Episode 650 - Steve Albini
Guest:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:It's Mark Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:My podcast.
Marc:Thank you for listening.
Marc:Welcome.
Marc:Welcome to the newcomers.
Marc:Who are here for the Steve Albini episode.
Marc:Interesting thing happened with the last episode.
Marc:Aaron James Draplin from Draplin Design Company.
Marc:It seems like there was a tremendous amount of momentum and feedback about that episode.
Marc:There's something almost exciting to me about the idea that people may actually be getting sick of show business.
Marc:Culturally, perhaps we're starting to get sick of the exhausting desperation of show business.
Marc:Look, there's a lot of different versions of show business.
Marc:I believe I'm operating in somewhat of a show biz adjacent situation of my own making.
Marc:And I'm happy with that.
Marc:But after a certain point, there's an intensity to it all, to all the options, all the channels, all the streaming content, all of it coming at you all the time when you turn it on, moving billboards that actually seem to be large televisions in and of themselves.
Marc:Just the constant sort of visual and mental crackling noise of, hey, over here.
Marc:yeah that that's sort of like the the underlying pitch of all content now yo hey hey hey over here oh look over here that that's really the undercurrent of all content just about and and what goes into getting people to watch it hey buddy buddy yo yo over here over here just watch this watch this just watch this for a minute just watch it for a minute come on just stay here for a minute
Marc:People liked hearing about a different medium, a different zone, a different mode, design.
Marc:It was interesting to me.
Marc:It was exciting to me to talk to a guy that pulled it together like that and creates things.
Marc:And maybe that's a direction I got to go into a little more.
Marc:I've always wanted to, but then I got to go out of the box.
Marc:I got to go out of my box.
Guest:Come on, look at this thing I made.
Guest:I made a thing.
Guest:It's so fucking, come on, just fucking look at it.
Marc:Tonight on NBC.
Guest:Come on, you fuck, come on.
Guest:Look, we did a thing.
Guest:Come on, look, look, look.
Marc:Tonight on ABC.
Guest:Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.
Marc:Amazon.
Guest:Hey, look, look at this thing.
Guest:I got it.
Guest:I made it.
Guest:CBS.
Guest:Please look at this thing.
Guest:Hulu.
Guest:Come on, come on.
Guest:Look, look, look, look, look, look.
Guest:IFC.
Marc:All of them.
Marc:And I don't think I'm being negative.
Marc:I just think it's very difficult to hold people's attention.
Marc:But I don't think you should necessarily play to that.
Marc:Oh, hey, in the James Taylor episode, there was a gunshot at the end.
Marc:And a lot of you seemed concerned, as you should be when you hear a gunshot, either recorded or not.
Marc:And you wanted some closure on that.
Marc:There's been many people asking, what did you ever find out what the gunshot was?
Marc:Short answer.
Marc:No, I did not.
Marc:Did I investigate what it might be?
Marc:I did not.
Marc:Am I freaked out about it?
Marc:Not really.
Marc:You know, gunshots happen around here occasionally and you just hope they're celebratory.
Marc:and not pointed at anybody so uh i have no idea it definitely sounded like a gunshot but you never maybe it was someone's birthday so i so no i don't know but everything's been cool since okay i hope that states your concerns all right um what else
Marc:Pow!
Marc:I just shit my pants.
Marc:JustCoffee.coop.
Marc:Just threw that in.
Marc:I don't do them as much as I used to.
Marc:Look, it's coming.
Marc:It's happening.
Marc:It's happening.
Marc:We're moving towards it.
Marc:Today's Lorne clip is actually a pretty fascinating clip because it helped me out.
Marc:It got me some closure through some honesty from Jim Brewer.
Marc:This was episode 435 of this show of WTF.
Marc:And he definitely seemed to have some info about my meeting with Lorne Michaels.
Marc:He gave me just a little bit of clarity around that meeting with Lauren and why things...
Marc:might have turned out the way they did.
Marc:Now, I assume a lot of you are up on the narrative.
Marc:We're moving towards a Warren Michaels episode that many of you who have listened to me for years know is a pretty important thing to me.
Marc:Those of you who are just tuning in for the Albini, Steve Albini talk, I imagine you've fast-forwarded already.
Marc:So this is me talking to Jim Brewer on episode 435 of this show.
Guest:You were up for SNL as the news guy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And Lauren sat me down.
Guest:And Lauren sat me down, and I swear to God, here's how it went.
Guest:He goes, Jim, we're thinking about using Marc Maron as the update guy.
Guest:Do you have thoughts on him?
Guest:That's exactly what I said I went.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:I think he'll be the best news guy you've ever had in your life.
Guest:I really said that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I said, but you need to know a lot of people have problems with him.
Guest:I go, he pisses people off.
Guest:But that has nothing to do with me.
Guest:And I say, if he's for the news guy, I think you got a home run.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I go, am I best friends with him?
Guest:No.
Guest:Do I love the guy?
Guest:No.
Guest:However...
Guest:The guy would be a monster news anchor.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:I really feel that way, Lauren.
Guest:And he's like, no, that's pretty much the feedback I get from everyone.
Guest:I said, did you meet with him already?
Guest:Now, I don't know if he said this or you said this.
Guest:Something about...
Guest:I feel like he told me this.
Guest:He said to me, he said he met with you.
Guest:And I said, well, how'd it go?
Guest:And he said, well, he said everyone enjoys a monkey or something until they throw the feces at you.
Guest:Or he said that.
Marc:No, I said that to him.
Marc:He said, comedians are like monkeys.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:The monkeys make people laugh.
Marc:And I said, unless they're throwing their shit at you.
Guest:Which, when he said- That stuck with him?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:Come on, you fucking with me now?
Guest:No, I swear to God I'm not.
Guest:I swear to God.
Guest:That made me-
Guest:really like you come on i swear to god and and then i you know i'm obsessed with that meeting you know i mean i talk about it all the fucking time i'm obsessed with that meeting with lauren he sat me down and he he asked me about you and he asked me about tracy morgan yeah because we were there the same day and tr i said tracy is the most raw
Guest:Funniest human beings I've ever met in my life offstage, Lauren.
Guest:I don't think I've ever laughed so hard.
Guest:Just- Offstage.
Guest:I said, I just listened to him rant and I just find myself, I feel like I'm looking at a Richard Pryor, but it's raw.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Onstage is a different beast.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Offstage, I've never seen anything more fascinating in my life.
Guest:And he goes, no, Mark.
Guest:What about Marc Maron for the update?
Marc:And I really got... So he was really thinking about it.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Because I thought, in retrospect, that he might have been trying to muscle Norm into something or whatever.
Marc:Because I didn't get it, obviously.
Marc:They were done with Norm, yeah.
Marc:They were done.
Marc:They were done, yeah.
Marc:See, now look, I can deal with that explanation.
Marc:At least there was a reason.
Marc:I never would have thought Jim Brewer would be the key...
Marc:to unlocking the mystery, but there you go.
Marc:The number of Lorne Michaels conversations I've had on this show is astounding.
Marc:Dig it.
Marc:All right, Steve Albini, coming up.
Marc:How do I preface Albini?
Marc:You know, Albini, Steve Albini is one of these guys.
Marc:He's a legend.
Marc:He's a living myth in the rock and roll arena.
Marc:He's a producer that is wary of calling himself a producer.
Marc:He's a guitar player.
Marc:He's a fixture.
Marc:in the world of modern, an important gear in the machinery of modern music in my mind.
Marc:Though a very humble gentleman, intense, and I know a lot of you who are deep music nerds have very specific expectations around what you want to hear from Albini.
Marc:I had a good conversation with him, and obviously some of the records that he made were profoundly important in my life.
Marc:You know, Pixies, Nirvana, The Breeders,
Marc:There's hundreds of records.
Marc:Hell of a resume, this guy.
Marc:But one of the most important things to me, when I was in college, I can't even put a date on this, but it's got to be the mid 80s.
Marc:And I'm thinking he's probably in big black.
Marc:Maybe I don't know.
Marc:But I know that I went to see Steve Albini at the Ratskeller in Boston, Massachusetts, in Kenmore Square.
Marc:I was going to BU.
Marc:I'm thinking it's got to be 84 maybe, 83, 84.
Marc:I don't remember being with anybody.
Marc:I remember going down there drinking.
Marc:I was probably with somebody.
Marc:I remember Steve Albini standing in the middle of that little stage.
Marc:He'd go down in the basement.
Marc:You walk past Mitch at the door with his weird gray toupee and his voice box.
Marc:He had a voice box.
Marc:He's a large man.
Marc:You just read a story into that guy.
Marc:He always had a suit on.
Marc:Looked like he might have been a little connected, but he had the voice box.
Marc:How you doing?
Marc:Check your ID.
Marc:And then down in the basement was where the rat was, the real rock and roll club.
Marc:Low ceilings, fucking dirty.
Marc:The rat scale are gone.
Marc:Gone.
Marc:So I go to see Albini, and I remember him just playing that fucking massive, you know, guitar sound.
Marc:But the most important thing about that night, in my mind, and I believe it was that night, things get a little blurry, you know?
Marc:As you get older, you realize you're just a curator of misperceptions and altered memories.
Marc:But I went to that Steve Albini show, and then in the crowd, moving through the crowd, was this woman...
Marc:But I didn't see her at first.
Marc:All I saw was this fantastic black mohawk.
Marc:And then just... As I followed the black mohawk down... The shaved sides... I saw this intense... Round... Angry face... And this stout kind of little... Tank... Down to the docks... To the Doc Martens... And the black jeans... And I was like... Holy fuck...
Marc:Who is that?
Marc:And it's not, you know, I don't know that I had any game then or certainly I had any real sort of couth.
Marc:I always moved through the world with the same type of intensity I have now, only younger, which was probably even more disconcerting.
Marc:And I just went up to her and I'm like, who are you?
Marc:What is, what, what?
Marc:and her name was Lauren, and I fell in love with her almost immediately at that Steve Albini show.
Marc:I'm going to put it on that show.
Marc:I just remember we walk home, and she's kicking cans, and just like this angry little art woman, girl at the time.
Marc:She was going to mass art.
Marc:She was telling me stories about her ex, like maybe her ex or current boyfriend, I don't know, who worked in sort of large, soft sculptures.
Marc:Maybe some story about living out in the country in a trailer, devious and weird.
Marc:She was from New Jersey and just full of this angry intensity.
Marc:But she was a welder.
Marc:And I've told the story about going to her house that first time.
Marc:Just completely enamored with her.
Marc:And she had a sculpture that she had done in metal.
Marc:Just emaciated metal female figure.
Marc:And the vagina was just full of nails.
Marc:And I was like, yeah.
Marc:All right.
Marc:I can handle this.
Marc:Loved her.
Marc:Still love her.
Marc:See her sometimes.
Marc:Still doing the art.
Marc:But, you know, has a life with a man.
Marc:We all get old and hopefully level off.
Marc:But man, that night, that Steve Albini concert, just seeing that black mohawk kind of cut through the crowd like the fin of a shark.
Guest:I'm like, what?
Marc:Who's connected to that?
Marc:She changed my life.
Marc:So now, let's go and talk to Steve Albini.
Marc:You want to wear cans?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Cans.
Guest:I love those studio terms.
Marc:Cans.
Marc:Do you call them cans?
Guest:No, no one calls them cans.
Marc:No one does?
Marc:No, of course not.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:No one says take five either.
Guest:Nobody says that.
Marc:Come on, radio guys say cans.
Guest:Well, okay.
Guest:Music guys don't.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Well, okay.
Marc:All right.
Marc:I learned something.
Marc:What do they call them?
Marc:Headphones?
Marc:Exactly.
Yeah.
Marc:All right.
Guest:In many, I've learned how to, just by being a recording engineer, I've learned a few useful studio expressions in many languages.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Like what?
Guest:In Dutch, for example, set je koptelefoon op.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which means put your headphones on.
Guest:Koptelefoon.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Kop is head and these are koptelefoon.
Marc:And you learned that from recording Dutch guys.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:Do you remember what Dutch guys?
Guest:I think it was the Dutch heavy metal band Gore.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:is there a possibility i gotta ask you a couple questions right up front would you have been touring i met a girl in college who who it was very important to me and i met her at the rat yeah boston played there many times as yourself though like would you have been touring as steve albini and say 84 85 no no no it would be black in 85 i would have been in big black
Marc:so it was you because i remember i was like i was at a steve albini show and i met this chick with a black mohawk and uh you know and in the rest is history sounds about right yeah yeah so you remember that huh i don't know i don't remember the chick with a black mohawk come on you got it we were both standing there no
Guest:The Rat was a shithole.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I mean, it kind of typified the era of punk venues where there were sort of two kinds of punk venues.
Guest:There were places that were sort of of the community where you had guys that were in punk bands that coerced a bar owner into letting them have a night, and then they sort of developed into... A thing.
Guest:A thing, and it gathered momentum, and you had...
Guest:So you had clubs where the punk bands were welcome because the people that were running the scene were... And then the other thing was that you had the shittiest bar in town where you could get away with stuff.
Guest:So the shittiest bar in town ended up being a punk club.
Marc:Like the basement.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Like the rat.
Guest:The rat, for example.
Guest:I mean, pretty good example.
Guest:The dude that ran it had one of those.
Marc:And the big hair, the toupee.
Guest:I think his name was Mitch.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And would routinely just decide not to pay the band.
Guest:Is that true?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he'd go into his office and he'd click the little buzzer on his throat and he'd be like, there's no way you're getting the money.
Right.
And they had...
Guest:They had the bouncers.
Guest:There was a weight room upstairs where the bouncers would all be working out.
Guest:So you'd have these yard-wide meatheads standing on either side of them while he's sitting in this sort of melted elephant of a dude sitting behind his desk.
Guest:And he's like...
Guest:The show didn't do well.
Guest:There's no way you're getting the money.
Guest:And then you just have to walk.
Guest:Well, yeah.
Guest:I mean, what else are you going to do?
Guest:What are you going to do with that guy?
Guest:He would offer you some pittance.
Guest:I'm losing money, but I'll give you gas money.
Guest:You know, that sort of thing.
Guest:It was kind of a routine scenario.
Guest:That never happened to us.
Guest:Because you guys were popular.
Guest:Not so much that.
Guest:I think it was kind of the luck of the draw.
Guest:Even in the 80s, you could figure out how to schedule a tour so that you would hit a town on a night when people would be willing to go out.
Guest:And so we structured our tours in a way where you would play
Guest:the bigger towns on the better nights and then the crappier towns you'd play midweek.
Guest:And, uh, because a punk audience in a crappy town is going to go out any night of the week that a band comes through because they're ecstatic that someone's bothered.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They're here.
Guest:They're in our town.
Guest:So, uh, so like you could play, you know, uh, a fat spot in the road in Kansas or Indiana on a Tuesday or Wednesday, and you could expect a sort of normal crowd.
Guest:Whereas if you're playing in Friday or playing in Chicago, uh,
Guest:uh you know people have a lot of their a lot of other options for their uh for their entertainment dollar it's kind of wild though man that whole that whole even all the cities that were music cities all that scene is just sort of gone isn't it not at all no i mean it's but like you go to boston and the entire kenmore square is level okay well boston is a special case there there was a a monopolistic control of live music venues
Guest:what was the name of the company?
Guest:Don Law?
Guest:Was that the name of the company?
Marc:Don Law, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, the monopolistic control of music venues.
Guest:Even the small ones?
Guest:Basically every suitable room.
Guest:I mean, it's the same sort of thing that happened on a national scale with Clear Channel, Live Nation, like sort of taking over venues and just exerting... The airwaves.
Guest:Or it can just be like a closed society of club owners and music people that won't allow anybody else, any independent people to operate.
Guest:You hear a noise?
Guest:I do.
Guest:What is it?
Guest:Is it in the world or in your mic?
Guest:Leaf blower.
Guest:You've got leaf blower noise.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:They have a filter for that.
Marc:Hey, Dennis!
Marc:It just happened spontaneously.
Marc:Oh, now he's blowing out his fountain.
Marc:Oh, shit.
Marc:Hey, Dennis!
Marc:Dennis!
Marc:He's the guy that suggested I put an on-the-air light on the side of my garage.
Guest:This will be my favorite part of the broadcast, for sure.
Marc:Hey, Dennis!
Marc:Dennis, can I interview for like an hour?
Marc:No, I'm sorry, dude.
Marc:I did.
Marc:I'm just doing another one.
Marc:I'll be done in like an hour.
Marc:Now come do it if you want.
Okay.
Marc:So is this punk rock enough?
Marc:Sure.
Guest:Fuck.
Guest:So did you come from around here?
Guest:Well, in a circuitous way.
Guest:My folks came from California.
Guest:My dad went to Caltech, and when he finished his graduate work at Caltech,
Guest:He started having kids.
Guest:We lived in Pasadena.
Guest:It's like down the street.
Guest:But I was the last kid and very shortly after I was born, I think I was less than a year old, we moved to Washington, D.C.
Guest:So I remember nothing.
Marc:Right.
Marc:How many kids are there?
Guest:I have a brother, Marty, who's two years older.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A sister, Mona, who's one year older and that's it.
Marc:Oh, three.
Guest:And then we moved to Washington, D.C.
Guest:And then in the mid-1960s, we moved back to Santa Barbara.
Guest:And I remember some about Santa Barbara.
Guest:I was there for, I was maybe six, seven, eight years old, something like that.
Guest:And then we, or five, six, four, five, and six, something like that.
Guest:I remember some of that.
Guest:And then we moved back to Washington, D.C.
Guest:area.
Guest:My dad worked as an engineer in aeronautics and doing some defense department contracting.
Guest:So the secret work?
Guest:Did you get that?
Guest:Like, I can't talk about... Well, he didn't bring his work home.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But some of it was literal secrets.
Guest:Like, he worked on the Titan 3C missile, and he worked on... No shit.
Guest:Yeah, he worked on a bunch of stuff for the Star Wars bullshit.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Did he talk to you about that later?
Guest:He can't really... He couldn't really... Well, he's dead now, but he couldn't really talk about it, like, specifically.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it...
Guest:The thing that was odd about my father was that he was an engineer.
Guest:He was a brilliant, brilliant engineer.
Guest:And the thing that gave him the most satisfaction in life was solving the hardest problem.
Guest:So he wanted the hardest problem, and he was eager to have the hardest right.
Guest:And the thing about the whole Star Wars technology was that it was...
Guest:essentially impossible like to do what was being postulated as easy and as like the saving that was the shield in space with exactly it was shooting a bullet with a bullet like that shooting down the missile yeah right that whole concept yeah was essentially impossible right but
Guest:And as a result, it was like the hardest problem.
Guest:So my dad was like super eager to work on it, right?
Guest:So he was spending all of his energy in this ultimately completely futile effort.
Guest:But it was very satisfying for him to be like, well, that's going to be really difficult.
Guest:That's probably going to tie me up for weeks and then be in bliss, you know?
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But toward the end of his life, he worked for the Department of the Interior working on the science of forest fires, which is impossibly complex.
Guest:But in a very practical way, you can make pretty significant improvements in the way we treat the forest and the way we treat fire.
Guest:but not specifically about fighting them necessarily no managing the resource of the forest so that people can use it and then it also doesn't become a threat to itself right i mean there was a long history of preventing forest fires at all cost and that was like a sort of policy and that was uh smoky the bear absolutely disastrous because fires are part of the life cycle of a forest right and uh then you know mitigating the the
Guest:The damage done by these catastrophic fires that were started because we had allowed so much fuel to build up by putting out all the fires all the time.
Guest:That became a part of the problem.
Guest:And then just understanding the behavior of fire itself is where my father concentrated his efforts.
Guest:And he was a...
Guest:He was a renowned scientist in that regard.
Guest:Very young science.
Guest:There's still so much... We know way less about fire than we thought we did.
Guest:Really?
Guest:From the efforts of the people at the Northern Forest Fire Research Laboratory.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I know that once it starts...
Marc:You just got to wait it out sometimes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's the thing that I like about my father's work in forest fire is that he took this incredibly complex problem and created practical tools that people in the field could like.
Guest:They could enter a few variables into a portable calculator, for example.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And using a program that was a reduction of all of this complex theory.
Guest:And then they could figure out how far ahead they had to go before they dug the fire line.
Guest:Like that sort of like very practical, very, you know, like, oh, well, that house is doomed.
Guest:Let's move on.
Marc:You know, things like that.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Make those big decisions.
Marc:We're going to lose that one.
Guest:What is your training exactly?
Guest:I left.
Guest:So working with forest fires brought our family to Montana.
Guest:And I did my principal growing up in Missoula, Montana.
Guest:I have no idea what that even looks like.
Guest:It's beautiful.
Guest:Is it?
Guest:If you picture, like, Dodd's plan for the earth, right?
Marc:Oh, really?
Guest:Mountains and trees and, like, rolling grass and rivers and massive lakes and, you know, beautiful snow caps.
Guest:Like, Montana has all of that.
Guest:It's beautiful.
Guest:There's high desert.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:lush uh coniferous forest you love montana i mean when i was there sure i was into punk rock and it seemed like extraordinarily frustrating to be in right um you know a place that has you know it's it's really its only characteristic is the the people in the natural beauty and what i wanted was i wanted like dope fiends and hustlers and you know
Guest:Where's the good stuff?
Guest:Where are the freaks at?
Guest:So I left to come to Chicago to go to school in 1980.
Guest:So you left Missoula?
Guest:I've been in Chicago ever since.
Guest:You went to high school in Missoula?
Guest:I went to high school in Missoula.
Guest:I went to college in Chicago at Northwestern University.
Guest:And studied what?
Guest:Journalism.
Marc:So, okay, so you're in Missoula, and what was the moment where you knew there was something bigger and more exciting out there?
Guest:It's weird because I've had to recall this moment for interviews.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:So it's now become crystalline in my memory.
Guest:Well, then let's go to a week or so before it.
Yeah.
Guest:well like my circle of friends and i in high school we were all like you know dorks into like horror movies and you know so you were with the nerd crew yeah anti-jock super super dorks you know in the school newspaper sarcastic uh i mean i was hated i wasn't physically attacked very often hated for what reason uh i was kind of a loud mouth
Guest:yeah which is i mean that's you know so you were you're an aggressive nerd yeah oh good i mean that i i've recognized that as a character flaw and i've i've done what i can to sort of ameliorate it really the anger no no no the being an asshole like just feeling like it was really important that everybody in the room knew what i was thinking all the time right like i got i got that out of my system when i was in high school
Guest:did you have to get beat up for it no although when i was in college um i i was still drinking when i was in college and uh i got into this thing where i i i really enjoyed taunting the fraternity people and the like the fraternity system i mean i sure i drew cartoons for the school newspaper you know oh really ridiculing and insulting it and
Guest:but uh they threw fantastic parties where bands would play and the booze was free and women would appear yeah so everyone exploited the fraternities as a kind of a social resource right right you would go to the party like we'll go to the frat house but if we just the five of us go where you're insulated in your crew exactly so that's the idiots i would go typically with a friend of mine named john bonin and i would go to these parties and it would be like the two weirdos in the funny clothing and
Guest:And I can't remember what the precipitating incident was.
Guest:I published some cartoon mocking the fraternity system or something.
Guest:But my friend John and I were at one of these frat parties and we were taking advantage of all the free beer and music and women and that sort of thing.
Guest:And a kind of a ripple went through all the Greek douchebags.
Guest:Like, oh, that Albini guy is here.
Guest:And then they sort of started to congregate around the two of us.
Guest:And I don't know how I did it.
Guest:It's like probably the only moment of judo in my entire life.
Guest:But I managed to extricate myself from this closing circle of Greeks and...
Guest:And then all of us threw my friend John out of the party as me.
Guest:And I stood with the mob on the balcony shaking my fist at that Albini guy that we had just thrown out of the party.
Guest:So that's like the only clever thing I've ever done in my life.
Marc:everybody okay did john make it all right it was fine it was an interesting uh almost uh uh not cowardly but you know absolutely cowardly yeah absolutely i mean let john take the hit and you know he forgave me he understood the situation
Marc:perfectly but they were too fucking stupid to know the difference i mean they didn't they they just wanted you know it's typical like right-wing mob mentality they just want someone to take the blame instantly yeah and then they can forget about the you know whatever the underlying issue is they can just move on isn't it interesting how you see that stuff like you know in retrospect now that we're older you see that that it's all set up at such a young age that you know the fraternity the fraternal fraternity system is designed to create a brotherhood of douchebags that will take care of each other throughout life
Guest:And, you know, whether it's those specific douchebags, it's that whole, it doesn't matter that we're wrong.
Guest:We're together.
Marc:Yeah, sure.
Guest:That mentality.
Guest:And we can win.
Guest:And in corporate, you know, like you hear, you know, that you hear that in sort of corporate motivational speech and all that sort of stuff.
Guest:You hear that same sort of like.
Guest:group identity nonsense and it's all typically being fostered by an authority figure like from above like all of you people who work for me right need to see yourselves as a team exactly so all right so you're there you're missoula you're just like what kind of what kind of music are you listening to before the enlightenment i didn't i wasn't really
Marc:Not at all.
Guest:I wasn't significantly interested in music until I discovered the Ramones.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The Ramones were a touchstone for me.
Guest:Right.
Guest:My brother had left for college and he left behind his collection of records, which were typical hard rock records of the year.
Guest:You know, Alice Cooper, The Who.
Guest:you like that though right yeah i mean i mean that was formative for me listening listening to that stuff was formative to me yeah i mean my sister my sister had like schlock records i mean no not a patch on my sister i think she's a wonderful woman and she's very intelligent elton john yeah good good example like gordon lightfoot you know sure a lot of
Guest:The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald or previous.
Guest:And all of that stuff has its charm.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:But when you compare Gordon Lightfoot to Alice Cooper, Gordo gets a bloody nose.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:The hell of a chasm there.
Marc:How old are you?
Marc:I'm 52.
Marc:I'll be 53 in a couple of days.
Marc:So we're the same fucking age.
Marc:I'm 51.
Marc:So we grew up.
Marc:And even when we were growing up with that stuff, it was already kind of old when we were in high school.
Marc:Most of it.
Marc:That's the weird thing.
Marc:I think when we were in high school, so you're a year ahead of me, we saw the death of disco happen.
Marc:We saw it.
Marc:And then we saw New Wave happen.
Marc:And then punk just sort of got left out for where I was.
Guest:The thing that seems strange to me is if you look at a timeline.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:From Woodstock to the CBGB era was only like six or seven years.
Marc:Holy shit, that's true.
Marc:It's kind of incredible.
Marc:That's true.
Guest:I never really thought about that.
Guest:And then if you think about it, from Bill Haley to Woodstock is only like 10, 11 years.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I've been...
Marc:flogging the same bullshit for 30 years now and i feel like i and i still feel contemporary you know which is absurd and you know it should be it should be impossible no it's not no i don't i'm not gonna it's not flogging the same bullshit at some point but it is always peculiar to me to realize that rock and roll in earnest it's like 57 1957 or so right rock around the clock or rocket 88 whichever one you
Guest:attribute the beginning to and it's still so fucking young like all your it's i never really put it together like that how much it just sort of blew up over time the the like the aggressiveness of evolution in the early stages of rock you know from you know late 50s you've got skiffle in the uk and like rock and roll and you know yeah rockabilly stuff in america
Guest:Then mid 60s, you have the British explosion and immediately followed by like the pop music side of that, like sort of melded in or dissolved into the psychedelic period where you had like radical stuff happening.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Going into the 70s where you had like the Prague stuff, which is also radical.
Guest:A lot of it, you know, preposterous, but a lot of it still very adventurous.
Guest:Are you into it?
Guest:No, not specifically, but I can recognize... There are fringe elements of prog rock that I find fascinating.
Guest:Like who?
Guest:Like the kraut rock stuff.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Like Cannes and Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk and all that stuff.
Guest:All of that stuff is, you know, organic... Crimson?
Guest:No crimson?
Guest:Yeah, it has its moments, right?
Guest:And just the other day we were listening to...
Guest:i don't know how it happened but bob's bob's ipod was on shuffle in the van and we played roundabout by yes yeah right i wait for that part that song by itself yeah is essentially the entire career of the band rush condensed you know and executed to perfection like it made rush unnecessary yeah well yeah they were kind of unnecessary
Guest:So, you know, I mean, that's the... That's a van conversation.
Guest:But that's a very small number in physical time.
Guest:But were you excited when you guys came up with that in the van?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:We have a couple of van rules, van music rules.
Guest:One of them is that if a song starts with cowbell, you turn it up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because the number of...
Guest:Great songs that start with a cowbell is extraordinary.
Guest:Like the batting average for starting with a cowbell.
Guest:It's like a very good signifier.
Guest:We're an American band.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Monky Tonk Women.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Mississippi Queen.
Guest:Basically, it's really, really hard to miss if the song starts with a cowbell.
Guest:And we got fooled once.
Guest:By?
Guest:We were in Europe.
Guest:I don't know if you've ever listened to European popular radio.
Guest:No, I haven't.
Guest:They play music, a very weird pastiche of music.
Guest:So this is in the 2000-something.
Guest:We hear cowbell.
Guest:Song starts with cowbell.
Guest:Fucking turn it up.
Guest:And it ended up being, Loverboy, everybody's working for the weekend.
Guest:Like such a downer.
Guest:Swipped in.
Guest:You're so excited.
Guest:And then we realized that the paradigm had not actually been broken because it wasn't a real cowbell.
Guest:It was the metronome.
Guest:They were using a metronome cowbell drum machine and they just left it in.
Guest:So we're still safe.
Marc:How much research did you have to figure that out?
Guest:It became apparent.
Marc:over the course of the song like oh that song is so bad it must have been done to a metronome i that cowbell isn't really a cowbell we're off the hook you know well when you okay so you you you get your mind blown coming back around so we actually did it coming back around to the moment where you got the ramones record right well you had an older brother which thank god right yeah i mean the records are important yeah where did the ramones album come from
Guest:A friend of mine or an acquaintance of mine on the school bus had a cassette tape in one of those little portable accordion button cassette players.
Guest:Panasonic.
Guest:I don't know.
Marc:You know, with the buttons at the end.
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:Accordion buttons on the end.
Guest:And he had a Ramones tape in it and we were listening to it on the bus and we were laughing our asses off.
Guest:It was like the most hilarious thing we'd ever heard.
Guest:This inept bubble gum music just played super ferociously.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:what a you know what a perfect comedy that was for us we were mocking everything and this was a thing that mocked everything and itself you know right so it really resonated with me and um i ordered my own copy of the record from the record store and then when it came i played it obsessively at first it was it was comic right you know at first i was like laughing at the ineptitude and the yeah you know and then somewhere around the 10th or 12th iteration of playing that record obsessively
Guest:I realized that it was actually perfect and the greatest record ever made.
Guest:The first Ramones record.
Guest:And from that point on, I saw the world differently.
Guest:What changed?
Guest:Perfect in what way in your mind?
Guest:It sounds kind of high-minded to attach all of this stuff to a band or a record.
Marc:Why not?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's what we do here.
Guest:It's our job.
Guest:The Ramones... The subject matter of the Ramones music was all the same sort of childish shit that my friends and I were talking about.
Guest:Right.
Guest:outsider culture, trash popular culture, horror movies, comics, stupid childish shit that we had clung to and that we had kind of imbued with this significance in our peer group.
Guest:And the Ramones were taking that stuff seriously.
Guest:So then suddenly I thought, well, maybe I can take...
Guest:these perverse notions that roll through my mind seriously, like they're singing songs about, you know, a chainsaw massacre or about, you know, sucking dick for drug money or whatever, like whatever they're singing about.
Guest:Like, I mean, that that's legit then like I can entertain those thoughts in my own head.
Guest:I don't have to suppress them.
Guest:I don't have to like not consider those part of my useful vocabulary.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So it, it made me take my own thoughts.
Guest:musings and ramblings seriously.
Guest:And then by extension, I had to take seriously other people's insane obsessions and musings and ramblings.
Guest:It made me take other people different from myself, people who didn't fit the paradigm of like sort of
Guest:mainstream mainstream serious people yeah i need in all all aspects of my life i'm not joking when i say that it made me that it changed the way i thought about the entire world right it gave you almost an aesthetic yeah sense or an understanding and a social awareness like uh you know it had never occurred to me that somebody would have to suck dick for drug money like it never occurred to me until and then i realized oh yeah i guess under a certain set of circumstances that becomes a viable option and also maybe a career you know okay
Guest:how old were you like 14 you know this is important shit yeah like i think i got this it's weird because i'm thinking about something in my own life it would have been like national lampoon or something yeah and that was also like that was also part of my peer group like we were all really into national lampoon right you know it served served the same sort of cultural purpose that mad magazine did in the late 50s early 60s you know
Guest:Right.
Guest:And, you know, by taking all of these offshoots of lefty or free thinking culture seriously, like it, it genuinely forced me to reassess my interactions with every other person.
Guest:Like I didn't, I was, I tried not to be as, as instantly judgmental in some instances, but in some instances I was much more judgmental, like immediately dismissive of people who seemed square and hidebound and douchebags.
Guest:Yeah, or just frozen into a preexisting paradigm.
Guest:Those people seemed like suckers to me.
Marc:Right, yeah, yeah, and frightened suckers in a way.
Marc:That's the weird thing about, because I imagine having been in music and recorded as much as you have and experienced people, that either some of those meatheads get their minds blown.
Marc:It might happen later, but they're not all hopeless.
Guest:No.
Guest:And I shudder to think what my life trajectory would have been had that moment on that school bus not transpired.
Guest:What would have happened to give me that kind of a, while I was in a malleable state, when you're a young teenager and you're forming your own personality.
Guest:What other thing might I have latched onto that could have put me in a different trajectory?
Marc:It might have been chess.
Marc:It didn't sound like you were going to be a football player or anything.
Guest:For example, my politics could have gotten radicalized.
Guest:I could have ended up a libertarian douchebag.
Guest:There's still time, man, for that one.
Guest:A lot of things could have happened to give me...
Guest:an angle or prism through which i would see the rest of my life and it happened to be the ramones i'm incredibly lucky that it was the ramones right and underground culture rather than you know the young republicans or something right but but it sounds to me like you were you're already a disruptive force and that you already had a innate suspicion of uh hierarchy of power and that kind of stuff right but i i think all of that energy all of that intellect like any of that
Guest:could have been directed in a in a different way right good all it would have taken was one strong-minded douchebag guy that you looked up to and then you're off it's it's like uh bill hicks said you know the the wrong friends and the wrong bar and anybody can be a bum you know yeah that's true yeah if in the right timing yeah so all right so you you have this moment but you're not a musician at that time no and then the in in my little peer group we decided to start a band and we started a band and
Guest:And no one knew how to play anything?
Guest:Not really.
Guest:I mean, we had a... What did you play?
Guest:I played bass at that point.
Guest:And because I had fewer strings than guitar, it seemed like it would be easier.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was.
Guest:I mean, legitimately, that's a... And you just taught yourself bass?
Guest:I had two lessons from an instructor that was recommended by the guitar store where I bought the bass.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he was also the cheapest instructor in town.
Guest:And the first lesson, he taught me how to tune the bass...
Guest:Like he showed me like physically how to tune the bass and what tuning it involved.
Guest:And then the second lesson, he started to teach me the difference between a minor scale and a major scale.
Guest:And at that point, I realized that I had learned enough.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:So what was that band?
Guest:That was a band called Just Ducky.
Guest:And coincidentally, I ran into a woman who was the singer for that band, or a singer for that band, on this tour.
Guest:She lives in Portland.
Guest:Her name is Heather Goncher.
Guest:She's a structural engineer.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:She builds bridges and stuff.
Guest:Wow.
Marc:So she got out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She got out unscathed.
Guest:Everybody that was the thing that's cool that I've that has transpired again and again in my life is I'll run into people that I thought were like smart and on the ball when they were like 15 years old or whatever or 18 years old or 20 years old.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'll run into them 20 or 30 years later and they're still smart and on the ball and I still admire them and I still think they're cool.
Guest:And maybe you haven't talked to them in 20 years.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's amazing how I mean, I think it's true more for dudes than for women.
Guest:But like a friendship that is that that a guy has with another guy, that friendship just reinflates and becomes whole after a span of like 20 or 30 years.
Guest:No problem.
Guest:Like you're just you're right back where you were.
Marc:I think that's true.
Marc:Like, there are guys that I know in my life that, I'm not gender specific, but I mean, they're mostly dudes that I know in my life where you just know it's not shakable.
Marc:Like, you know, and there's no, like that, you know, a couple of people that get lost.
Marc:Sure, sure, sure.
Marc:Religion or something.
Marc:But a lot of times they come out the other side.
Guest:But even they're like, you know, under the veneer of what they've applied.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:It's the same dude.
Marc:Same dude.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Holding on.
Yeah.
Guest:trying to get through so so at what point do you just you know break it open once you got the ramones records you start just amassing records yeah i mean i was luck i was lucky in that missoula is a college town yeah so in college towns people like bring stuff with them from wherever they came and then they when they leave or when they need like weed money or whatever they like shed that stuff yeah to the secondhand market right there were very good secondhand record stores in missoula there's one of the great record stores in the world's place
Guest:called rock and rudy's in missoula and that place um it came at that place came into full flower after i left but it is one of the great record stores you can you know it's an emporium but while i was there there were still a bunch of secondhand record shops there was sort of hybrids missoula had a lot of weird hybrid culture like there was one shop that had secondhand records
Guest:Secondhand motorcycles.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Guitars and home wine and beer making equipment.
Guest:Like that was this one shop.
Marc:Creative off the grid stuff that you need.
Marc:But at that time, I've talked to other cats who...
Marc:who were in the original kind of American punk movement, that it was really driven by a network of fans and people that needed literally to mail each other sometimes.
Marc:Oh, absolutely, yeah.
Marc:And the whole zine culture and, like, to get actual punk records was sort of a chore.
Guest:Yeah, and it was... And there was a... You know, if you ran into somebody else who had cool music tastes, like, the first topic would be, what are the cool records?
Guest:And then they would start to... You know, there was kind of like this...
Guest:underground education that you would pick up like oh yeah this record blah blah blah yeah yeah yeah like you'd go into a record store and the guy behind the counter would recognize you from and it was you know from where you were looking and what you looked like right he would say have you heard this right like pull out a record you're always getting your mind blown like once a week it was terrific
Guest:And that you said earlier that that sort of network, it doesn't exist anymore, that the live music scene and the fan network doesn't really exist anymore.
Guest:I disagree wholeheartedly.
Marc:It's just lighthearted.
Marc:I'm not going to argue with it.
Guest:It's just moved venues to the Internet.
Guest:And now there are these very robust online communities and exchange available.
Guest:which has made for the exact same kind of interaction, just in a non-physical environment.
Guest:And so you still find a website that's about a band that you never heard about before.
Guest:And in that website, there are links to a bunch of other sort of progenitor bands that are all interesting.
Guest:I guess what I should have said is I'm old.
Guest:You can't play that shit with me.
Marc:I guess I can.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I know that's true, but is there something that's lost in it not being physical?
Marc:Yes.
Guest:Like I, the culture, the personal culture of the record store, I still value pretty highly.
Guest:I don't go into record stores nearly as much as I used to, and that's on me.
Marc:So when you started playing, your drive was just to be a punk rock guy, to be a musician.
Guest:Yeah, I just wanted to participate in this mania that was evident from the records that I was buying.
Guest:I wanted to participate in it.
Guest:But you didn't find it in Missoula.
Guest:You had to wait until you went to college.
Guest:I mean, we enjoyed ourselves in the band that we had in Missoula, but it couldn't be described in any way other than failure.
Yeah.
Guest:i think we played two gigs that was it yeah and one of them the short life we played at a high school yeah a high school booked us for a school for like a a dance or something yeah someone at the high school booked us right and midway through our show like maybe 30 minutes into the show the chaperone from the for the day like the you know assistant principal or whatever marched onto stage onto the stage yeah
Guest:And presented our singer with the check for our fee and said, you guys can stop and leave.
Guest:And so we were actually cut off mid set at one of our only gigs.
Guest:That sounds like a successful punk performance.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:It sounds like it did exactly what it was supposed to do.
Marc:And even then.
Marc:It shook them up.
Marc:Do you remember what song might have been the one that pushed them over the edge?
Guest:I know that we did a cover of the cramp song, Human Fly.
Guest:And I think it was during the human fly that our senior was interrupted.
Guest:But we were, even then, we were thinking two steps ahead.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We cashed the check at a Safeway on the way out of town so that they wouldn't have time to stop payment on it.
Guest:oh you think they would have oh absolutely yeah yeah why else would they why else would they do it right just get it get them out yeah get them out get them out the door so when you got to college you you you were playing music and you were just going to school i was going to school um i was playing music why journalism exactly um i had a kind of a romantic notion of journalism from being you know
Guest:in the high school newspaper sort of idolizing.
Guest:And it was, it was a time when like, um, Woodward and Bernstein had sort of made an enormous political contribution.
Guest:You were like 14 and 76 or 75.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So like it, it seemed as though journalism could be, uh, you know, a tool of change and it seemed as though journalism could be important.
Guest:And it seemed just on a fundamental level, I thought writing down what happens now is important for the future.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that just seemed like a noble thing.
Guest:And my heroes at the time were journalists, muckrakers, and people who had an effect on the culture, on the greater culture.
Guest:And the Ramones.
Guest:Yeah, and the Ramones.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I did, in fact, pick a school that was in a big city where I assumed that there would be a vibrant punk rock scene.
Guest:Because I could have gone to Columbia and Missouri, which is another good journalism school.
Guest:Right.
Guest:but I didn't think there would be as much punk rock there, so I chose Northwestern, which is right next to Chicago, because I was certain there would be a lot of punk rock in Chicago.
Guest:And was there?
Guest:Yeah, there was a very interesting, small, but extraordinarily energetic punk scene.
Guest:So you were just a kid hanging around?
Guest:Yeah, I was just going to shows.
Guest:I mean, I tried to put together bands on my own, and I was kind of not doing well at that, and I joined another band, and I got kicked out of that band, and then I started recording on my own.
Guest:Why'd you get kicked out?
Guest:um i kept making fun of brian ferry i think that was the the last straw there was a couple that was at the core of the band and they were really a couple they were rocks and music really into like you know that kind of british like sort of romantic high forehead kind of music you know
Guest:sports jackets and you were just relentless yeah fuck brian ferry basically uh-huh yeah i mean again i as i've as i've matured i now see the charms in some of that stuff but at the time it just seemed really phony and pretentious and i didn't want to didn't want anything to do with it anyway i got kicked out of that band i started recording stuff on my own as big black and that's when i actually started to get involved in sort of on a more like significant level in the music scene
Guest:In terms of recording and playing.
Guest:And also playing out, like we formed a live band.
Guest:Jeff Pizzotti, the singer from Naked Ray Gun, who at the time was one of my absolute heroes.
Guest:You know, that band was an earth-shaking band to me.
Guest:Seeing Naked Ray Gun perform in the early 80s was just, you know, every show was completely radically different.
Guest:Like they would...
Guest:They did one show where they were all tripping balls and the music was just like a sheet of noise.
Guest:And they would do another show where it was kind of like this weird space rockabilly.
Guest:And then they did one show where the four members of the band set up on little platforms in different corners of the room.
Marc:yeah so they were like they were sort of playing like there's this confused crowd of like maybe 40 or 50 people in the middle of the room like nobody knew where to look but that was exciting because you know experimental music at that time like because i remember in albuquerque where i grew up i you know i talked about it before i knew this guy who had this band that played twice a year called jungle red and was just two of them and there were you know doll parts and
Guest:noise and and it was something they were both wearing jumpsuits it seemed like such an open field right it seemed like limitless yeah you know and and that to me was stimulating and exciting and that like sort of embodied this mentality that i had like what i imagined the ramones meant by all of their stuff right seemed to be physically embodied by the bands and the culture that i saw in the punk scene in chicago
Guest:And it validated my thinking.
Guest:It validated all these leaps of logic that I had made about how I should live and how I should think about people.
Guest:Like when you're in the company of people, like I came from Missoula, Montana, and I was not particularly like socially aware.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And suddenly I was in the company of immigrants and queers and dope fiends and people that literally lived on the street.
Guest:And like that, I'd never been around those people before.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it completely opened my perceptions of what was possible, like what kind of person mattered, what people could create from nothing.
Guest:You know, it was a life changing experience getting involved in the punk scene.
Marc:So the Ramones opened your mind to all these possibilities and made you feel less alone in your own, what you would have judged, wrong-minded thinking, perhaps.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:And then so you go to Chicago and then you see... I see it in practice.
Marc:Like things that you could never conceive of.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:And just sort of like, of course there's room for this.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Like you see a dude wearing a trench coat completely covered in mousetraps.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you think, well, that actually looks really cool, you know?
Marc:As opposed to, what the fuck's wrong with that guy?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or, you know, you go to a show and the singer from the band has a rat that is literally running around on his body while he's performing.
Guest:Who is that guy?
Guest:I think the band was called CHA, Chicago Housing Authority.
Guest:and that you know who would do that number one and then when you see it in action you think well why not that actually that's kind of you know it's like a it's kind of a gross version of alice cooper and his and his python you know sure well that's interesting that like when you see that kind of stuff happening and you realize there are precedents for it in a way right or but but significantly you just it's like
Guest:At the time, there were these paradigms.
Guest:There was disco music and rock music and the rock stars were these exalted, like sort of statuesque dudes and everything about them was mythical and phony and everything about it was giant and overblown.
Guest:And then like the disco scene, just all of it seemed manufactured and phony.
Guest:It seemed like it was a...
Guest:perversion of a genuine culture like the soul music and the gay culture seemed genuine to me and disco was just like fucking guidos you know it's just like you know douchebags and it was when you'd see like this the sort of
Guest:mustache schmucks with their silk shirts like it's easy to be offended by that culturally right without without being offended by its by the the gay and soul music roots right disco right disco was an aberration and and and was abhorrent
Marc:Now, is this something that you've been able to forgive as you get older?
Marc:Or does that remain?
Guest:I have friends who identified with the social underclasses that were the antecedents of disco.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And some of those people have sort of embraced the more flamboyant diva aspects of disco.
Guest:And I find their embrace of it charming.
Guest:That music is still repellent to me.
Guest:Sort of making it campy.
Guest:I don't think it's camp.
Guest:I think it's genuine.
Guest:It's sort of like the house music scene in Chicago.
Guest:The house music scene in Chicago was a genuine expression of underclass and sort of not just minority, but people of different sexual identities.
Guest:That was a genuine expression of joy for them.
Guest:And then it was stylized and co-opted and turned into a formula.
Guest:And it's easy to hate that formula.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it's easy to hate that exploitation.
Guest:But its initial expression in the clubs and in the garages in Chicago, that's legit.
Guest:It's beautiful.
Guest:It has its own soul.
Marc:So when you put Big Black together,
Marc:um who were so naked ray gun was still playing you were playing alongside of these bands that you looked up to yeah and you became sort of a force in yourself and where were you recording the original big black records when he started recording music i started recording on borrowed or rented equipment in my apartment right and i
Guest:It wasn't until the second Big Black record that I actually recorded my band in a studio.
Guest:I had been in the studio with other bands, sort of helping them record stuff.
Marc:But how'd you get the knack for that?
Marc:I mean, when you say helping, what were your original tasks?
Guest:Well, when you're in a band... Yeah.
Guest:eventually your band wants to make a demo or some sort of recording of yourself right right and so it falls on somebody in the band to learn how to do that yeah and i just learned i volunteered so i rented equipment when i'm back in montana i would go to the guitar shop sure and rent a tape recorder and rent some microphones like an eight track a four track four track and you know figure out how to set it up and then do some recordings and then and at the end of the at the end of it you end up with a recording of some kind you know
Guest:So, I did that a few times and then did the same thing when I moved to Chicago.
Guest:Like, I would do demo recordings for my friend's bands or my band.
Guest:And then once you develop those skills, you become an asset to your peer group.
Guest:Like, oh, he's that guy.
Guest:He's done demo tapes for bands.
Guest:You can get him to do your demo tape.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When you're in a band, all your friends are in bands and you end up doing this for everybody that you know until over time it just evolves and eventually it becomes a profession.
Guest:I occasionally speak at recording schools and the audio departments of universities and stuff.
Guest:And people talk about their career path.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And if I chart from when I first started doing these experimental recordings with my own band as the beginning of my experience in recording in the studio and stuff in 1978 or something or so, then I carried on doing that informally, certainly never getting paid for quite a long time.
Guest:And then I eventually developed...
Guest:A relationship with some recording studios that let me bring bands in to record them on a semi-professional basis.
Guest:And then eventually I had enough work where I could actually quit my job.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that didn't happen for almost 10 years.
Marc:From 78 to 88, late 80s.
Guest:87, I think, is when I quit my job for the last time.
Guest:What was your job?
Guest:I was a photograph retouch artist at a place that did advertising imagery.
Guest:Where'd you pick up that skill?
Guest:I had been into photography when I was in high school.
Guest:And then when I graduated at Northwestern, I needed a job.
Guest:And I just bullshitted my way into it and then learned it on the fly.
Marc:So you were a darkroom guy in high school?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, me too.
Guest:I was into cameras and photography.
Guest:Mostly, yeah.
Guest:And then I was working for this company that did images for the advertising industry.
Guest:And so a lot of my time was spent working on the Marlboro Man or the Merit Cigarette Campaign or Salem.
Guest:Just getting the color right?
Guest:Stuff like there'd be a dude they'd photograph in the studio and then him leaning against a motorcycle.
Guest:right yeah they'd have this like epic mountain vista you know like all right take the motorcycle dude put him there yeah and then so the end of this little wooden cigarette that he's holding is a prop you have to put put the fire on the cigarette right now that kind of stuff like really really mundane really but somebody has to do it you know and it was good good money
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Terrific money.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so when I quit, I actually, it was actually, I, I had tried to get my ducks in a row before I quit.
Guest:Like I bought a house, I qualified for my mortgage and then I, you know, and then I quit.
Guest:So like, it wasn't a matter of me trying to buy a house as a self-employed person.
Guest:You still live in that house?
Guest:No, I had to sell that house when I built the studio that I work in now.
Guest:But yeah, I went from being a college student to being a professional in that business to being self-employed as a recording engineer and
Guest:And I was doing recordings the whole time.
Guest:But I think the expectation now is that at the end of a university program, you're qualified to work in an industry and then you can just get a job in that industry.
Guest:And specifically in recording, there's just so much stuff that you pick up in the saddle that I don't think that's realistic.
Guest:And besides, there's just no jobs.
Guest:No one is hiring recording engineers.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So you basically give lectures to tell the class that it's like, look, it's really a long shot.
Marc:And what you're doing here is probably bullshit.
Guest:Well, the main thing is that if you're interested in it, you will pursue it anyway.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Anything.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then you will find a way to make it part of your life.
Marc:But it's interesting to me that your your primary momentum was to be a musician.
Guest:yeah i mean the job was definitely a a means to an end of me playing music and being involved that was your first passion yeah yeah the way i the way i describe it is that um there are some people who want a career in music that is they want to be able to play music right and have music pay their rent for them right and then there are people and i would consider myself one of these people
Guest:who i'm willing to work a 40 hour a week job in order to support my interest in music the way some people would support a family i support my interest in music and that's playing recording whatever it may be yeah whatever it is and as a fan especially in the punk rock scene where every there weren't that many people and everybody had to do a lot of things
Guest:if you're one thing you're also another like if you're in a band you're also a guy that a contact for out-of-town bands booking gigs right if you're and if you're a contact for that well then you also have to handle printing up posters or flyers for the gig right and then once you're doing that well that's a small step from there to making record jackets and pressing up records and being a record label
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And once you're doing that, then it's a small step, you know, from there to distributing your friends records as well.
Guest:And so everybody, basically everybody involved in music, like evolved in the original punk rock.
Guest:In the punk scene had fingers in all of those areas, like everybody that you run into that was in a band.
Guest:They would also like, you know, the guys in Naked Ray Gun owned a PA that they used public address system they used for their practice room.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They would also rent it out for gigs and go do gigs as a as a sound company.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, and then the a bunch of the bands got together and they're like, we're all pressing up our records and we're trying to sell them.
Guest:let's call ourselves a label, put all of our records under the same label, and then maybe we'll have more clout.
Guest:And so we formed a collective record label that was a record label really only in that they all used the same P.O.
Guest:box.
Guest:Every band was operating independently.
Guest:What label was that?
Guest:It's called Ruthless Records.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And that record label, you know, we put records out by basically all of our peers in Chicago.
Guest:If they wanted to put a record out under the name Ruthless Records, they were welcome to.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And as long as they did all the work, no problem, you know.
Guest:But what it allowed us...
Guest:It allowed you to do is like you could call a distributor and say, hey, I've got these new there's a there's a new naked Reagan record coming out next week.
Guest:But you still owe us for these big black records or these effigies records that you bought.
Guest:And you haven't paid that invoice.
Guest:And we're not going to ship you any of the naked Reagan records unless you pay those invoices.
Guest:Now the guy on the other end of the phone didn't know that naked Reagan would send him the records regardless.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I could still say that and I could still get paid.
Guest:You were the guy that did that.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You were the heavy.
Marc:Well, you know, I was the least likely to get paid.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So you're telling me that like when you, by the time you recorded Surfer Rosa, the Pixies record, you hadn't quite quit your day job yet.
Guest:No, I was still working for a photo lab in Chicago.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc:And at that point, you know, you were getting a reputation.
Guest:I don't think it may look that way if you're looking, you know, in reverse chronologically.
Yeah.
Guest:But at the time, I was essentially unknown outside of the very small circle of people who were into making records.
Guest:But the Pixies were out of Boston, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So how did they find you?
Guest:Their record label was in England.
Guest:There was another Boston band called the Throwing Muses.
Guest:I remember them.
Guest:It got signed to an English record label called 4AD.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the Throwing Muses people were friends with the Pixies people.
Guest:And they said to their record label, here's this cassette from this other Boston band you might be interested in.
Guest:They got signed on the basis of that cassette before they'd really established themselves as a performing band.
Guest:I don't know how many shows they'd done at that point, but they weren't a known quantity.
Guest:And then their first record came out.
Guest:It was an EP that was called from that cassette.
Guest:It did some business and established them somewhat.
Guest:And when they were fixing to do an album, their English record label...
Guest:sort of essentially sent my name down from above and said, you should talk to Steve Albini about doing your record.
Guest:I don't think they had ever heard of me.
Guest:I don't think they knew who I was, you know, which I wouldn't have taken that as an insult at the time.
Guest:I would have been completely normal.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So then I contacted them.
Guest:I heard their cassette.
Guest:I thought they were an interesting band.
Guest:I thought I could probably work on the record and do okay.
Guest:They were one of the first bands that I worked on where they weren't part of my immediate peer group, you know, and were you impressed with the music?
Guest:Yeah, to an extent.
Guest:I think that guy, Charles, I think is a distinctive songwriter.
Guest:I thought he had some odd ideas that I thought were underrepresented.
Guest:And to this day, I have a very close relationship with Kim Deal.
Guest:I think she's got an absolutely magical voice.
Guest:I think she is a genius and she thinks about music in a unique way.
Guest:I consider myself very close to her in terms of her musical existence.
Guest:I really admire her.
Guest:uh and i'm you know i'm proud of that association the the pixies as a band you know they were fine whatever they were fine i'm not you know i thought as a band their music was kind of unremarkable like especially considering what we were talking about like the extraordinary range of experiences that you could have in the punk scene at the time i i felt like their music was like fairly conservative
Marc:But that record turns out to be a great record.
Marc:So did you find in starting out that dealing with maybe something you couldn't say directly to their face, which is like, you guys are okay.
Marc:That made you sort of compensate.
Guest:Well...
Guest:I should point out that I was still pretty green.
Marc:No, I know, but I'm just saying like, but is there a part of you that said, I'm going to, I'm going to pop this shit?
Guest:No, no, no, no, no, not at all.
Guest:Like I, even then I didn't think that I had, uh, uh, I didn't think I was able to, to, you know, make something into, you can't turn a sausage into a trout.
Guest:You know, I didn't, I didn't have that, that kind of a delusion.
Guest:I think I did insert myself, insinuate myself into the personality of the record a little much in my, to my way of thinking.
Guest:Into that record.
Guest:Yeah, like the little bits of recorded conversation that ended up on that record and certain sonic aspects of it, I think were driven more by my ambition than the band's organic.
Guest:And that actually left a bad taste in my mouth, thinking that...
Guest:For the rest of their career, this band has to answer for all these little gags that are on their record that weren't their idea.
Guest:But now they have to go to their grave with that as hung on them as part of their legacy.
Guest:Well, I'm sure that somebody made it their idea.
Guest:Do they always say like, no, it was Albini.
Guest:Well, regardless, I would know, you know, that I did that to them rather than them coming up.
Guest:And so that helped to shape my current philosophy, which has been sort of since then.
Guest:I tend not to insinuate myself too much into the personality of the record.
Guest:I tend not to try to exert very much control over music in the music I'm recording.
Guest:And I would go as far as to say that I try to avoid forming opinions about the music that I work on as an engineer because I think it's inappropriate.
Guest:I think one of the experiences that I had with my friend's bands going into the studio during the punk era was my friend's band would come into the studio and he would set up his amplifier and he would be playing and it would sound awesome.
Guest:It would sound like that's what my friend sounds like when he plays his guitar, right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then you'd see the engineer through the glass in the control room and he would like be sort of crinkling his nose a little and it would come out and you know, you would see this sort of pantomime of a conversation between the guitar player and the engineer.
Guest:And it would conclude with the engineer reaching over and turning the amplifier down to satisfy himself.
Guest:Like, you know, you shouldn't play so long.
Guest:And then you would hear this guy that you were familiar with and his music, he would play his guitar and it wouldn't sound like him anymore.
Guest:It would sound feeble.
Guest:But the engineer would now have a smile on his face like, ah, I fixed it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I've seen that mentality of the engineer trying to like use his tastes and his perception of the music.
Guest:I've seen that be detrimental.
Right.
Guest:If the band is really into something and they're doing something, they have a method that they've used to form the personality of the band.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I don't want to interfere with that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it's also, I mean, on one hand, it's none of my business because that's all internal stuff that goes on within the band, like what their aesthetic is, how they want to present their music.
Guest:And...
Guest:On the other hand, like, my tastes are pretty fucked up.
Guest:Like, the music that I like, that I listen to, is kind of absurd.
Guest:Like, I like a lot of stuff that sounds like kind of a disaster.
Guest:Like what?
Guest:Well, we'd mentioned this band End Result.
Guest:They were a band from Chicago.
Guest:Like, they were, you know, an aggressively experimental, noisy, outsider band.
Guest:Very much outside, not just the mainstream music scene, but outside even the punk scene and the hardcore scene that we were developing at the time.
Guest:Truly odd, genuinely weird, beautiful music.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But most people listening to it would just assess it as noise and screaming.
Guest:But for me, I have an emotional resonance with it, and I think it's beautiful.
Guest:So if I tried to make other bands that are trying to make a conventionally pretty record...
Guest:If I tried to make them sound more like end result, it would be a failure on both counts.
Guest:It's like if you see a beautiful woman and she's wearing a pink frock and has lipstick on and then you see a grizzly bear.
Guest:And you think, well...
Guest:i wonder maybe i should put lipstick on an address on that bear i mean all you're going to do is piss off the bear right and in the end it's not going to be any more beautiful yeah i get it you know yeah yeah so so that's like i'm i try to tell you gauge not interfering yeah i try to i try to let each band have their own have the experience of making the record that they want and also i try not to
Guest:I've seen engineers like I've seen it happen where someone is trying to improve things and they diminish them.
Guest:And I don't want to do that.
Guest:I would rather have them be I'd rather have them be erratic and unpredictable and or like not classically perfect in order for them to be more genuine.
Marc:So do you think, though, as time went on, I mean, you did several bands, several records, you know, Boss Hog, The Breeders, Jesus Wizard, you know, you did a lot of people come back to you.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Do you think your reputation in the music community was that let's go to Albini because he's going to honor our exact sound or Albini is going to Albini it?
Guest:Well, I think I flatter myself in thinking that I do a good job, right?
Guest:And I think that that's a baseline that a lot of people have been frustrated by.
Guest:Like a lot of bands just felt like they were treated ineptly in the studio previously.
Guest:So just if you listen to a record from a band that you're familiar with and you think, wow, that sounds...
Guest:Sounds convincingly like that band.
Guest:And then you look in the credits and it's me that did the recording.
Guest:That's very gratifying for me.
Guest:And also that might entice you to bring your band to me.
Guest:So I like to think that that's a part of it.
Guest:Like on a basic level, I do a good job.
Guest:secondary to that i'm also a bargain like for the for people in my position who do what i do i charge significantly less than most of the people who are you know that have that kind of cv and have that kind of tenure and people have been doing it for as long and have the kind of facility available right so it's a bargain right so that's that's another selling point that's that's the but you like john spencer did a lot of the few records with you yeah and they've got a pretty we're good friends
Marc:Yeah, I love those guys.
Guest:Did you do their last album?
Guest:No, I've worked on bits and pieces over the years.
Guest:I've rarely worked on an entire record start to finish with John because he's a pretty creative guy and he has a lot of procedural ideas about how he wants to do things.
Guest:And a lot of it is stuff that he just wants to pursue on his own.
Guest:And I have a lot of respect for that.
Marc:But there's a lot of punch to it.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Guest:I mean, and you can tell when you're listening to music from somebody who's really single minded, somebody who's like kind of gripped by a mania of something.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And that, to me, that trumps anything else.
Guest:Like you can listen to a, you know, a recording that from a classical standpoint is a bad recording.
Guest:You know, it's distorted.
Guest:It's just not, not full frequency response.
Guest:It's not an accurate reflection of what was going on, blah, blah, blah.
Guest:But you can feel the mania coming through it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that to me trumps everything else.
Guest:Right.
Marc:You need to feel that.
Yeah.
Marc:Well, I, cause like, you know, in my limited under, you know, sort of understanding of, of what in my mind you represented, uh, production wise was that there was, you know, whether it was with, with nevermind or, or maybe what do you did a wedding present record, didn't you?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I did a couple of records for them.
Marc:that there was this sort of wall of sort of the guitars were, you know, up front.
Marc:But that's me just reading into you.
Guest:Well, what you're picking up on is the aesthetic of the band.
Guest:Like a lot of those bands had that as an aesthetic.
Guest:Like they wanted to have a very sort of overwhelming...
Guest:presentation but is that what you do i mean isn't like big black sort of like that as well yeah i mean our aesthetic was pretty raging but but then i've also worked on a lot of very modest music like there's a band called low who are i like that i like them very beautiful yeah very very you know you could say modest but it's i think it's also quite intense yeah and i think that you know that presentation is as difficult and as much of a challenge or as much of an interest of mine as an engineer as doing like a ripping rock record is you know
Guest:I've done a bunch of records with a singer-songwriter from New York named Nina Nastasia.
Guest:And she's done some records where it's just her singing and playing a guitar.
Guest:And some records where it's her and as many as 9 or 12 people playing in a very large ensemble.
Guest:And there's a thread of continuity.
Guest:Her aesthetic survives through all those different changes.
Guest:And each of those settings requires different things from an engineer.
Guest:But I find that very gratifying to work on as well.
Guest:I don't...
Guest:I don't think that I have a single aesthetic that I want to apply to other bands.
Guest:What I like to think is that I'm sensitive to what they're trying to do, and I have enough of a technical experience that I can pull off what they're trying to get at.
Guest:And also an appreciation of music.
Guest:Yeah, I think that's less important, though.
Guest:I mean, what we were talking about before, I'm trying not to form an opinion about the music.
Marc:No, I get that.
Marc:I get that.
Marc:But in talking about you as a person, and I'm not arguing with you, that the same spirit that brought you to Chicago to appreciate all these different elements, you know, it's within you.
Marc:I mean, there's part of you, if it's not Gordon Lightfoot, which you can even contextualize, you can say, like, I see this.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And like I said, I mean, as I've matured, I mean, if Gordo called me, I would probably say yes.
Yeah.
Guest:But like the point being that I feel like I wouldn't have stuck with music if music wasn't important to me.
Guest:I probably would have done something else that had a technical capacity.
Guest:Like I could conceivably have satisfied myself as a photograph retouch artist for the rest of an extended career.
Marc:Do you still take pictures or did you take pictures?
Guest:It's been a long time.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But like, I guess sort of, you know, maybe it's just my personal, what I'm bringing to it.
Marc:Cause I look at, you know, the number of, of albums you've produced, which is hundreds, right?
Marc:Thousands, thousands.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Of all different levels.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like there are ones that I know.
Marc:and i know where the artist was before they recorded with you and where they were after like someone like nirvana or like pj harvey or and now like in looking at the john spencer stuff and the breeder stuff like and like for me like you know if i listen to the difference between did you didn't do dry did you the pj harvey one yeah you did that no no no no i didn't do dry i did rid of me right like the difference between dry and rid of me is profound so in my mind i'm like well steve must have done that
Guest:Well, but then if you listen to the other records, other P.J.
Guest:Harvey records, there's a pretty dramatic personality shift between every record.
Marc:Yeah, no, I see that now.
Guest:At the point that I did the P.J.
Guest:Harvey record, P.J.
Guest:Harvey was a band, a functioning three-piece band.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The name of the band was P.J.
Guest:Harvey.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Shortly thereafter, PJ Harvey became a solo performer, Polly Harvey.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the band identity didn't exist anymore.
Guest:So she made radical changes between each of her records.
Guest:As an individual, I worked on the last record that she did where it was the original incarnation of a band.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then she broke away from that and became a solo performer after that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So her solo records were all constructed sort of individually.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I think I am sensitive about getting credit for aesthetic decisions that the bands and the musicians make.
Guest:Well, I think that's... Because I am aggressive about not participating in those decisions.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So if you listen to a record and you think, wow, that was really brilliant the way they did that with the music there, that's not me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's them.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, I think that takes some humility, huh?
Guest:Well, I mean, part of it is there's a careerist aspect to being an engineer or producer where...
Guest:In the mainstream paradigm of record labels in the music business, people use their professional capital in different ways.
Guest:But first you have to accrue that capital.
Guest:You have to become responsible for a hit or a success or something, right?
Guest:So you have to claim authorship of it somehow.
Guest:And then you have some professional capital, which you can then use to extend your career, right?
Guest:I've never been interested in a career in that sense.
Guest:I like my job.
Guest:I want to keep doing it, you know?
Guest:And this is why you notoriously don't sign on for the royalties.
Guest:Yeah, I don't take royalties on records that I work on, partly because I think it's part of a system that exploits musicians and artists in a way that I'm just not comfortable with.
Guest:But also, I just don't feel like my job warrants it.
Guest:There's a fundamental thing that I've noticed about the music scene, which is that whenever anyone wants to be paid a percentage of
Guest:for whatever it is it doesn't matter whether it's a you know management booking agent you know promoter or whatever whenever somebody wants to be paid a percentage of what would otherwise be your income that person is being overpaid yeah right no i understand that and i feel like not participating in that system
Guest:makes it easier for me to get to sleep and also means that the differential, like the money that would otherwise have gone to me, that's going to the band.
Guest:And I feel good about that.
Guest:I feel good about knowing that the members of Nirvana, for example, are a couple million dollars richer as individuals.
Guest:It's their music.
Guest:It's their record.
Guest:They...
Guest:they deserve that money.
Guest:They made those records and they lived that experience.
Guest:So they deserve that couple extra million dollars that I didn't get.
Guest:And it's not like I'm hurting.
Guest:It's like I can still make rent.
Guest:I just keep doing my job and I keep getting paid.
Marc:I think that's the strength of character that you've decided for yourself and it's commendable in a way.
Guest:I appreciate that, and that's a very nice thing to say to me and about me, but I also feel like it's just an observation.
Guest:Like, other people maybe haven't realized that they're exploiting other people.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it's very easy to... We chose not to play along with the paradigm that was feeding everybody.
Guest:Yeah, but it's easy to either feign ignorance or prefer ignorance in a situation like that, where you, you know...
Marc:But another producer might, just as easily as you say that it's the band's record, would say like, well, I produced that record.
Marc:I'm part of it.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:You know, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, okay.
Guest:I mean, if the producer, if he was that important or if he was that big of a factor.
Marc:Well, you think George Martin would say like, you know, I don't deserve any of that Beatles money.
Guest:No.
Guest:Bear in mind, George Martin came from a completely different political organization of the music scene.
Guest:In the late 50s, early 60s, there was a hierarchy within the corporate structure of a record label where a producer was a staff person who was responsible for making records, and he picked the artists, picked the songs, picked the studios, made the arrangements, blah, blah, blah.
Guest:So, completely different paradigm.
Guest:And in that paradigm, that compensation scheme...
Guest:probably made sense because he was much more of an authority.
Guest:And he's in the system.
Guest:And he's in the system.
Guest:I get it.
Guest:Not part of that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But if you talk about contemporary producers, like people who make music now, there are a couple of different kinds.
Guest:The term has evolved in meaning.
Guest:Like there are people who make completely finished music.
Guest:backing tracks and then they can apply a vocalist over any portion of that track and to finish it to complete it and in that sense those people are authors of that music right right but when a band comes in with a song that they wrote four years ago that they've been playing on the road and that they you know is like an embodiment of their aesthetic and like and they knock that song out in two takes and i i just sit in the chair and hit record
Guest:There's no way that I deserve more than just an hourly wage, basically, for what I've done.
Guest:And that's the situation that I'm in most commonly.
Guest:I'm recording what a band is doing organically.
Guest:And you're making it sound the best you can.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that just boils down to competence.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You call yourself a recording engineer.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Over a producer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I've seen producers in action and they're like bossing people around and telling people to, you know, keep the hi-hat a little more peppery off the top, you know, shit like that.
Guest:It's not something you say?
Guest:No, of course not.
Guest:So like that sort of stuff, if you're doing that, then I'm proud not to be associated with that.
Marc:Now, I mean, what are the biggest records that you were involved in in your mind?
Marc:Like, I know that in utero, that was the one that you got.
Marc:That was the last one.
Marc:And they came to you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When you say biggest records, I presume that you're talking about their financial turnaround.
Marc:No, not necessarily.
Marc:This is what you think.
Marc:Well, that example's big.
Marc:That was a big change for them, and it's a significant record for them.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:I'll give you two records that are really big for me.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:I did a record, oh, God, it's a couple years ago now, for a guy named John Grabski.
Guest:He had been given a terminal cancer diagnosis.
Guest:After having beaten cancer previously, the cancer reasserted itself, and he had a terminal diagnosis.
Guest:He had two options in his treatment.
Guest:He could...
Guest:maintain a sort of normal quality of life for a relatively short period, or he could maybe extend his life by being very aggressive with the treatment at the expense of much lessened quality of life.
Guest:And he chose to live his life as normally as he could and let the cancer take its course, but he was going to try to be productive in the months that he had left or months or weeks, whatever it ended up being.
Guest:And they contacted me and said he wanted to make an album documenting his relationship with the disease.
Guest:And that's how he wanted to spend his last months on earth was making this record that was going to be a statement about his relationship to the disease.
Guest:So he and his brother came to the studio and we recorded an album and we finished it and it got mixed and it got released.
Guest:And the album is under the name of the band is Teeth, and the album is called The Strain.
Guest:And it's an incredible record.
Guest:It's a great record.
Guest:It's a brutal record, and it's a really eyes-open assessment of his, you know, they call it a struggle.
Guest:It's not a struggle.
Guest:It's a relationship.
Guest:It's his relationship with the disease from the inside, right?
Guest:like a war correspondent giving the rest of the world a synopsis of the action along with him just expressing himself about his, you know, his emotional state and his feelings and his fear and his, you know, everything, everything tied into it.
Guest:It's a really remarkable album.
Guest:So that record's really big for me.
Guest:The fact that I was able to do that record with that guy in the last months of his life
Guest:And his approach to life and his commitment to staying on it rather than being passive or rather than
Guest:making accommodations to the disease, that was inspirational to me.
Guest:Again, it was one of those things like listening to that Ramones record.
Guest:It changed the way I saw the whole world and the range of possibilities that I could have.
Guest:So that's a big record for me.
Guest:A few years earlier,
Guest:uh kim deal had been contacting me about making a record a breeder's record or a record under the name of the breeders she had been she'd gone through a bunch of personal stuff she had had her band her actual band the breeders had kind of dissolved under her she tried to mount another version of that band and that was a failure she had burned through a whole bunch of money yeah it was kind of at the end of a rope with respect to that yeah relationship and
Guest:And we got started making this record and she was suspicious of me as she had grown to become suspicious of other recording engineers who had been trying to like sort of hoodwink her into doing things in ways that she didn't want to.
Guest:And that reopened our relationship.
Guest:We hadn't really interacted much since the first Breeders record that I worked on.
Guest:Which one?
Guest:It was called Pod.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:That's a good record.
Guest:That's the one with the cover of... Happiness is a Warmdown.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And in the intervening years, she had...
Guest:She'd seen a lot of changes in her personal life.
Guest:Battling this and that.
Guest:Gone through a bunch of shit.
Guest:If that session had gone poorly, if she hadn't been able to reanimate the breeders at that point,
Guest:I shudder to think what other things might have gone wrong for her.
Guest:But we had a very successful session.
Guest:We carried on with more.
Guest:She formed a new version of the band around the success of those initial sessions.
Guest:We recorded some with that band.
Guest:She carried on.
Guest:And since then, she's made several Breeders albums, some of which I haven't worked on.
Guest:Which record was that?
Guest:This was a record called Title TK.
Guest:And that record reinvigorated my relation or reestablished my relationship with Kim.
Guest:She's become a dear friend.
Guest:I have an enormous amount of respect for her and her aesthetic and her perseverance through all the bullshit that she's been saddled with.
Guest:And so that record stands out to me as an important record.
Guest:And then... So those are two specific records.
Guest:But...
Guest:They kind of hint at a thing where I've worked with some people over a very long period of time and many, many sessions with these people and they've become kind of woven into the fabric.
Guest:We've each sort of gotten woven into the fabric of our lives.
Guest:And those relationships to me mean more than the records, which is little artifacts along the way of a relationship.
Guest:So what I'm most proud of are those relationships, those longstanding relationships where it's not just that I'm working with somebody again and again.
Guest:It's that the whole range of experiences that was hinted at to me
Guest:by the idea of punk rock as expressed by the Ramones, whatever.
Guest:All of that is all true.
Guest:I get to experience all of these life experiences.
Guest:I get to have these long, meaningful friendships and professional relationships that transcend any artifact that you make along the way.
Guest:Those are the things that matter to me.
Guest:That's beautiful.
Guest:oh yeah but i mean it wasn't always like that was it i mean that's something that sort of evolved as you evolved as a person yeah i mean emotionally it probably took me 20 years to be ready to realize that the actual records aren't that important you know and i and i genuinely feel like the actual records are not that important like it's nice when there's a good record and i'm proud of doing a good job and all that sort of stuff
Guest:But the records are signposts along, you know.
Guest:Your life and the life of others.
Guest:And I'm pleased that I have gotten to experience all the things that I've gotten to experience along the way.
Marc:And like, you know, we talked about, you know, early on, like, because it struck me that in looking back at who I thought you were, that there was, you know, an intensity and an anger there.
Guest:and uh and and it's sort of like a a person that was sort of um uh you know just you're ready to explode and well i mean i should point out that i've managed to steer clear of all of the things that i might otherwise have been frustrated by and angered at you know like the conventions of the mainstream music music business like i just don't operate that way so i'm never frustrated by that yeah like and booze and drugs was never your thing
Guest:No, I mean, I stopped drinking in my 20s.
Guest:I just realized I didn't like being drunk.
Guest:I didn't like... And I was a dick to other people when I would drink.
Guest:And it just... It wasn't like I gave anything up.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:A lot of people that I know have... I'm very lucky that I never developed a taste for alcohol because I was a real prick, you know?
Marc:Right.
Marc:And you saw, I mean, I have to assume that over the arc of this career and talking about some of your close friends, this was not... You saw it.
Marc:You saw the ravages.
Marc:You saw it in every manifestation, I imagine.
Guest:And I've seen people who have lost things more important to them for the sake of indulging... The addiction.
Guest:A chemical, which is tragic, but...
Guest:i also have seen people who for whom an identity as an addict or an identity as a drunk or whatever that is a part of their personality that they cherish like they feel like you know being in that spectrum is part of what defines them and they feel like if they lose that then they're losing something important about the way they see the world or the way they interact with it and i'm i'm not going to judge that is wrong you know
Guest:right well you seem like a reasonably happy yeah yeah i think like i said i'm i i've tended to avoid those things that could frustrate you have kids i have no kids none that i know of anyway uh-huh and and i know that you play professional poker a bit yeah i i would consider myself semi-professional i can't if i tried to make a living as a poker player it would probably be a pretty meager living
Guest:was it but it was just something you were interested in and you enjoyed i've played cards my whole life i just i it's a tremendously stimulating game i i i enjoy the i i'm not a competitive person right nature like you know i i don't necessarily want to beat anybody else i just want i want to do things well i want to i want to do something well myself right so i'm i'm not as concerned about beating somebody else as i am about you know doing things correctly or doing things well myself
Guest:And poker is a place where you have a pretty obvious scoreboard.
Guest:It's like if you leave with more money than you came with, well, then you're doing something right.
Marc:I know you sort of have a kind of proletariat sort of view of your job, but are there people...
Guest:that you want to work with that you haven't oh sure i mean like is there someone out there like i love to record that i get asked i get asked this question a lot and i have this i've had the same oh yeah the same laundry list the same well my point being if any of this was ever going to happen yeah it would have by now probably you know
Guest:Like, I couldn't count the number of times that I've said, you know, Neil Young, give me a call.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But Willie Nelson, you know.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Hit Google.
Guest:I'm very easy to find.
Guest:And affordable.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, you know, I did get the experience of recording the Stooges, who were... Oh, you did the weirdness, right?
Guest:Yeah, I did an album with them, and that was...
Guest:an experience that I wouldn't trade for the world.
Guest:Like just hanging out with the Stooges for a month was maybe the coolest thing I've ever done.
Guest:I can't claim to being that cool of a person.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But hanging out with the Stooges every day, like just when, just hearing Iggy's voice over the intercom, you know, when you bring the doorbell, yeah, it's Iggy.
Guest:It's like fucking, it's the best, you know?
Guest:You just, like if I could time travel back to 15-year-old me and say, don't worry about all this bullshit, one of these days you're going to get to record the Stooges album.
Guest:It's going to be great, you know?
Guest:And it was exactly the experience you would want.
Guest:You know, like, he was, like, huge personality.
Guest:He had his shirt off the whole time.
Marc:He had his shirt off in here.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, he's like, he's wrought iron, that guy.
Guest:That's exactly what he is.
Guest:What you think Iggy Pop is, what you think the kind of a dude you would like to, like, if I ran into Iggy Pop, what would it be like?
Guest:That's what it's like.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:It's better than you think.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Like, I was surprised at how articulate and how good his memory is and how intelligent he is and how he's framed his life.
Marc:It's amazing.
Guest:And, you know, and the other guys, and seeing, particularly for Ron and Scott, like, they're both gone now.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:they had always been kind of shortchanged like their band it was their band you know and their they never really achieved any kind of like significant success during the initial iteration of that band like they were they were known by other musicians but like they weren't celebrated right and to see them see their band like re in like sort of reanimated like that in its original incarnation like this is the band that we always wanted and we've got it back and
Guest:and we're playing to sellouts every night, and people love us.
Guest:That was very satisfying for them to see their ambition for themselves, see it realized like that in a very tangible way.
Guest:After so many years.
Guest:Yeah, after so long, just to get another bite at the apple, I thought that was really, really great.
Guest:You brought up...
Guest:Bill Hicks.
Guest:Did you know Bill?
Guest:I didn't know him.
Guest:My wife knew him quite well.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, my wife has worked in the comedy world for quite a long time.
Guest:Do I know her?
Guest:Heather Winna.
Guest:She managed, I want to say, the funny firm in Chicago and the laugh factory in Chicago.
Guest:For the last 15 years, 12, 15 years, she's been a manager at the Second City.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And so she knows all the comics that used to come through and all those places where she worked.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I've interacted with a lot of those people, but I didn't know Bill.
Marc:But he had an influence.
Marc:He seems like, in terms of your spirit, that there's definitely a similarity in...
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, every, all the stories that I, and, um, there was a guy that used to work at our studio is a guy named John Novotny.
Guest:He was a standup in Chicago and he, um, he and Bill were friends and like the stories that I've heard from Heather and from John about Bill, um, mean, you know, I, I appreciate how genuine he was.
Guest:Like he's another one of those guys, like, you know, you see his comedy and you get a sense of his perspective and you wonder what, what he would be like as a person.
Guest:And then it's nice to hear that.
Guest:from people that knew him directly that he was basically the same dude same dude a little sweeter yeah like you know in one-on-one so what's your relationship with comedy did was that part of it like i know that you thought the ramones were funny but when you were a kid was comedy sort of a thing i can't really say that i was that embedded in the comedy culture right like it like i know there was a period where comedy was like sort of in its heyday in the late 80s early 90s where there was like um the stand-up thing was
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:The boom.
Guest:A route to some sort of stardom.
Guest:I didn't really participate in it or I didn't know anybody that did, but in the ensuing years through Heather and her friends, I've come to meet a lot of people who ended up being kind of significant comics.
Guest:There's a guy who used to work in the... He was in a band and he used to work in the clubs in Chicago named Fred Armisen.
Guest:I know Fred, yeah.
Guest:Terrific, terrific dude.
Guest:And he honed his comic skills by like...
Guest:mocking and playing with all the people in the... He used to work at a club called Lounge Axe, which was a club where all the bands would tour through.
Guest:And he would play pranks on the bands and he would... That's where a lot of his comic sensibility came from.
Guest:And he's a musician himself.
Guest:Yeah, he was a drummer in a band called Trench Mouth.
Guest:So seeing him go from being just like Fred from Lounge Acts to being this international star, television star, that's one of the most amazing things that I've ever witnessed up close.
Guest:He's the first person that I've ever known that wanted to become famous and then through strength of will and being funny made himself famous.
Guest:It's pretty astounding, isn't it?
Guest:So you're in town playing?
Guest:We played a couple of nights.
Guest:We played at the Echo and we played at the Regent Theater last night.
Guest:And now my wife and I are just taking a day off to goof off.
Marc:Well, it was a real honor talking to you, buddy.
Marc:Oh, thank you.
Marc:Thanks for coming.
Guest:No problem.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:The man, the force of nature that is Steve Albini.
Marc:I hope that satisfied most of your needs out of a conversation with Mr. Albini.
Marc:Go to WTF Pod for all your WTF Pod needs.
Marc:Not touring much because I'm working on a thing that I can't talk about yet.
Marc:What's that noise?
Marc:You want guitar?
Marc:I made up a riff that I like, and I think I will play it for you now.
Guest:Boomer lives!