“Why do I breathe?
Why do I work?”
From “Strange Things” by Big Black
Steve Albini has lived a punk rock life. Not only is Albini a founding member of seminal punk rock bands such as Big Black and Shellac but he is also founder of Electrical Audio, an independent, DIY studio where he has recorded hundreds of punk rock artists, as well as famous musicians such as Nirvana, The Pixies, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. Albini has also been a fierce advocate for punk rock ethics and for independent underground music in general. And when you consider that, at its core, the punk rock mind is one that embraces confrontation, Albini has both exemplified and helped spread the core confrontational ethos of punk rock: whoever you are, you matter.
When we spoke, Albini explained how The Ramones opened his eyes to punk rock music and culture. “The Ramones kind of became a talisman for me and my small circle of nerdy friends … Up until that point, it hadn’t occurred to me that … adolescent diversions that my friends and I were into … could be taken seriously as topics for songs or as … the subject of art,” he told me. “And the Ramones kind of gave me license to take all of those things seriously…”
And just as he came to understand that his divergent interests and perspectives were of value, Albini began to recognize that other people with unique and independent perspectives deserved to be seen and heard. “The extension of that was that people who were primarily preoccupied with these … otherwise considered trivial occupations … those people mattered as well and I should take them seriously,” he recalled. “I should be open minded enough to take people as they are … let them contribute what value they’ve come up with originally, organically…
“It made me imagine a world of possibilities of music and culture.”
The natural outgrowth of that perspective was the search for a culture that fostered that type of acceptance, open-mindedness, and commitment to artistic pursuits. When Albini moved from Missoula, Montana to Chicago, he sought out and found kinship and a sense of purpose in the emerging punk rock community. “I completely immersed myself in the punk scene here … The sort of nucleus of the Chicago scene was really coming together with a lot of energy… There was a record store called Wax Tracks! That was the epicenter of the underground music scene. And that was a hangout and meeting place,” he said. “You can read fanzines from other cities. You could buy records that were otherwise unavailable. You would meet people there that were into the same sorts of things as you… I just insinuated myself into that community.”
But what Albini experienced was more than several people all doing independently interesting things. He described a truly communal endeavor comprised of people pursuing a common purpose – developing and promoting a creative culture. “And that sort of fraternal communal effort, really made a huge impression on me. It made me realize … we could have ideas and we could have value but as a collective, as a group of people working toward a common purpose, we could solve almost any problem,” he explained. “That was a transformative thing for me to realize that you could live your whole life that way. And the thing that was most inspiring about that era was that everybody felt obliged to do everything. So, if you were in a band, that meant also that you would help put on shows or help hang flyers. Or you would help somebody put out their fanzine … If you had a rehearsal space, that meant that all of your friends’ bands had a rehearsal space … Sometimes there was only one bass amplifier among four or five bands. And so those four or five bands kind of always had to play together.”
As a consequence of punk rock’s commitment to developing its culture in a purpose-driven and communal way, the notion that people “mattered” started to spread not just to individuals but to entire cities. Particularly in the hardcore punk era, scenes sprung up all over the country and perhaps one of Albini’s and his contemporaries’ legacies was the decentralization of culture so that everyone had a chance to matter. “The decentralization began with this kind of informal network building that started for me in the punk scene where every time you’d meet somebody from another town…people would just sit on the couch and start exchanging numbers,” Albini said. “You could work out a resource to find a venue like, okay, is there a college there? Let’s see if they have a college radio station. Let’s see if they have a punk show. Ask the DJ that has that punk show where they should play a show in town or let’s see if there’s a record shop – ask if they have the Sex Pistols record … If they have the Sex Pistols record, ask them where in town, they should try to book a show and that kind of stuff…That’s how an awful lot of that network was put together.”
One of the most important concepts that hardcore punk culture promoted was the notion that success could be measured in non-economic terms. Profit was secondary to creativity, purpose and community. Albini has shown particular leadership in this understanding, and explained how the punk rock business model works differently from a more traditional corporate model. “There are businesses that exist for the sake of generating money … for those people, those businesses, what type of business they do matters very little to those people. And in a lot of cases, that’s the sort of, that’s the default of the investment capitalist mindset … We’re investing money in your company, we want your company to make money no matter what it takes to make money,” Albini described. “The other kind of businesses that is the kind that I’ve always been a participant in where people have an enterprise that they want to pursue as a kind of a calling as a thing that they want to do. And, you know, you’re forced into a business environment. So, the business has to make money as a necessity. But that’s not the reason for the business’s existence … And if things fall into place, you can make a living at it.”
As an outgrowth of that approach, Albini has little use for formal contracts. Rather, the collaborations last for as long as they are organically viable and facilitate the artistic goals of the parties involved. “I’ve been in several bands, but all of them have been working with Touch and Go. And the sums over that long period of time amount to many millions of dollars. And we’ve never had any kind of a formal agreement between us. We’ve just always agreed that we would split the profits equitably from everything that we do,” he described. “And if at some point that relationship broke down if we didn’t get transparent and complete accounting, or if we didn’t get paid, what we thought was a fair split of the profit, well, then the relationship would just sort of naturally end … And similarly, if we started to disappoint the record label, like if we started making music that offended their politics or that they thought was substandard, and they didn’t want to release it, they didn’t want to associate themselves with it, then they could just end the relationship that way… And I found that that approach works in almost every situation.”
One might ask how these ventures, particularly Electrical Audio, maintain economic viability without a focus on profit. “What I think we’ve demonstrated though, is the efficiency of working without these outside facilitators means that you can operate on a smaller scale and still survive,” he said. “And this studio has survived and gone through several periods of very, very low economic activity in the music scene. We’ve survived through that because we haven’t been wasting money and resources. And because we didn’t have expectations beyond the reality of our pure client base.”
By confronting the status quo through his artistic expression and in his business dealings, Albini has thrived as he embodies the confrontational and broad-minded punk rock mind. And he has not only lived, but continues to further the Ramones legacy.
“I think it’s an articulation of that same idea… that all people have value.”
Photo credit: Aagotaa
