The lyrics are elliptical studies of creepy types like crackheads, child abusers, and even an individual who lives in a hole, sometimes including sophomorisms like “You can’t ignore the beauty in the things that you love / Like you can’t stand the hatred and the lies.” But even if his lyrics did contain a fair amount of clinkers, Albini did come up with a great name for his one-man band: Big Black. “It was just sort of a reduction of the concept of a large, scary, ominous figure,” Albini said. “All the historical images of fear and all the things that kids are afraid of are all big and black, basically. That’s all there was to it.”
Albini used the Lungs tape to enlist other musicians for the band. He really admired Naked Raygun guitarist Santiago Durango, but Durango, a local punk scene celebrity, was out of Albini’s league. He did manage to get once and future Minor Threat guitarist Lyle Preslar, who was temporarily at Northwestern, but they soon found they were incompatible—“We’d end up throwing things across the room at each other after a while,” said Albini.
Albini gave a tape to Jon Babbin, who was then starting his own label in order to release records by a band he managed: the Effigies, then one of Chicago’s premiere punk bands. Ruthless Records wasn’t much more than a logo; band members did virtually all the work themselves. But Ruthless’s association with the Effigies helped convince distributors and retailers to take at least a few copies of anything on the label.
Babbin liked the Big Black tape and released a 1,500-copy pressing on Ruthless in December ’82. Many copies of the Lungs EP had unique inserts, including dollar bills, locks of hair, Bruce Lee photos, used condoms, old photographs, rubber animals, and blood-spattered pieces of paper courtesy of a friend of Albini’s who suffered from chronic nose-bleeds. Things like blasting caps, razor blades, fish hooks, and firecrackers were pulled out by the distributor, Dutch East India Trading, fearing lawsuits.
Through some mutual friends, Albini managed to meet Naked Raygun’s Jeff Pezzati, who was impressed by Albini right away. “He was this wiry journalism student with this really hot girlfriend who went to Northwestern—in fact his girlfriend was in Playboy’s Girls of the Big Ten issue of 1985,” Pezzati recalls. “He knew a heck of a lot about, right from the start, how to release a record and get the word out that you have a record.” Albini convinced Pezzati to play bass with Big Black. “I do remember that he was… not in awe, but real happy,” Pezzati recalls. “He jumped at the chance to have a band play his stuff.”
They rehearsed at Pezzati’s place, a former coach house in the then dicey Lincoln Park area. It is said that at one point, every punk band in the city rehearsed in the building’s storied basement. Albini was not shy about telling Pezzati what he wanted. “He told me exactly what to play,” says Pezzati. “He kind of had it all down. I was spoon-fed.”
One day the two were practicing loudly downstairs while upstairs, vainly trying to concentrate on a football game on TV, was Santiago Durango. Durango was the soft-spoken son of a successful Colombian doctor; he was well educated—with a degree in poli sci from the University of Illinois—and yet very punk rock. “He’s a complete maniac on one hand,” Pezzati explains, “and this nice normal guy on the other.”
Durango and his family had moved from Colombia when he was ten. He eventually went to an all-boys Catholic high school, where his small stature and Hispanic background ensured outcast status. For Durango, punk rock was salvation. “When I heard punk for the first time, I felt like a fish that had found the water he belonged in,” he says. “Punk changed my life completely. It transformed me. I found a home.”
Durango was soon playing in an early Chicago punk band of high school pariahs called Silver Abuse. “I was very angry and very alienated, and I just wanted to yell back because everybody had been yelling at me for so many years,” says Durango. “So we went out and took it to people, insulting people, berating them severely.” The first two times the band played, they incited near riots by taunting the audience.
After leaving Silver Abuse, Durango wanted to form a more serious band and cofounded Naked Raygun. Bands like Strike Under and the Effigies had established the city’s punk scene, but Chicago’s clubs had shunned punk rock until one night Naked Raygun packed the Cubby Bear club, opening the city’s nightlife to punk rock shows.
Durango would often go intentionally haywire during Naked Raygun shows, throwing away everything they’d rehearsed, twirling his amplifier knobs at random, and just making the wildest sounds possible. This excited Albini to no end, so when Durango came downstairs to Albini and Pezzati’s rehearsal and asked to play along since he couldn’t hear the game anyway, Albini was delighted. “I was like, ‘Sure, Mr. Durango, anything you want!’ ” said Albini. “And then it got really great.”
Albini and Durango clicked. Although Albini had a very clear creative conception, his songs were diamonds in the rough. As it turned out, Durango was a brilliant song doctor who could rework arrangements and tweak sounds until a song shone and sparkled. “Any time he thought I was making a mistake, he would say, ‘You’re a stupid person.’ And he was always right,” said Albini. “He ended up being absolutely crucial to Big Black.”
With Durango and Pezzati on board, the ideas sketched out on Lungs began to take almost palpable shape onstage; it was time to bring it to the studio. Albini knew the Chicago label Fever Records, which basically was two University of Chicago students with a little extra money to throw around. Albini “sorta conned” the two into financing his next project, affording a full band and a twenty-four-track studio. The trio drafted drummer Pat Byrne, on loan from Urge Overkill, to double up with the drum machine.
Albini had liked the work that transplanted Englishman Iain Burgess had done on Naked Raygun’s first EP and asked him to engineer the second Big Black EP. Albini explained, “We wanted it to be more aggressive than normal…. We just wanted it to sound really high energy and powerful without using any of the clichéd tricks to do that.” Burgess was sympathetic to Big Black’s ideas, but the problem was that he fancied a drink now and then, and often during sessions he would retire to the couch and fall fast asleep. Still, the band regarded him as an invaluable guide through the recording process.
Back in 1983 punk fans with enough experience in recording studios to work as engineers were still few and far between, especially in Evanston. So Burgess and Big Black inevitably got saddled with mellow, ponytailed types who had no clue as to why or how to achieve the sulfurous sounds the band envisioned. “Half the battle was always trying to neutralize them, get them to understand what we were trying to do,” recalls Durango. “They couldn’t deal with it.”
But through sheer force of will, Albini and the band got their way, and the leap from the first EP is startling. With a proper studio, the tracks had texture and bite; rehearsing with a band meant the songs were more fine-tuned. Albini’s guitar playing had improved drastically, scything the music with a steely glint; Pezzati’s bass had the demeanor of a junkyard dog; and Durango’s guitar supplied a grinding propulsion. And in a proper studio Albini could now let it rip on vocals—“It’s real hard to get up and scream when it’s you alone, screaming in a room into this four-track,” says Pezzati. “You’re thinking, ‘I hope I don’t wake anybody up upstairs.’ ” Even the drum machine now kicked butt.
But best of all, the band was totally simpatico. “There wasn’t that much debate about ‘Is this any good?’ or ‘What should we do here?’ “ says Albini. “It just seemed like all the decisions were sort of making themselves.”
The sound was, in fact, far bigger and blacker than Lungs. Albini got a signature clanky sound by using metal guitar picks that he would notch with sheet metal snips, creating the effect of two guitar picks at once, making the sound doubly clanky. “I always thought that our guitar playing was not so much playing guitars,” says Durango, “but assembling noises created by guitars.”
There were plenty of synth bands at the time, but virtually all of them sounded wimpy. Big Black�
��s innovation was to use synthetic sounds as instruments of aggression. Albini saw that the best thing to do with a drum machine was to exploit its idiosyncrasies, rather than vainly try to make it sound natural. On many songs Albini made the machine accent the first and third beats of the bar, not the second and fourth as in most rock music. The effect was a monolithic pummeling, an attack. Thanks to Roland the drum machine, as the band soon dubbed their silicon-hearted fourth member, their groove, normally the most human aspect of a rock band, became its most inhuman; it only made them sound more insidious, its relentlessness downright tyrannical.
THE FIRST BIG BLACK LINEUP PLAYING CHICAGO IN FEBRUARY 1984. LEFT TO RIGHT: JEFF PEZZATI, STEVE ALBINI, SANTIAGO DURANGO.
GAIL BUTENSKY
The point, Albini says, was to make “something that felt intense when we went through it, rather than something that had little encoded indicators of intensity.” Albini was something of a connoisseur of intensity. “Heavy metal and stuff like that didn’t really seem intense to me, it seemed comical to me,” he says. “Hardcore punk didn’t really seem intense most of the time—most of the time it just seemed childish. I guess that’s how I would differentiate what we were doing from what other people were doing.”
Albini’s lyrics on Bulldozer are miniature short stories, shot through with bilious misanthropy. “It’s sorta like a Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” Albini explained. “If you have an interest in things sort of out of the ordinary, and you stumble across something like this, you think, ‘This can’t be!’ But it turns out to be true, and that makes it even wilder.”
The Gang of Four–ish “Cables” is about a bunch of guys Albini knew back in Montana who liked to sneak into the local abattoir to watch the cows get slaughtered. “They take a pressurized gun and drive a bolt through the snout of a cow,” Albini explained, “and they clip a cable to either side of the bolt. And then there’s this winch that hauls the cow into the stall, and then there’s a compression hammer that crushes the cow’s skull.
“That was like TV for them,” Albini continued. “It was that or go home in the trailer park and get drunk. Sniff glue. There was nothing else to do.”
“Pigeon Kill” is about a town in rural Indiana that apparently took great delight in getting rid of their pigeon population by feeding them poisoned corn; elsewhere, there is the Texan redneck (the amphetamine rockabilly of “Texas”), the despondent paraplegic (“I’m a Mess”), and “Seth,” the dog trained to attack black people—the latter track opens with a harrowing snippet of a white supremacist’s harangue. “Steve Albini was one of the few people writing song lyrics that were funny, but in a mean-spirited way,” says Killdozer’s Michael Gerald. “Kind of like laughing at old people when they fall down.”
The EP was originally going to be called “Hey, Nigger,” the cover a drawing by Albini of a repulsive, obese man uttering the title. “The idea being,” says Albini, “that an offensive term used by an offensive person is only offensive if you allow that person’s commentary to have some weight or value.” Albini felt it was an antiracist statement and debated the point at length. It took the objections of virtually everyone he knew, including Pezzati and Durango, to persuade him to drop the idea. Albini insisted on packaging the first two hundred copies of Bulldozer in an expensive gray sheet metal sleeve in homage to PiL’s Metal Box, making it very difficult for the tiny label to make its money back.
Like many Chicago bands, Big Black started by making trips up to Madison, Minneapolis, and Detroit. But touring was no picnic for Big Black—they made the long drives in a cramped car, not a van; they couldn’t afford to stay in motels, so they slept on people’s floors; bathing and decent food were rare. “It was very, very grueling,” says Durango. “We used to say it was ‘going into combat.’ And that’s what it was. You really had to prepare yourself for it. It was very hard on you physically. The best part was the playing. And even that, some club owner would try to fuck you over. Or you’d get someplace and you’d draw three people and they’d be uninterested.
“It was not,” Durango concludes, “glamorous at all.”
Early on they played the tiny No Bar club, located in the basement of a record store in Muncie, Indiana. The place held about a hundred people. “I think the sound system was a stereo with some microphones plugged into it,” says Durango. “We went in there and they packed the little place and we had just an awesome show. It was really great, with the going back and forth between the band and the crowd. And from that day on we always went back there. It was always out of our way, but they had been so good to us that Steve never forgot. Steve is very loyal. And we always went back and packed that little club for those guys.”
Albini set up the rehearsals, booked the studio time, and arranged the tours. “Steve is dangerous—he knows how to use the phone,” says Durango. “He was always connected with all sorts of people.” So when a buzz on Big Black erupted in New York, he was able to line up an East Coast tour, including a stop at New York’s Danceteria. Albini was already a formidable frontman—“He was really intense, sweated a lot, veins bulging, he was good,” says Pezzati—and the New York crowd, as well as the press, loved the band.
Before they’d gone off on that East Coast tour, their Chicago audiences consisted of “us and three flies buzzing around,” according to Durango. “And all of a sudden, people started perking up and paying attention to us. And that pissed us off, because we were the same band, but now because we’d played New York and Boston and Washington, all of a sudden we were good.” The situation was only magnified once the band toured Europe and won acclaim in the U.K. music press. The band was so disgusted by their own town’s shallow about-face that they actually refused to play there. “We enjoyed not playing [Chicago],” says Durango. “For all those idiots who told us we were no good, that was a nice little comeback.”
But much of the band’s local unpopularity may have stemmed from Albini himself. “He was very vocal,” Pezzati explains, “didn’t like anything—or didn’t seem to anyway—and pissed a lot of the wrong people off.” By 1985 Chicago’s Club Metro was the only punk-friendly hometown club large enough for Big Black. They had played one show there and drawn well, but then Albini bad-mouthed the club in a fanzine interview and was permanently banned from the club.
The feisty Albini would not roll over when promoters or record labels tried to rip him off, and he encouraged others to do the same. In 1985 the Meat Puppets played on a bill with Big Black in Boston. When the Meat Puppets got stiffed by the promoter, Albini sprang into action. “He talked me into going in and getting money out of them by pretending I had a gun,” recalls the Meat Puppets’ Curt Kirkwood. As instructed, Kirkwood ambled into the office with his hand thrust into his black trench coat and demanded more money. Unfazed, the club manager directed Kirkwood to sit on a bench outside the office and emerged a few minutes later with another hundred dollars.
And no one was immune from Albini’s seemingly bottomless pool of bile. Even in a very informative and uncharacteristically sunny Matter article about how to make your own record, he couldn’t resist slipping in a gratuitous dig at English producer Martin Hannett (Joy Division), calling him a “miserable little junkie.”
“I don’t know that he was wrong to piss people off, but it’s just the way he was,” Pezzati says. “There was a lot to criticize back then.
“I’ll say one thing for him—he had a terrible diet, man,” adds the health-conscious Pezzati. Albini consumed vast quantities of Slim Jims, preferably the ones with the gold wrapper because the ink from the label stuck to the meat. “He would always show it to me, every time,” says Pezzati, “and say, ‘Look!’ And then he would eat it.”
Although Albini lacked culinary discernment, he had worked up a very circumscribed aesthetic to guide his music: Melody meant almost nothing. Aggression, rhythm, and texture were all.
The key was noise. “I don’t give two splats of an old Negro junkie’s vomit for your politico-philosophical trea
tises, kiddies,” Albini wrote in Forced Exposure. “I like noise. I like big-ass vicious noise that makes my head spin. I wanna feel it whipping through me like a fucking jolt. We’re so dilapidated and crushed by our pathetic existence we need it like a fix.” Albini went on to compare the desperate need for a jolt to the twisted cravings of grisly serial killers such as Robin Gecht, John Wayne Gacy, and Dean Corll. “Me, I’m not that desperate yet,” Albini wrote. “I stick with the noise. But an articulated noise that hangs there in your memory and causes further damage.
“Big Black is a way to get the old blood to boiling,” he continued, “without having to buttfuck and garrote little boys, or hang around slaughterhouses.”
Like so many of his interviews and Matter columns, it was an inspired and defining piece of self-promotion, and Albini would reiterate the sentiment from time to time. “I would shoot myself in the face if I didn’t have some way to blow off steam,” Albini told a German interviewer. “And because I don’t like sports, and because I don’t like disco dancing, and because I don’t take drugs, and because I don’t drink, and I don’t beat my head into the floor, and I don’t have a wife to beat, I have Big Black.”
Like Randy Newman before him, who also profiled rapists and racists without overt comment, Albini was an intelligent social misfit who liked to test the tolerance of the white liberal crowd that made up most of his audience. After all, pissing off the squares was like shooting fish in a barrel—it was a lot more interesting to piss off the hipsters.
After growing up in Montana, where race relations were relatively placid, it was a shock to come to Chicago, one of the most racially divided cities in the country. “Half the population doesn’t speak, interact, eat, or hang out with the other half of the population,” says Albini. “And that just seemed bizarre to me.” Given his divided new hometown and his magnetic attraction to confrontation, it’s no surprise he worked the racial angle heavily in his lyrics—the word “darkie” appeared in the first line of his first EP. “But also the word ‘darkie’ is a comical word,” says Albini. “And in a way that’s a play on the concept of a hateful word. Can a word that’s so inherently hilarious be hateful? I don’t know.”
Our Band Could Be Your Life Page 41