Our Band Could Be Your Life

by Michael Azerrad

  Not surprisingly, the band—and Albini in particular—attracted a somewhat twisted following. Among the strangest fan gifts Albini was sent were, he says, “a turd, a blood-and-hair-caked condom, photographs of themselves and their turds.”

  Up until Atomizer the band wasn’t a big draw. They had yet to sell out Chicago’s Cubby Bear, which held about three hundred people. “We could play anywhere where there was an active underground music scene,” says Albini, “we could find a show and we would do OK, but we weren’t really that popular.” But then Atomizer won a pile of positive national press and even the locals began to take notice.

  Atomizer sold three thousand copies when it was released. “And we were thrilled,” says Albini. “We were ecstatic. That seemed like an unfathomable number of records to sell.” It kept selling, too, to the point where Big Black had enough clout with Homestead that Albini could call up label head Barry Tenebaum and demand that either he pay fellow Chicago bands like the Didjits or Big Black would leave the label. The gambit worked, too.

  The band got paid better for shows, but conditions were still pretty much the same as ever. Every town seemed to have a ratty punk rock house that was more than willing to put up the band, but Big Black eventually worked up a better strategy. “If it was possible to stay with a gay couple or a gay man, we always did, because their houses were always much, much nicer,” says Albini. “Generally they had cats, the places were always clean. So ‘Crib with fags’ was always one of our rules for the road. You always crib with fags.”

  The drum machine would often befuddle the house soundperson, who would hem and haw, complaining that it would somehow blow their speakers, or that it wouldn’t work with their sound system. Sometimes they’d refuse to put the drum machine through the monitors and the band would have to threaten to cancel the show. “You’d sort of have to convince them that you knew what you were doing and that you weren’t going to hurt their stuff,” says Albini. “Then it would be OK.”

  Sounds that aggressive didn’t come lightly, and the band members slammed their hands against the steel strings until they drew blood. “Oh, we bled,” says Durango. “We bled and bled. We used to have to put plasters on our fingers.” The other hazard about playing in Big Black was Albini’s custom of setting off a brick of firecrackers onstage before they played, a tradition dating from the band’s earliest performances and carried on virtually ever since. “Yeah, every fuckin’ show,” says Durango with a resigned little laugh. “By the end, I just didn’t care anymore. You get this feeling like ‘When is it going to explode in front of your eye,’ but it just never happened. They used to fly all over the place. I would stand off to the side at first, but by the end, it was just, ‘Ok, let’s just do it.’ ”

  BIG BLACK IN TRANSIT, NEW YORK, 1986.

  GAIL BUTENSKY

  If Big Black’s live shows lacked the visual excitement of a live drummer, Albini more than made up for it. “It looked like someone had plugged Steve into the amp,” recalls Cosloy. “It wasn’t like he was pogoing up and down for sixty minutes, but he was pretty scary to watch onstage.” Albini would yell, “One, two, fuck you!” to count in most songs and, with his guitar dangling from his specially made hip-slung guitar strap, prowl the stage like a spindly gunslinger.

  The band was brutally loud, but they also knew the value of varying the attack, like during “Jordan, Minnesota.” “We would get to a point in the song where we’d hit this really creepy noise, prolonged so it would just hang in the air, discordant so you would get a creepy feeling,” says Durango. “And [Steve] would start pretending that he was one of the kids being raped, but I mean really intensely. And just impeccable timing. It was actually very disturbing to watch…. It would really get people unsettled.”

  A lot of fans would try to one-up the outspoken Albini by heckling him, just trying to get a reaction. And Albini or someone else in the band, usually Riley, would dismiss them with an acidic comeback or a joke so offensive it practically singed one’s eyebrows. It was the perfect way to defuse—or was it heighten?—the effect of the extremely violent, intense music.

  Visiting Europe was something of a reverse commute in those Anglocentric times, but Sonic Youth had already paved the way. And once in Europe, a band could expect much better treatment than they got back home. When Big Black toured Europe in 1986, promoters paid the band well, supplied hotel rooms, and even specially designed tour vans, complete with driver.

  Overseas, no one knew anything about Big Black except for their music—there weren’t even any pictures of the band on their records—and they apparently took Big Black songs such as “Ugly American” as straight autobiography. “Especially in Europe, people were surprised that we weren’t these big, mean, ignorant people who were chemically dependent,” says Riley. “We were three puds, basically.”

  But the response to the band’s shows was very enthusiastic. “In fact, it was kind of overwhelming for a while,” Riley says. “Needless to say, I got used to it really damn quick. People actually appreciated what you were doing and it was kind of cool. It was much different from America. We were treated with respect in Europe. When we toured in the States, it was like a ‘Oh, use the back door with the busboys’ kind of thing. Very different.”

  By then Big Black had gotten the all-important European label deal. And, like so many things in the indie world, it had something to do with Sonic Youth. Albini, like just about everybody else in the Chicago scene, occasionally promoted shows for out-of-town bands. Soon after he immersed himself in the Chicago punk scene, he began arranging shows for bands like Killdozer, Butthole Surfers, Rifle Sport, and Scratch Acid. And in 1983, when no one else would book Sonic Youth on their second Chicago appearance, Albini got them a show. It was a smashing success and paved the way for more out-of-town underground bands to play Chicago.

  The favor came back to Albini. In 1986, when it came time to look into overseas record deals, he contacted his old friends Sonic Youth, who had just returned from England. Sonic Youth recommended Paul Smith’s label Blast First and the deal went through.

  At the same time, Albini had taken over operations of Ruthless Records in 1985, after the Effigies made a deal with Enigma Records. Albini helped engineer some of the records, assisted the bands with artwork, and served as liaison to distributor Dutch East India Trading. But his commitment to Big Black and his nascent engineering career (not to mention his day job as a photo retoucher) meant Albini couldn’t properly promote the label’s releases. “It was kind of foolish for me to get involved in it,” he says, “and I feel like I didn’t really do a great service to any of the bands.” (Still, Albini released records that probably never would have been released otherwise: powerful, original music by bands like Minneapolis’s Rifle Sport; Dark Arts from Columbus, Ohio; Madison’s the Appliances SFB; and Chicago’s End Result.)

  To make matters worse, Dutch East India just wasn’t working out, which was doubly bad since it owned Big Black’s U.S. label Homestead as well. “Their accounting was always fucked,” Albini claims. “They would do every sleazy, cheap trick to avoid paying you, like send you a check that wasn’t signed or send you a check that had a different numeral and literal amount. Or they’d send you a statement that had all these figures on it and a total at the bottom and they’d send you a check for that total amount, but if you added up all the figures, it was actually a couple of thousand dollars off. ‘Oh yeah, I guess you’re right, I guess we did the math wrong. Sorry. We’ll get a check out to you.’ And you’d never end up getting the check.”

  But the final straw was when Homestead asked Big Black if they could make five hundred copies of a twelve-inch single of the song “ll Duce” for free distribution to radio stations. The band agreed on the condition that the single was not to be sold to the public. “We didn’t want our audience milked for extra money by an alternate format,” Albini explains.

  And yet a few weeks after the single went out, Albini started seeing them in stores, although no
t in Big Black’s hometown of Chicago. Albini then called a few stores around the country and abroad. “And sure enough, Homestead had been making and selling them at a ridiculous price—as a ‘collector’s item’—all over the world, except in Chicago. I called Homestead, and Barry said, ‘Oh, no, we aren’t selling any.’ I then called one of their salespeople, posing as a record buyer, and asked if the title was available. He said, ‘You’re not in Chicago, are you? We’re not allowed to sell this in Chicago.’ ”

  Albini severed ties once and for all with Homestead and Dutch East India.

  Despite the band’s growing popularity, a major label was out of the question. “You can’t find a person more concerned with the importance of remaining independent than Steve Albini,” says Killdozer’s Michael Gerald. “He’d receive phone calls from major labels, and his reaction was just to hang up. He wouldn’t say, ‘No’ or ‘Try to convince me.’ He wouldn’t say anything. He’d just hang up. He wasn’t interested in anything they had to say.”

  “We wanted to have pointedly offensive records, and no big record company would put up with that,” Albini explains. “And it was obvious if you just go to the record store and just listen to records, all the good ones were not on major labels. Why would I want to be part of that?” And with the indie label system more than well in place by 1986, there was just no reason to.

  Besides, there would be commercial pressure if they signed to a major label. “Once you start putting out records because you have to make a living off of it, then you’re in trouble because you’re making music for the wrong reasons,” Durango says. “That’s OK for people who are entertainers and have no qualms about that, but for us it was a little more than that.”

  Another big reason the band shunned the majors was because of the clueless crowd they’d inevitably attract. “There already seemed to be a percentage of the audience that didn’t get what we were on about and were just there for a party,” says Albini. “I didn’t see any advantage in increasing those proportions.”

  Not even the lure of big money could entice them. “None of us ever imagined that the band was a job,” Albini continues. “The band was always a diversion. It seemed unrealistic to think that we could make a living out of it. So we didn’t even entertain those notions.”

  “We didn’t want to save the world,” Riley concludes. “We just wanted to play in a punk rock band.”

  Fortunately, there was a very cool indie label right in town: Touch & Go. Corey Rusk and Albini had first met in the summer of ’83 on a panel at the New Music Seminar in New York. It turned out to be quite an illustrious little group on the dais—also on the panel were Gerard Cosloy and Def Jam Records cofounder Rick Rubin. Rusk and Albini met again when Big Black played the Graystone in Detroit with the Butthole Surfers. When Big Black arrived at the Rusks’ house, they were impressed. “He and his wife had made this amazing hospitality lifestyle,” Albini recalls. “People would turn up and there was always a bong on for them, there was always beer in the fridge, there was always a barbecue running. It was great.”

  The house was also something of a zoo—besides dogs and cats, the Rusks kept a python, some prairie dogs, a chinchilla, and some hedgehogs. “They had some sort of African bullfrog that was about twelve inches in diameter,” says Michael Gerald, “and that’s the way to describe it because it was as flat as a cowpie. I do recall perhaps eight people there sitting around watching in amazement as the frog shat. Apparently it did this only about once a year. It shat a shit as big as itself. It came out so slowly that Corey had time to go and get his video camera and tape it.”

  As usual, Rusk threw an epic barbecue to kick off the weekend of shows. Albini immediately ingratiated himself by bringing along “a big bag of meat,” and, standing around the sizzling flesh, Albini and Rusk soon discovered they shared an intense, lifelong fascination with fireworks.

  “When I first met him, I felt like I was meeting another person like me,” Albini says. “I sort of felt like we were the same person in different bodies. We had a lot of the same attitudes; we appreciated a lot of the same stuff. We both sort of had run-ins with some of the hardcore punk scene which we had sort of gotten disillusioned with and didn’t feel like it really represented what we liked about punk. We both liked fireworks; we were both pretty committed to doing things in what we thought was the right way rather than doing it the way other people were telling us to do it. And in both cases it seemed to be working.”

  Albini and Rusk have been good friends ever since, gathering in Rusk’s backyard nearly every Fourth of July to blow up electronic gear, plush dolls, and many of the larger fruits and vegetables.

  Big Black’s first Touch & Go release was the five-song Headache EP, issued in the spring of ’87. The notorious cover of the original, limited edition—packaged in a black plastic “body bag”—featured two gruesome, truly horrific forensic photos of a man whose head had been split down the middle, perhaps in a car accident. (The imagery, Albini says, “was a good play on words.”) Seeing those photographs provided the same jolt Albini often spoke of in connection with his music. Then again, maybe it was just a pointless, puerile gross-out. “At the time,” he says, “it seemed like a good idea.”

  A sticker on the cover read “Not as good as Atomizer, so don’t get your hopes up, cheese!” And indeed, it wasn’t as good as Atomizer, though few bands would ever advertise the fact on their own record. “We didn’t want to sit there and screw people,” Durango explains. “If we felt it wasn’t as good, then we should just be honest about it.”

  Headache recycled many of the same sounds, and with songs about a hard-bitten detective, a union thug, and a man so revolted by his own newborn child that he hurls it against a wall, it recycled many of the same themes as well. Albini’s targets were quite distant from his or his audience’s existence—had any of the geeky college boys in the audience ever tangled with a Teamster goon? So while the songs are a pointed refutation of the vapidly escapist pop and navel-gazing singer-songwriter drivel of the time, their unrelenting immersion in the dank depths of American life is just as reductive.

  The band was no longer at the top of their game: one big reason, Albini claims, was that Riley was “Kind of fucked up most of the time” (a charge Riley denies). Albini was a teetotaler, so Durango and Riley became drinking buddies on the road, especially since Albini was often off doing interviews or organizational work. But apparently Riley was getting a little too far into his cups. “The problem with Dave,” says Durango, “was that he fucked up a number of our shows.”

  At a show in Milwaukee, “he couldn’t even sit on the stage,” says Durango. “We tried to plug him in and he fought us off. He was fucked up beyond fucked up—he was FUBAR.” When they played a key show at CBGB, Riley drunkenly smashed Roland the drum machine. “I think Steve could have strangled him right then and there,” Durango says. They called in Peter Prescott of the opening band the Volcano Suns to play live drums, but Prescott barely knew the songs and the show was a flop.

  Riley’s other offenses, Albini says, included: “always late for rehearsal, never having equipment together, needing a ride to everything, a fresh excuse for every day, generally unkempt and unreliable, impossible to communicate with when loaded, flashes of brilliance offset by flashes of belligerence.” These are annoying offenses for any band, but they particularly bothered the efficient, hardworking Albini.

  “It was like living in a dysfunctional family,” says Durango. “It was kind of a love-hate thing. [Steve] was always mad at Dave, always threatening all kinds of things.” But Albini never fired Riley, perhaps because it was too difficult to change horses in midstream. “That may have been the reason,” Durango says, “or maybe on some subconscious level he understood that that was something Dave brought to the band.”

  Even by late ’86, both Durango and Albini had to keep day jobs—Riley was now in school—which limited the amount of time they could tour. But it also gave them the economic freedom to do wha
tever they wanted with the band.

  Albini did have to be resourceful, though. For instance, when he couldn’t afford to pay his phone bill, he’d just let the phone company blacklist his name and then start a new account under a slightly different one. “So in Chicago, there were listings for Steve Albini, Albin, Albono, Albani,” Durango chuckles. “The guy was amazing, sneaking all his furniture out of an apartment because he couldn’t pay the rent and they were going to lock him out, packing a little apartment’s worth of furniture into a little station wagon.”

  But Albini’s diary entries in the summer ’86 issue of Forced Exposure revealed a sensitive side that few knew existed. “I’m an abject failure at everything I try,” he wrote, “partly because I can never be satisfied with doing only part of it. I want to do everything and I want it all to be perfect. As a result, I accomplish almost nothing, and what I do get done is slipshod crap.”

  In response to a letter condemning him as a hatemonger, he wrote, “Is it really such a fucking sin to be frank about all this shit? Christ, people go much wilder on this shit in private than I ever do in print. All I’m doing is owning up to what everybody else is saying behind each other’s backs. If I’ve got an opinion on something or an observation about something, and somebody asks me for it, well there you go. I try to retain my integrity (the little I can) by being honest and upfront about this shit, and all I get is grief. It’s as though people don’t mind you thinking unkind things as much as they mind knowing about them in the first place. And a lot of the people ragging on me for being straight so much have some pretty massive skeletons in their closets. I keep mine in the foyer to greet my house guest. That’s all.”