Our Band Could Be Your Life

by Michael Azerrad

  Then one day Durango told Albini that he had decided to enter law school, starting the fall ’87 semester. They decided to keep the band going until then and then call it quits. The band members had never looked on Big Black as a full-time job, and besides, now pushing thirty, Durango wasn’t getting any younger. But it might have been a good time for the band to stop anyway.

  By Headache the band was showing signs that it had reached the end of its creative line. “I was feeling that I was tapped out ideawise,” Durango concedes. “At that point I think we had tried everything that we wanted to try, musically and in the studio.” They put a more righteous face on it in the Pigpile liner notes: “The members of Big Black have often been asked why we chose to break up (the end of the band having been announced well in advance) just when we were becoming quite popular. The best answer then and now is: To prevent us from overstaying our welcome.”

  In the year following the announcement of their impending demise, the band received more acclaim than it ever had. They were now enjoying substantially increased press, airplay, record sales, and concert fees, and the possibility of modest commercial success was not out of the question. “Oh yeah, we could have, had we pursued it,” says Riley. “But see, Big Black was never about that. For Big Black to make any money, it wouldn’t have been Big Black anymore.”

  Besides, being in a lame duck band wasn’t so bad. “It was great,” says Albini. “We didn’t have to worry about anything. Who cares if we make an enemy, I’m never going to see this guy again! OK, this soundman is being a pain in the ass, let’s straighten him out, what do I care? It was liberating, it was really great.”

  New York punk priestess Lydia Lunch raved about a January ’87 show in Forced Exposure: “RAM-BATTERING WITH BRUTALLY BUTT-FUCKING GUT-BUSTERING BALLS-OUT BLITZKRIEGS OF SHEER POETRY AND PAIN, I WAS PULVERIZED INTO NEAR OBLIVION AS WALL AFTER WALL OF FRUSTRATION, HEARTACHE, HATRED, DEATH, DISEASE, DIS-USE, DISGUST, MISTRUST, & MAELSTROM STORMED THE STAGE WAGING WAR WITH MILITARY PRECISION INSISTENTLY INVADING EVERY OPEN ORIFICE WITH THE STRENGTH OF TEN THOUSAND BULLS, AS JACK-HAMMERING ON THE BASE OF MY SPINE WITH A BUCK KNIFE-BURNED THE DREAM OF MY HANDS WRUNG FIRMLY AROUND HIS THROAT.”

  Lunch added a fantasy about her and Albini that must surely have sent the latter into paroxysms of ecstasy. “PARKED IN PITCH-BLACK OVERLOOKING SOME STINKING, USELESS, LIFELESS HELLHOLE GARBAGEPLOT WHERE NEITHER OF US WANTED TO LIVE OR DIE, WHERE FOR 32 SECONDS OF HIS MEASLY LOUSY LIFE HE WASN’T IN TOTAL CONTROL OF HIS SKINNY, TIGHT NECK, TAUT, POWERFUL, RHYTHMIC THRASHINGS, THOSE IRRESISTIBLE REPETITIONS, SUCKING YOU INTO AN INCREDIBLE POUNDING LIKE A HEAD AGAINST A WINDSHIELD OVER & OVER & OVER THE BANGING BRUTALITY, SQUEEZING, FORCE-FEEDING HIM HIS OWN LOVE/HATE/LIFE/DEATHTRIP FLIRTATIONS IN REVERSAL. TO DO TO HIM WHAT HE DOES TO ME.”

  Other reviewers had quite different reactions. In a review of a show from the same tour, Puncture’s Terri Sutton described Big Black’s brutal, frenzied audience as “marionette puppets, translating messages of violence into more violence.

  “Is that it?” Sutton asked the band. “Is that what you want, guys?”

  The initial pressing of the band’s final album, Songs about Fucking, was about eight thousand records, and it went on to become Big Black’s best seller. Even Robert Plant liked it.

  The sarcastic album title was more than explained in Albini’s notes for the song “Pavement Saw.” “The male-female relationship, as a subject for song,” Albini wrote, “is thoroughly bankrupt.” The song “Tiny, King of the Jews” was also revealing. As the last song on the last Big Black album, it’s hard not to lend it particular significance. “Man’s gotta hate someone / Guess I’ll do,” Albini growls, “And when I’m through with myself / I start on you.”

  Albini booked the band’s final tour to begin in early June ’87. An L.A. promoter had offered the band $5,000, but the manager of the venue they were supposed to play thought Big Black was a racist band—“Why he thinks this, I have no idea,” Albini wrote in his tour diary—and refused the booking. Then the promoter found them a show for $2,500 at a smaller venue. “So,” wrote Albini, “I told him to eat shit.” A $6,000 New York gig also fell through.

  Albini turned twenty-five on July 22, the day Big Black played the Pukkul Pop Festival in Belgium. Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon presented him with a birthday present of a pair of mud-spattered panties that had been tossed onstage. Later Albini pissed on goth kingpins the Mission’s amplifiers.

  “I am now quite happy to be breaking up,” Albini wrote. “Things getting much too big and uncontrollable. All along we’ve wanted to keep our hands on everything, so nothing happened that we didn’t want to. With international multi-format/multi-territorial shit, that’s proving elusive. I prefer to cut it off rather than have it turn into another Gross Rock Spectacle.”

  At a sold-out (thirteen hundred tickets) show in London, Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis of one of Albini’s favorite bands, Wire, helped the band play an encore of Wire’s “Heartbeat.” “If I die right now it will all have been worth it,” Albini wrote.

  The tour then jumped to Australia, then back to San Francisco, Providence, Boston, and New York, and on to their final performance ever, on August 11 in Seattle, at the Georgetown Steamplant, the former generating plant for Boeing Airfield and the largest cast concrete building in the world. Much to Albini’s later regret, they smashed their guitars at the end of the show.

  I felt good about the way the band conducted itself,” says Albini. “We treated everybody good, we never took advantage of anybody, never shit on anybody, never did anything that I wasn’t proud of.”

  “It meant nothing to us if we were popular or not, or if we sold either a million or no records, so we were invulnerable to ploys by music scene weasels to get us to make mistakes in the name of success,” Albini wrote in the liner notes of the posthumous Pigpile live album. “To us, every moment we remained unfettered and in control was a success. We never had a manager. We never had a booking agent. We never had a lawyer. We booked our own tours, paid our own bills, made our own mistakes and never had anybody shield us from either the truth or the consequences.”

  After Big Black’s final tour, Albini returned to Chicago and promptly got depressed about not being in a band anymore. He tried making music, but his neighbor would call the police whenever any sound escaped from Albini’s house after nightfall. Then his basement flooded, ruining lots of equipment. On top of it, he was broke and yet desperately wanted to quit his day job.

  Eventually, Albini started a new band with the now defunct Scratch Acid’s peerless rhythm section—bassist David Wm. Sims and drummer Rey Washam. “The two of them with him was like… Cream!” says Gerard Cosloy. “Actually, I can’t stand Cream so it’s not like Cream at all. But it was the perfect supergroup.”

  Albini had recently discovered a Japanese comic book called Rapeman. “You open up this comic book, and there’s this superhero who rapes people, as his profession,” said Albini. “It’s pretty amazing.” Washam and Albini both became fascinated with the comic and eventually came to the conclusion that Rapeman would make a great band name. And in classic Albini fashion, it was sure to annoy the hell out of people.

  On their first American tour, in the summer of ’88, Seattle’s KCMU refused to allow the band’s name to be used in on-air promos for their show; there were even picket lines and news crews at a few gigs. “It was the typical motley alliance of housewives and lesbians at the picket line—housewives offended by the concept of punk rock and lesbians offended by the concept of rape,” said Albini. “The really annoying thing was that the majority of the people on the picket line were precisely the kind of people that we would have liked at the gig, people that, politically, basically think like we do. But sometimes people are so dead set on being stupid that they won’t allow themselves to experience something themselves.”

  Jeff Pezzati recalls being on tour in Europe with Naked Raygun when Rapeman first came over. The two tours trailed each other a
round the Continent, and Pezzati would hear the reaction every step of the way. “The Europeans took that name so goddamn seriously, it was like someone had hit them with a brick in the head,” says Pezzati. “If he had picked any other name, he would have been the king of the world in Europe.”

  The band released 1988’s Budd EP, named after R. Budd Dwyer, the disgraced Pennsylvania State treasurer who shot himself to death at a 1987 press conference. The music is spacious but intense one moment, dense and intense the next; one number features probably the most virulent utterance of the word “motherfucker” on record. The band eventually released an album the following year, Two Nuns and a Pack Mule, but Albini disavowed it shortly afterward.

  The band didn’t last very long after that. Albini explained the breakup of Rapeman by saying simply, “Someone couldn’t get along with someone else. That’s it.”

  Fortunately, Albini had something to fall back on. Even before Big Black started, Albini had done some modest demos for other bands, while other bands would bring Albini along to sessions so he could explain to the engineer what the band wanted. Later he recorded Urge Overkill in their practice room on a four-track and recorded a few local punk bands in a little studio in Evanston.

  Around 1985 he began to undertake more serious recordings. Albini would often record and mix an entire album in one day for about $200. “I just consider this a service that I do,” Albini said in 1991. “Because, like, when I was in a band it really frustrated me that there weren’t good, cheap studios out there to record in. So what I have done is built a good, cheap studio for all the bands out there.”

  In 1987 Albini bought a house in a nondescript neighborhood in northwest Chicago, quit his day job, and began working on building his own basement studio; it was small, but the equipment was all top-notch. Even better, Albini didn’t charge for studio time, just his time, so a band could bring blank tape and a friend to do the recording and it wouldn’t cost them anything.

  He soon recorded a long list of fine bands: Slint, Poster Children, Pixies, Gore, the Wedding Present, Head of David, AC Temple, Scrawl, Pussy Galore, Boss Hog, Zeni Geva, the Breeders, Tar, Shorty, Pegboy. The sheer quality of the bands he recorded and the excellent sounds and performances he extracted from them made his reputation. By 1991 Albini claimed he was getting three or four offers a day to record bands. That fall alone the prolific Albini recorded albums by the Volcano Suns, the Didjits, Urge Overkill, the Jesus Lizard, and the Wedding Present as well as literally dozens of lesser-known bands.

  Albini’s recording philosophy: “When you listen to something and it grabs you by the face and drags you around the room, that’s great. It doesn’t have to be a macho rock stud kind of loud, but it should jump out of the speakers at you.”

  He achieved his goal with the aid of an ever-growing collection of vintage microphones strategically placed around the room. One Albini trademark was to mix the vocals very low—on the Jesus Lizard albums Albini recorded, singer David You sounds like a kidnap victim trying to howl through the duct tape over his mouth; the effect is horrific. The recordings were both very basic and very exacting: Albini used few special effects; got an aggressive, often violent guitar sound; and made sure the rhythm section slammed as one.

  Albini disliked getting credited at all on the records he worked on. But if there was a credit, he insisted that it say “recorded by” as opposed to “produced by” because, he says, he never forced his wishes on the band. “I will do a good job for them,” he wrote in Forced Exposure, “but that does not include shouldering any responsibility for their lousy tastes and mistakes.”

  Albini claimed to be willing to record anybody who asked, although if it meant going to another studio or going out of town, they’d have to be a band he either liked very much musically and/or personally. And if it was a band on a major label, “Then I stick it to them,” Albini says. “Because it’s not their money, it’s the big-ass record company’s money who’s not going to pay them anyway.” Even still, Albini recorded for bargain basement rates—topping out at around $25,000 at the time. And unlike virtually all other producers, Albini refused to take royalties for his work. “It is an insult to the band to say that because I recorded this album,” he said, “and not somebody else, you’re selling more records and therefore I want a cut.”

  As Spot had done with SST and Jack Endino would do with Sub Pop, Albini worked for low rates, enabling his friend Corey Rusk’s label, Touch & Go, to get off the ground. “Steve’s the patron saint of Touch & Go,” Rusk says.

  And though a saint, he remained Albini. In 1988, he recorded the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa album in a week and charged them only $1,500. And yet he later called the now classic album “a patchwork pinch loaf from a band who at their top-dollar best are blandly entertaining college rock.” A couple of years later, when they were on a major American label (Elektra) and flush with dough, he charged them $4,000 to record one song.

  Albini went on to record albums by the likes of PJ Harvey, Bush, Nirvana, and even Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. He brushed aside accusations of sellout, pointing out that he had always said he’d record anyone who asked, and besides, he was plowing the money back into the studio of his dreams, the world-class Electrical Audio Studios in Chicago. Even his fancy new studio is in keeping with his core values: “See this place?” he says, gesturing grandly toward the air-conditioning ducts, the plumbing, the walls, and the electrical wiring. “This place was built entirely by punk rockers!”

  CHAPTER 10

  DINOSAUR JR

  STARTING BACK IN ’83, STARTED SEEING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

  HARDCORE WASN’T DOING IT FOR ME NO MORE STARTED SMOKING POT

  I THOUGHT THINGS SOUNDED BETTER SLOW

  —SEBADOH, “GIMME INDIE ROCK”

  Dinosaur Jr was one of the first, biggest, and best bands among the second generation of indie kids, the ones who took Black Flag and Minor Threat for granted, a generation for whom the Seventies, not the Sixties, was the nostalgic ideal. Their music continued a retrograde stylistic shift in the American underground that the Replacements and other bands had begun: renouncing the antihistorical tendencies of hardcore and fully embracing the music that everyone had grown up on. In particular, Dinosaur singer-guitarist J Mascis achieved the unthinkable in underground rock—he brought back the extended guitar solo.

  Dinosaur Jr had nothing to do with regionality, making a statement about indie credibility, or even speaking to a specific community. It was simply about creating good rock music. Even Mascis seemed removed from the feelings he was conveying in the music, which was ironic since he’d come up through hardcore, that most engaged of genres. But while he’d embraced the intensity, he’d abandoned the sensibility of hardcore. Throwing in the twin bogeymen of the underground, classic rock and the navel-gazing singer-songwriter sensibility, made Dinosaur Jr’s music acceptable to a much broader range of people, people who were a little more complacent and less radicalized than the hardcore and post-hardcore types.

  Dinosaur also represented a continuing shift on a professional level, too. By the time they came along, the indie underground didn’t have to be do-it-yourself anymore—there were booking agents and road managers and publicists at a band’s disposal, particularly if the band was on SST, which hit its commercial peak in the Dinosaur era.

  Rare was a label like Dischord or Twin/Tone that could survive on a steady diet of local bands. Instead, indie labels that stayed alive did so by diversifying. No one had done this better than SST, which by the late Eighties dominated the indie landscape with a roster that also included bands like Screaming Trees, Volcano Suns, All (on the SST subsidiary Cruz), Soundgarden, Meat Puppets, Sonic Youth, fIREHOSE, Bad Brains, Das Damen, and Negativland.

  SST would use its power and experience to break Dinosaur Jr. SST worked Dinosaur’s singles to college radio just like “real” record companies, instead of encouraging stations to choose various album cuts. But in the end, if Dinosaur Jr’s songs had been mediocre,
SST could have done only so much. As it turned out, Dinosaur’s music was awfully good; it also reached precisely the right audience. The band and college radio developed a symbiotic relationship: Dinosaur thrived on college radio and college radio thrived on making underground stars out of bands like Dinosaur.

  The classic rock influences, the extreme volume, the band’s so-called “slacker” style, even their quiet verse/loud catchy chorus formula would soon be imitated and finessed into a full-fledged cultural phenomenon.

  Joseph Mascis Jr. grew up in affluent Amherst, Massachusetts, essentially a company town for the area’s famed Five Colleges and a bastion of touchy-feely post-hippieism. Joseph, better known as J, was the son of a successful dentist and a homemaker. He says his parents were “really uptight and not very affectionate,” and, consequently, young J grew up somewhat aloof and self-absorbed. All the furniture in his room was arranged to create a wall around his bed, and there he’d lie for hours, listening to music. Green plastic curtains covered the windows, suffusing the room with an emerald light, and the floor was literally covered with stuffed animals and records. “I was a weird kid,” Mascis acknowledges. “It made people uncomfortable sometimes.”

  Mascis had taken a few guitar lessons in fifth grade but quickly switched to drums and played in the school jazz band for years. He was a voracious music listener, exploring the Beatles and the Beach Boys by age ten, then moving into standard hard rock like Deep Purple and Aerosmith. His older brother introduced Mascis to classic rock like Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Creedence, and Mountain, but by eighth grade, he says, “I was strictly Stones.” Then he discovered hardcore. “I didn’t listen to anything else for a while,” Mascis says. “Didn’t understand how anyone else could.”