Steve Albini Looks

BIG BLACK origin, but go in very different directions.” But isn’t there at least a similarity of intended effect? Unlike, say, soulboys or singer- songwriters, who want to strengthen the listener’s sense and identity and reinforce values, aren’t your kind of bands into the pursuit of oblivion, using noise and horror, to put the self in jeopardy? “Well, certainly, the whole thing is about reaching that point where your eyes roll back and you get dizzy! Like the first time me and my friend heard the Ramones. All we could say was, ‘Fuck!’ That was it for me, the beginning. I wasn’t even dissatisfied with music before punk, because I didn’t listen to music at all.” Perhaps what fascinates Albini about power and domination is the spectacle of pure will. You could define violence as the refusal to argue, to give an account, to justify. Maybe the kind of people who’ve worked around the noise/horror interface – intellectual geeks – are secretly envious of the sheer will to power, to action, that marks the psychos, fanatics, führers, shamans they deal with. The kind of potency and singlemindedness that is missing from our aimless, debilitated lives. But on stage or in print, we can live like fanatics, monsters, live with murderous edge, high on “attitude”. I speak to Big Black while they are in the middle of recording one side of their new LP in London. Before then, in a week or two, there’ll be an EP with the promising title “Headache”. Tell us about the new material, Steve. “One song on the new LP, called ‘El Dopa’, is about a sleeping-sickness epidemic in America in 1926. It’s a true story I read about in a book July 24, 1987: Big Black’s called The Awakening, written by Dr Oliver Steve Albini at the Clarendon Ballroom, Hammersmith , Sachs, the guy responsible for waking up all on a bill with Head Of David these people from deep sleep. Some were and AC Temple woken up as late as 1965, awoke to find themselves old people, their entire productive Sounds like the classic course of development for rock musicians, rock life just slept away. And all these people either committed suicide or critics, fanzine writers, and indeed anyone who gets into “difficult” or asked to be killed. They were so fucked up, so unable to cope with what “alternative” music. they’d lost, that they wanted to throw away the little they had left. Dave: “Yeah, you’re a loner, you want to be one-up over everyone else. “There’s a song called ‘Bad Penny’, which is about the kind of person Plus, you want to belong, somewhere. I mean, I never met anyone who who just won’t get out of your life, who sticks around and stirs up shit, in had a good adolescence that I even wanna associate with!” your name. ‘My Disco’ is the true story of a physician who has a kid that So, life’s losers achieve a strange kind of triumph on stage, reinvent has brain damage. And rather than live with that, he beats his way into themselves through rock noise. the maternity ward, grabs the baby and bounces it off the floor until it Santiago: “Our lives would be just so much worse without Big Black. dies. The amazing thing is that the guy doesn’t get sent to jail forever, he’s Without Big Black we might turn into the sickos we write about.” found guilty of aggravated manslaughter, and spends maybe a year in jail. So somehow, he managed to convince a jury that, hell, it wasn’t such TEVE ALBINI LOOKS like a fanzine editor – stoop-shouldered, a bad thing to smash a baby on a hospital floor because he was too dumb with arms as thin as twigs and an air of bespectacled intensity and ugly to be in your family. Any of you guys woulda done the same. Sabout him. His writing for US hardcore rag Forced Exposure has That’s weird! Can you imagine this guy thinking it through, carrying out won him notoriety, even persecution. Each day he returns home from the whole operation – punching out nurses, swerving through the work (as a photo retoucher in Chicago), checks his answering machine hospital corridors and bouncing his child off the floor.” and finds at least two or three detailed messages of abuse. He’s left Albini and his group find a terrible poetry in the intractable, the Forced Exposure now, after a piece entitled “Guide For Social Tards” unbudgeable, the indelible. Their music is as desperate a response was printed under his name, 90 per cent of which had been written by to these things as any in the stories of their songs. They are drawn to someone else. desperation as to a heady drug. “It was a crap piece of writing. I don’t mind making myself look stupid. “The thing about these phenomena is that they aren’t that unusual, In fact, I’m probably the best at it. So, what annoyed me was amateurs you have to face the fact that you too could be driven to these lengths. messing where professionals should be.” I use true stories because I couldn’t think up these things. But I don’t Albini resents and resists any idea that there is an American have to look.” “movement” of noise bands, groups like Scratch Acid, Big Black want to make us feel awe. The paradox of Big Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Swans, Live Skull… Black is that they immerse us, deluge us in defilement “Sure, everyone knows everyone else, has each and desecration, and yet product sacred feelings. I feel other’s phone numbers, plays the same clubs. But small before the scale of the experiences they deal in, musically, all you can say that we have in common is small and religious in the face of the beauty of terror, that we’re all American, all like electric guitars, and the terror of beauty. are all inspired by punk rock. Anything more specific Live, when Steve Albini plays guitar with his teeth, than that is misleading. We start from the same I think I see God. Simon Reynolds • BELLIA RICHARD 1 HISTORY OF ROCK 1987 | 43.

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