Steve Albini on Touch and Go, the Stooges, and how his analog work ethic is It’s been more than two decades since guitarist and recording engineer Steve Albini emerged as the gadfly of the midwestern rock underground. In his 20s he led the notoriously abrasive, crowd-baiting bands Big Black and Rapeman, but he’s since mellowed considerably–though his current outfit, Shellac, is hardly warm and cuddly, at 44 he no longer goes out of his way to make himself a lightning rod for controversy. His reputation as an iconoclast persists, however, and he remains the sort of public figure folks either love or hate. “There are specific people who have a bee in their bonnet about me,” Albini says. “I can’t do anything about that. I trust the bands and people I work with every day–the ones that know me on a personal level and actually know me as opposed to the image of me–they have the real perspective. If those people thought I was a jerk, then I’d feel bad.”
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The forthcoming Shellac record, the band’s first since 1000 Hurts in 2000, will be called Excellent Italian Greyhound–originally what drummer Todd Trainer would say to his dog instead of “good boy,” it was quickly adopted by the band to refer to anything praiseworthy. “If you’re familiar with our stuff you probably won’t be surprised,” Albini says. “I guess Todd has a cowbell now, so that’s new.” Touch and Go has tentative plans to release the album in early 2007, and the band has a couple spring shows planned for the UK, which may turn into the nucleus of a European tour.
Albini has been playing in Shellac with Trainer and bassist Bob Weston for 14 years, and calls it “absolutely my favorite thing in the whole world to do”–though he’s quick to point out that he still considers it a hobby. The studio is his job, and he puts in an average of 300 days a year as an engineer. In 2006 his work has appeared on releases by Canadian roots band the Sadies, Sicilian art punks Uzeda, power-pop legends Cheap Trick, and even the Lovehammers, the group led by Rock Star: INXS runner-up Marty Casey. He’s not a fan of every act he records, but he’s looking forward to working with the Stooges, who he calls one of his all-time favorite bands. The re-formed lineup includes three original members–Iggy Pop, Ron Asheton, and his brother Scott–along with Minutemen bassist Mike Watt and Fun House saxist Steve MacKay.
Every one of Albini’s bands has released records on Touch and Go, the indie label run by Corey Rusk, and two of them–Shellac and Big Black–played at the label’s 25th-anniversary party earlier this month. Albini is generally loath to indulge in nostalgia (during Big Black’s mini set he commented, “You can tell it’s not something that we had a burning desire to do”), but he’s long been a vocal cheerleader for Touch and Go and helped persuade Rusk to move the operation to Chicago in 1986. For Albini the Touch and Go celebration was a reminder of why he’d invested so much of himself in underground music to begin with. “Seeing Scratch Acid again, seeing Killdozer, seeing the Didjits–all of the reconstituted bands were as good as in their heyday,” he says. “And even though those bands were dissimilar to one another, they were still comrades in this cultural movement.
