashed bigot or a merciless satirist. “Some people are uncomfortable being confronted with a notion without having that notion explained to them,” said Albini. “We’re much more interested in sending the information out as we perceive it, and letting people deal with it on their own terms.”

  Albini’s lyrics provoked some eternal questions, like does the artist have a social responsibility? In the liner notes to the Pigpile live album, Albini made his position known in his own special way: “Anybody who thinks we overstepped the playground perimeter of lyrical decency (or that the public has a right to demand ‘social responsibility’ from a goddamn punk rock band),” he wrote, “is a pure mental dolt, and should step forward and put his tongue up my ass.”

  Many of those who heard Big Black’s music couldn’t grasp the idea that what Albini said in the context of a song didn’t necessarily reflect what he actually felt, but rather reflected impulses that, as a rational, civilized human being, one normally suppressed in the course of social interaction—quashing the quite understandable urge to murder someone for messing around with one’s tools, for instance (“Grind”).

  Others grasped Albini’s argument yet still felt he reveled in the material a little too much for comfort—but of course comfort was exactly what he was not after. It was risky territory—it seems downright impossible to immerse oneself in something so completely and not be affected by it, like the phenomenon of undercover cops who actually become criminals. Deep down, some armchair psychoanalysts felt, Albini really did have some issues with women, gays, and minorities and covered them over with his arty justifications. Sometimes Albini did seem to be flirting with racism. In one Matter column he described a visit to a doctor whom he termed a “splay-toothed, thick-lipped goat herder… from some developing nation’s sole medical school.” This was several steps past an ironic character study.

  But Albini was interested in an audience that thought for itself. By not explicitly spelling out his position, he felt he was dealing with his audience on an intelligent level; he was opting out of the mainstream paradigm of the preaching rock star and his unquestioning flock. And, of course, he simply got a big kick out of pissing people off.

  Looking for better nationwide distribution, Albini began negotiating a deal with Homestead Records. Albini liked Homestead’s parent company, the distributor Dutch East India, because they had bought more Ruthless releases than any other distributor and because a previous Dutch East indie label, Braineater, had released records by two Albini favorites, the Wipers and Sisters of Mercy.

  Gerard Cosloy had started writing for Matter, made friends with editor Elizabeth Phillip, and soon made Albini’s acquaintance. “I had a lot of respect for him then and now,” says Cosloy. “He does not suffer fools gladly. He sees through the bullshit very, very quickly.” These two acerbic, highly intelligent, nerdy-looking guys with glasses got on very well; they liked to engage in verbal sparring where each would try to say something more offensive than the other could stand, the nerd version of two jocks punching each other on the arm until one begs the other to stop.

  The two found they had a lot in common not just ethically and socially but aesthetically as well. “There are certain idiosyncrasies about bands that we both picked up on, things about texture, definitely things about the way guitars sound,” Cosloy says, “the idea that the way the guitar is traditionally supposed to sound in the context of rock music—the whole R&B-based Keith Richards, Chuck Berry, John Fogerty guitar—that there’s other directions it could go in.”

  When Cosloy arrived at Homestead, he picked up the negotiations with Albini. “Steve was probably a thousand times more effective than any manager or lawyer could have been,” recalls Cosloy. “I’d say he was more organized and thorough than any manager or lawyer I’ve ever dealt with.”

  Their arrangement was unorthodox—Big Black merely licensed their records to Homestead for a specified length of time. They took no advance and paid for their own recordings (Albini once estimated that the band’s entire recorded output cost between $2,000 and $3,000). And perhaps most unusually, they signed no contracts—the members of Big Black just didn’t believe in them. “We came from a punk perspective—we did not want to get sucked into a corporate culture where basically you’re signing a contract because you don’t trust the other person to live up to their word,” says Durango. “We had ideals, and that was one of our ideals.”

  Big Black figured contracts were worthless anyway—if a record company was going to screw a band, they’d do it with impunity since the band couldn’t afford to retaliate. Besides, “if you don’t use contracts, you don’t have any contracts to worry about,” says Albini. “If you don’t have a tour rider, you don’t have a tour rider to argue about. If you don’t have a booking agent, you don’t have a booking agent to argue with.”

  Albini and the band resolved to conduct their career on a high ethical plane. “It just seemed like you could behave like a pig or you could not,” says Albin
i. “It never seemed like there was any advantage to being like a pig.” This was especially true in the small world of indie rock.

  Just before their Homestead debut, 1984’s Racer-X EP, Big Black did a fairly extensive national tour. The close-knit indie network came in very handy. “You would call people in different cities that you’d met or were recommended to you by somebody else and ask them where you should play,” says Albini. “Because nobody had any expectations of greater cultural importance, nobody had any aspirations to being a mainstream act, it was very easy and very comfortable to keep traveling in the circles that you were familiar with…. You’d know that if you were going through Ohio, you’d cross paths with these people, and those people have been recommended by these people and so on.”

  Unlike many of their peers, Big Black always made money on their tours—for one thing, since they didn’t have a drummer, they didn’t need to rent a van; they took along no roadies, and since Albini booked the tours, they didn’t give up a percentage. “We just kept the scale really small,” says Albini, “and didn’t try to go places where we weren’t welcomed.”

  Not only did Big Black resolutely refuse to pander to or compromise for the mainstream; they refused to do so with their own audience. “We are perfectly satisfied with the number of people who like the band,” Albini declared in 1987 at the peak of the band’s popularity. “It wouldn’t bother us at all if half that many did. I don’t think it would change anything if ten times as many came to see us. It wouldn’t change the way we do anything, it wouldn’t change the number of people that give a shit, it wouldn’t change the effect of the band—it would just be more bodies.”

  In print and in interviews, again and again, Albini strongly took to task sacred cows like Public Image, Ltd., Suicide’s Alan Vega, Wire’s Colin Newman, the Stranglers, Hüsker Dü—all former favorites—for softening up and/or selling out. And to many people, Steve Albini gradually became “Steve Albini”—a larger-than-life cartoon of a strict indie rock zealot with dubious positions on just about any minority group you could name. “If you repeat a lie about someone often enough, that sort of becomes the truth,” says Cosloy. “So it becomes Steve Albini, Evil Ogre, this very bad guy who goes to record stores and takes records on major labels and breaks them over his knee, then paints a swastika on the front of the store. In Steve’s case, it’s funny, because those things could not be further from the truth.”

  Racer-X, released in April ’85, was a tad less frantic, less teeming than Bulldozer. Albini said he was going for a “big, massive, slick rock sound” but admitted that the effort fell short, ending up “too samey and monolithic.”

  The characters this time around, besides Speed Racer’s mysterious older brother, are “The Ugly American” (“I hate what I am,” growls Albini), a murderously jealous small-town loser (“Deep Six”), the masochist of “Sleep!” (“Your foot in my face is what keeps me alive”). There is even a mechanistic take on James Brown’s “The Big Payback” that has Albini proclaiming, “I’ll cut your throat / I’ll make amends.”

  It was Big Black’s third EP, and the band would go on to make one more record in that format. “Back then EPs carried a lot more weight,” Cosloy explains. “An EP was not necessarily thought to be a precursor to an album or a promo item. An EP could exist as its own entity.”

  Of course, it was a lot quicker and cheaper to record six songs than ten or twelve, but Albini also figured that Big Black’s abrasive music was easier to take in small doses. The lyrics in particular were growing more and more malevolent. It got so the band would play a little game of seeing how long it took a journalist to get around to using the phrase “the dark side of human nature” in interviews. But it’s important to remember that Albini, Durango, and Pezzati were in their early twenties, and just about any male that age is fascinated by gruesome imagery. “That’s just what was interesting to me as a postcollegiate bohemian,” says Albini. “We didn’t have a manifesto. Nothing was off-limits; it’s just that that’s what came up most of the time.”

  And the lyrics and even vocals weren’t supposed to be the focal point anyway. “It seemed like, as instrumental music, it didn’t have enough emotional intensity at times, so there would be vocals,” Albini says. “But the vocals were not intended to be the center of attention—the interaction within the band and the chaotic nature of the music, that was the important part.”

  Eventually Pezzati, who had an increasingly demanding job, a fiancée, and two other bands (including the now nationally popular Naked Raygun) amicably left Big Black in late ’84.

  Dave Riley had moved to Chicago from Detroit in 1982, having worked at a recording studio that was home to both George Clinton and Sly Stone. Albini was impressed when he saw Riley play with a band called Savage Beliefs and eventually handed Riley a copy of the Lungs EP, saying, “Listen to this, and if you don’t think it sucks, then maybe you can play with us someday.”

  Riley had already met Durango when the latter, drunk, was propping himself up on a sink at the Cubby Bear. “You’re in Savage Beliefs, aren’t you,” Durango slurred. “You guys are really good. You’ve got real style.” And then he threw up in the sink.

  But Riley had never met the infamous Albini before. “For some reason, [I] expected a guy of much greater stature who was somewhat of a prick,” says Riley. “I was clearly right about him being somewhat of a prick, but a benevolent and ultimately decent-kind-of-guy prick.”

  Like Albini and Durango, Riley was also a misfit, the perennial target of what Riley calls “insidious crap perpetrated by imperceptive emotional retards.” As a teenager he’d been in a car accident that permanently damaged his face. “So he had a funny way of speaking,” says Albini. “Especially when he got drunk, it was sometimes difficult to communicate with him because you could tell he was struggling just with the mechanics of speaking to you.”

  Riley joined the band the week Racer-X came out, although he kept his day job as a litigation law clerk. Once he learned the group’s repertoire, they began writing songs for the band’s first album.

  The last sentence of the liner notes for Racer-X read, “The next one’s gonna make you shit your pants,” and although the Atomizer LP did not quite induce spontaneous defecation, it amply delivered on the promise.

  Sure, Riley was a stronger bass player than Pezzati, and he brought a bit more melodic sense to the band’s music, but by this time Big Black had both refined the ideas first suggested on Lungs and exploded them into something much huger than anyone but Albini had ever imagined. Riley’s gnarled bass sound combined explosively with the brutally insistent hammering of the drum machine while his funk background gave the music an almost danceable kick; Albini’s and Durango’s guitars, respectively billed as “skinng” and “vroom” in the liner notes, were reaching new heights of sonic violence. But it’s not like a lot of people realized how good it was at the time. “Now, Atomizer sounds like a great, accessible record,” says longtime Chicago music journalist Greg Kot. “But back then, you had to listen to it ten times just to get through, to penetrate the fact that there was actually music going on underneath this assault. It was that radical a statement.”

  Albini has a simpler explanation for the superiority of Atomizer: “We just had a higher-than-average percentage of really good songs.” With a powerful rhythm ripped straight from Gang of Four and guitars that sound like shattering glass, “Kerosene” is probably Big Black’s peak. As Riley explained it, life in small-town America is boring: “There’s only two things to do. Go blow up a whole load of stuff for fun. Or have a lot of sex with the one girl in town who’ll have sex with anyone. ‘Kerosene’ is about a guy who tries to combine the two pleasures.”

  One of the band’s most controversial songs was “Jordan, Minnesota” about the rural town that stood accused of conducting a huge child sex ring; twenty-six people were indicted, a large portion of the town’s adult population. “And this will stay with you until you die,” Albini rails on the
chorus.

  The story confirmed everything Albini felt about human nature. “I felt sort of vindicated in my concept that everyone in the world was as perverse as you could imagine them being, that perversion was not restricted to TV preachers and classical perverts—everybody was perverted, everybody was strange,” says Albini. “Everybody has the roots of greatness and evil in them.” (The case began a long line of horrific child abuse and satanic ritual abuse stories that flooded the media in the late Eighties. Years later the Jordan case was dismissed after the children’s testimony was found to have been coerced.)

  And there lay the basic Big Black lyrical formula: Present people doing evil things that most people sometimes vaguely contemplate but never actually carry out—because they aren’t sociopaths. On Atomizer there is the corrupt cop (“Big Money”), the shell-shocked veteran who becomes a contract killer (“Bazooka Joe”), the violent alcoholic (“Stinking Drunk”), the sadist (“Fists of Love”). The approach deflected attacks rather handily—as Puncture writer Terri Sutton put it, “The topics are so deliberately loaded that you can’t criticize their ‘art’ without looking like some fucking puritan.”

  Big Black’s audience seemed mostly to be male nerds brimming with frustration and fury—just like the band. “We were just repressed dweebs who opened the hatch where the demons come out and put them in the record bottle,” says Durango. “It’s a release. Just because we were puds didn’t mean we didn’t have this aggressiveness.” Dweebs don’t usually get to enjoy the kind of brute power that the bullies who torment them do. Getting up onstage and cranking up amplifiers to absolutely concussive levels of volume lets them exercise a simulacrum of power, and being experienced witnesses of that power, they wield it like connoisseurs, with all the expertise of those who have come to identify with their oppressors.