Steve Albini interviewed by No Scene fanzine D.C. Space - Washington, DC - 1989
“When we heard Chicago singer/guitarist/producer Steve Albini was playing DC with his new band Rapeman, Pam insisted we interview him for our ‘zine. She introduced me to the industrial rock/noise of groups like Albini’s first band, Big Black. We heard Albini was mean, and loathe to interview. If my memory serves me correctly, we conducted this conversation with another local ‘zine called Nomadic Underground. Rapeman was a short-lived project and the issue of our ‘zine this was supposed to appear in never went to print, but I’ve always been inspired by the passionate directness (and disdain for major labels) Albini showed in this brief meeting. He formed Shellac in 1992, and has since engineered the Pixies, the Breeders, Urge Overkill, PJ Harvey, Fugazi, and Nirvana’s
In Utero record, among others.” – Shawna Kenney
No Scene: Why the name “Rapeman”?
Albini: It’s the name of a Japanese comic book that we like. There’s no philosophical implications or anything. We like the name, it’s easy to remember, and it’s short enough to fit on t-shirts.
No Scene: What are most of the songs about?
Albini: Most are tacky inside jokes. A lot of stuff about my cat, my roommate, our eating
habits…
No Scene: Do you like your roommate?
Albini: Yeah, he’s a cool guy. He’s just got a hyperactive libido, that’s all.
No Scene: You seem to center on a lot of really fucked up situations.
Albini: Well, that’s the stuff you remember. That’s the stuff that’s interesting. I mean, not a lot of really good rock songs have been written about doing the laundry.
No Scene: Was it a difficult transition going from a drum machine to a drummer?
Albini: No, that was incredibly easy. He is an unbelievably good drummer. It’s easy as shit to work with Rey [Washam] ‘cause he doesn’t fuck up and he’s loud as all sin. I think if I tried to start a band with a regular crappy drummer I probably would have gotten frustrated and just bagged it. But Rey called me up and said “Scratch Acid is breaking up, Big Black is breaking up whey don’t we start a band?” The musical end of it has been really easy to get together. I’ve never had any second thoughts about the line up or anything.
No Scene: Where’s the bass player from?
Albini: David Sims was also in Scratch Acid.
No Scene: Why were so few of the seven-inches pressed?
Albini: We wanted to put out a record ‘cause we’d been around awhile. Rey moved to
Chicago in October, so we have been together almost a year now. We wanted to put
2 out a record but we didn’t want it to be a big deal. We knew there was gonna be a lot of empty attention brought to the band because of Scratch Acid and Big Black … our past histories and stuff. But, we still wanted to make records and put them out. We didn’t want to hide what we were doing. We just didn’t want it to be a big deal ‘cause we knew, like any band, when your first starting out, you’re gonna fuck up. Make dumb records. So we figured we’d make our dumb record in semi-seclusion.
No Scene: The packaging is awesome.
Albini: That was the other idea. We wanted to get away from what both of our bands had done in the past as far as packaging. Less egomaniac art, more, like, under-played stuff. So we put out the single just like any band puts out their first record. Save up some money, go into the studio, record it, press up to 1,000 sell it to people over the phone…
No Scene: I guess you are aware that it is already selling for pretty much…
Albini: Yeah, the collector scum got a hold of it. But, for every person we find that’s paid
10-12 dollars for one, we find someone who paid 3 dollars for one. Some ‘Mom and
Pop’ record store brought some without knowing what they were and just put them out on the rack for 2 or 3 bucks. That’s really satisfying ‘cause that’s the way it should be.
No Scene: I was talking to someone who works at a record store and they said Touch
& Go wouldn’t even tell the people ordering it what it was…
3 We told them to try and make it real low-key. If they said “Ooh, we have this secret
new record coming out,” that’s a big difference from saying, “hey, we’ve got this
insignificant little single that some friends of ours are putting out, do you want some?”
And generally they didn’t ask what it was, they just said. “Yeah send us a couple.” And
that, I think, is a much more honest way to go about it than send out a press release
about “The New Super Group” record and all that bullshit.
No Scene: Are you still doing the label Ruthless?
Albini: No, I’m a total loser at that. I don’t have the time or the attention span to do it.
It’s been a disaster recently because there was a band called Dig Dat Hole from Rhode
Island. They moved to New York and got screwed by Tom Smith and Peach of
Immortality, who was gonna put their record out and he sat on it for a year. I saw them
and I thought they were great. I said, “Get the tapes together and I’ll put it out.” About
a year ago, they gave me the tapes and one thing after another has failed and it’s been too long. I really feel bad that their record hasn’t come out yet. So, a couple weeks ago
I called them and said “I’m gonna stop pretending that I know how to run a record label and I’ll let you put your record out yourselves.” I spent over $1,000 getting it mastered
and stuff and I’m just gonna let them use that. It’s the least I can do really, since I essentially took their shit from them and jerked off for a year.
No Scene: I heard that Big Black did a Peel Session in Europe. Is Rapeman planning on
doing that?
4 Albini: Well, it’s gotten kind of weird. There are two ways that you can do a Peel
Session. If you record tape outside of England, you just sell the tape for whatever they
would normally pay the band in royalties. That’s what Big Black did. We recorded
something in England, but told them we recorded it in the U.S., and they just paid
recording cost and that was it. There was an offer made for Rapeman to do a Peel
Session and they said if we wanted to do it in the BBC studio, which is where most bands
do it, we would have to join the American Musicians Union because there’s a reciprocal
agreement that anybody that records in a BBC studio has to be a union musician. And
there’s a reciprocal agreement between the U.S. Musicians Union and the British
Musicians Union. I am completely opposed to small scale rock bands joining a musicians union. The musicians union does nothing for rock bands. All it does is extract dues and then claim to represent them in contract disputes, which there are none. We don’t ever have to worry about dealing with NBC, so we don’t need any musicians union to do our negotiating for us. And rather than spend a thousand bucks to join the musicians union so we can do a Peel Session, we’re gonna have to do the same kind of thing: Do it surreptitiously and then sell them the tape. If they even allow us to do it at all now.
Because we told them we weren’t gonna join the union, they might not do it at all now.
No Scene: I was informed that you are gonna be on the cover of Sounds. How did that come about?
Albini: They just called and said, “Get us some photos.” Well, John Robb from the
Membranes did an interview with me when the Membranes stayed at my house in
5 Chicago when they were on tour. They slept on my floor for a couple of days and did an interview, which was originally gonna be in his fanzine, The Rocks, which is a great fanzine. He showed it to the editor of Sounds. The editor was wanting to run it as a feature, and then somebody at Sounds said: “Wow, this will be really hip. We can scoop everybody and put it on the cover.” So, they called and said “Get us some photos.” I wasn’t that satisfied with the interview myself. It ended up concentrating on the mundane stuff that really didn’t appeal to me that much.
No Scene: Why didn’t you play the 9:30 Club?
Albini: They wouldn’t have us.
No Scene: Did they give you a reason?
Albini: They said that they didn’t think anyone would come. Seth [Hurwitz] said he didn’t think he could justify paying us the money. We ask for $500, which is what we ask for everywhere, and I think here we made almost $700. So, that’s kind of O.K.
Thanks, Seth. I think it has something to do with the fact that Big Black didn’t play at
9:30 on its last tour, and I think he may have been insulted by that. I’ve been told he takes things personally.
No Scene: You played Australia with Big Black. How did that go over?
Albini: It was cool. It was a lot like this. A lot of smaller clubs packed to the walls ‘cause we were over there illegally. So, we couldn’t do any big venues or any big shows or
6 anything that was particularly well promoted. It was all real word of mouth. But it was
a blast.
No Scene: What do you do to pass time on the road?
Albini: We have this rating chart in the van and we’ve been keeping track of all the
different beef jerky products. We have this big grid of all the names and then we rate
them on all their lard, stink, substance, salt, and spice content. So far, the big winner
has been Jack Links Kippered Beef Steak. It’s got an aggregate score up there in the 30s
right now. Out of curiosity, we tried the new, exciting, spicy, hot Tabasco –flavored super slims. Bullshit. If you think about it really hard, you get the faintest whiff of some sort of pickle-y taste.
No Scene: We’ve been talking recently about major labels and sort of the morality of it…
Albini: The stupidity of it.
No Scene: I’m sure Big Black was approached…
Albini: Big Black hung up on RCA, Atlantic, Sire. It’s pretty obvious to me that major labels don’t do anything for a small scale band that they can’t do for themselves.
No Scene: Really? You don’t think that would be a better way of getting your thing out?
7 Albini: No. You would fool some people that wouldn’t appreciate you into buying your record.
No Scene: Yeah, at least with Touch & Go, you can get it in any record store that you want.
Albini: Yeah. The argument that independent labels have poor distribution is complete horseshit nowadays. SST, Touch & Go, Caroline, Enigma can put a record in the hands of any kid that wants to buy one. I’ve never thought that was a good argument anyway, because I’ve always figured that it means more to people to have to look for their records. So, the safe labels are much more traditional. You end up spending more money on all your records, you end up making less money on the record, You end up working harder to get out of debt. On an independent scale, things just go more smoothly because there are fewer people in the chain of command and there are fewer people you have to ask questions of. And, all of us are existing comfortably without having to have real jobs, which is conceivably the only advantage to being on a major label. But, because we are on a moderate success level in the US and in Europe, and other places around the world, we get a little bit of go from each of those places, and the cumulative effect of it is much more secure, much more consistent way of life than getting a huge lump sum from Enigma or Epic or somebody.
No Scene: So, you’re definitely planning on staying on an underground-type label?
8 Albini: I would never, ever be on a label other than Touch & Go for as long as they exist.
They’re the only label that is 100% honest and 100% behind the bands in a philosophical
sense, not just in a marketing sense. They’re incredibly dedicated to what they do….Is
the van here yet?
Rey Washam: Yeah.
Albini: Well, we’ve gotta put things in the van.
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