Steve Albini (1962 - 2024)
So this isn't so much a eulogy as a long-delayed response to something Steve Albini wrote three decades ago. Truth is, I don’t have a lot to say about Steve Albini, personally. I’ve lived in the same town as him, circulated in the same social environment, for most of my adult life. Yet, I knew of him more than I knew him. It’s impossible, if you’ve lived a life like mine, not to know of him. His projects and opinions are legion. Many of them, possibly most, chafe against convention. Sure he kicked against the pricks. But he also pricked our kicks, piercing the inflations of our delight like a scorpion in a bouncy house. Take for example, his oft-cited 1993 article for The Baffler about the music industry. It wore the title, “The Problem with Music,” but I also saw it somewhere else bearing the title, “Some of Your Friends are Already This Fucked.” Albini provides a line item accounting of a typical band’s deal with a label, detailing what the band will be advanced against all the costs of recording, producing, and promoting a record.
Of course, Albini is right when he says that the game is rigged. A.) The record company is chock full of people who went to business school and who know how to read a spreadsheet. Bands are chock full of people who learned how to play instruments and write songs in order to avoid reading spreadsheets. B.) The record companies have what’s known as “institutional memory.” The company’s practices are passed down from one CFO, one lawyer, one A&R dude, one promotions intern, to the next. While every band reinvents the wheel. There’s no passing down of knowledge, no guild or union. Every band is a newborn baby locked in mortal combat with a team of professional alligator wrestlers.
But he’s not totally right. Because to concede that it is folly to try to make music and share it with listeners is to capitulate to the logic of the spreadsheet readers. There is more than one way to measure how fucked you are.
In which spreadsheet column do you enter the satisfaction of playing for people who appreciate your music? What about the accomplishment of realizing you’ve grown as a songwriter, singer, or musician? And what currency do we use to quantify the camaraderie of living, eating, breathing, and striving with one’s bandmates over the course of a seven week tour, sleeping on floors, eating crappy meals, driving five hundred miles a day, hauling gear in and out of clubs in the freezing cold middle of the night and middle of nowhere? What do the spreadsheeters know about the mesmerism of locking in with other human beings and making a song do something that it’s never, in its hundreds of performances, done before?
And even on the ledger sheet there are other ways this can play out. My band, Number One Cup, had some minor success on the UK charts and had a song placed in a movie (to a pretty cool Bill Plympton animation). As a result of this and a few other factors, the small, struggling label to which we were signed was enticed into a distribution deal with Richard “Space Boy” Branson and his new (at that time) company, V2 Records. Suddenly we found ourselves with a lavish recording budget, an advance that allowed us to quit our day jobs and buy a new van. We even put our foot down and demanded that the label figure out a way to get us on their company health insurance plan. How did that work out? Literally days after the first premium of our insurance was paid, I broke my third and fourth cervical vertebrae, leaving me temporarily quadriplegic. I very nearly died and went through a series of dicey surgeries and a long period of rehab. The out-of-pocket cost of this treatment would have been in the neighborhood of $300,000. Thanks to our record deal, I paid not a dime.
What’s more, the band decided to call it quits during the ensuing tour in support of our third album, People People Why Are We Fighting? Since we had received our cut of the Branson-windfall only a few months prior, we were able to walk away from our recoupable depts to the record company. So when Albini outlines costs like these:
New fancy professional drum kit: $5,000
New fancy professional guitars (2): $3,000
New fancy professional guitar amp rigs (2): $4,000
New fancy potato-shaped bass guitar: $1,000
New fancy rack of lights bass amp: $1,000
Rehearsal space rental: $500
Big blowout party for their friends: $500
Tour expense (5 weeks): $50,875
Bus: $25,000
Crew (3): $7,500
Food and per diems: $7,875
Fuel: $3,000
Consumable supplies: $3,500
Wardrobe: $1,000
Promotion: $3,000
he's ignoring a few important factors. For instance, not every band goes out and buys “fancy” drums, guitars, and amps. (We were still using our Sears Silvertone amplifiers – back when they were had for $250 a pop.) I don’t even know what a potato-shaped bass is. We threw no $500 parties. We spent $0 on “wardrobe.” So his accounting here is predicated on a number of purely optional expenditures indulged by precisely zero of the bands that I knew.
But most importantly, he’s leaving out the fact that individual members are not personally on the hook for these debts. It’s a band debt and if the band no longer exists, neither do the debts. So when Number One Cup broke up, we “owed” the label well over $200,000. But we walked away from those debts scot-free. The label was making an investment in the band and knew full-well that they might never get that investment back. That seems like a fair enough trade so long as the parties act in good faith. In our case and many (but not all) others in the indie scene of the 1990s, that good faith was maintained.
Allow me to ease the minds of those who knew us in those halcyon days: Your friends, Number One Cup, were not so fucked.
Who knows if the current situation resembles any of this anymore. I'm out of the game, so for all I know, things could be very different. Probably are. But one thing that is undoubtedly still true - because it always is in the "culture industries" - is that to adopt the bottom line worldview of the record company accounting departments is to pack it in before you even reach the woods. Most of us didn’t start making music to get rich. We didn’t even imagine a day when we could quit our day jobs. We did it because music had done something to us – something profound – and we wanted to pass that profound thing on to the next listener. We wanted to participate in the millennia-old tradition of receiving and bestowing cultural gifts. Music was generosity to us. It was joy. It was love. Somewhere, at some point, Steve Albini must have known that.
Sixty-one is too fucking soon. I hope he died a happy man.
