engineeredbystevealbini

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Steve Albini v. Pixies

Sure, Steve Albini engineered Surfer Rosa — but that doesn’t mean his relationship with the Boston rockers wasn't tense.

In 1988, the New England band Pixies were itching to make something new. Following their explosive EP Come On Pilgrim, which both baffled and awed critics and casual listeners alike, they were set to continue their tone — abrasive, needling, and vulgar, an overall perversion of gospel and Christianity with Pixies' tales of incest and deserts — with their first album. The band sent around copies of their original 17-track demo tape, dubbed the Purple Tape, before eventually meeting with Albini to create the legendary album.

In an interview with Long Live Vinyl, Joey Santiago, the band's guitarist, said:

“It was very quick. Just because of the way we were, tick-tock, we gotta go, we don’t have that much time. We were really well rehearsed, we were ready for that album. We didn’t have any sort of pre-production on it. The first time I’d heard of pre-production was working with Gil Norton on Doolittle. We met Steve Albini at a coffee shop and that was it, we were in the next day. We were excited to get the Pixies on the map. We had the material ready to record, everything was written, way down the road. People were already excited about it – the people we played the material to, live – so it just had to get captured in an exciting sense, and Albini was a pretty damn good choice."

In the studio, Albini encouraged them to try and add new things to the already fully-fleshed songs, such as unconventional instrumental set-ups, and distortion pedals that bastardized Black's voice more than in-person (like the inhuman "I am a happy prick!" in Something Against You). Upon its release, it was acclaimed by critics, listeners, and fellow musicians. "It rocked without being lame," said Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins. Too, the quiet-loud-quiet dynamic Black set the precedent for in Come On Pilgrim, and kept up in Surfer Rosa, greatly inspired Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, who would go on to produce his band's junior album, In Utero, with Albini.

In 1991, three years after Surfer Rosa's release, he wrote a column on the #17 edition of Forced Exposure, an independent music magazine, precedenting it with something that, for any Pixie reading, would likely cause the hairs on the back of their neck to raise in anticipation: "When I am hired to record a band, I make it plain to my clients that I do not wish to be associated with their charming little records. I will do a good job for them, but that does not include shouldering any responsibility for their lousy tastes and mistakes." He continued, "Often these clients disregard my wishes and publicize the fact that I worked on their records. Oh, man. Today, they get their just desserts. I will make little comment about the actual music on any of these records (figuring everybody has formed an opinion already or couldn't care less), and will say nothing except 'Bless you' about those who have respected my anonymity."

He then fired his shots at Surfer Rosa, and the Pixies themselves:

"The Pixies "Surfer Rosa" LP: patchwork pinch loaf from a band who a [sic] their top dollar best are blandly entertaining college rock. Their willingness to be "guided" by their manager, their record company and their producers is unparalleled. Never have I seen four cows more anxious to be led around by their nose rings."

Ouch. He further recalled that he remembered nothing about the album besides a couple tidbits (including his dalliances with "a sibling of the sexual partner of a Pixie"). To that, the Pixies responded in what was arguably the best way to respond to a criticism by Albini: nothing at all. While there were rumors on several forums about Black's alleged dislike of Albini, such as the now-defunct Google Groups' alt music category and Frank Black Forum, the band remained silent about his criticisms of the album he, himself, engineered. It wasn't until an interview with Life of the Record, that he retracted his statements.

“[…] I think it was a better record than I thought it was at the time. At the time, I had, like, all of these conflicting intellectual perspectives on it, and I couldn’t just listen to it for its effect. And, now, when I hear it as a finished record, it sounds very good, and I think the band sounds very good, and I don’t find a lot to criticize. [….] They seemed very credulous and I talked about that a little bit with respect to me influencing the album by making suggestions and them acceding to all my suggestions. I wrote some rather glib and unflattering things about that in a fanzine in the immediate aftermath of that record, and I’m ashamed of the way I treated them. They didn’t deserve that.”

After this, Black returned to speak of Albini and his involvement in Surfer Rosa's production after Albini's death in an interview with The Independent.

“It was nice, in a way, to work with someone who wasn’t taking it all too seriously, wasn’t taking us that seriously, was a little sort of almost dismissive. That is a tone .. that one can take when you’re making your art or whatever that can be useful. It can be useful to not take it all too seriously. That you have to be willing to just go, ‘It’s good, but we could just also destroy it all right now and start over.’ I mean, you have to not be so precious about it."

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Behind the Song: "Mouth Breather" by The Jesus Lizard

Mouth Breather by The Jesus Lizard follows a narrator that, in increasing desperation and disgust, comes to find his house in disarray by someone who is a "nice guy" who they "like just fine", but is a mouth-breather. This mouth breather was Britt Walford, the drummer of Slint.

Britt Walford, who initially played in Squirrel Flower before its dissolution, had been revolutionizing Louisville's rock scene alongside his bandmates when he met Steve Albini, who engineered. Presumably, they hit it off, because Albini asked him to house-sit for him — only for it to end disastrously. In the 2014 Slint documentary Breadcrumb Trail, starting at 42:26, Albini explains:

"I don’t really remember where I was, but I was gone for an extended period, and Britt was house-sitting for me. I lived in a bungalow on the North Side, and I don't know if Britt had ever lived alone in a house before. I don’t if he knew, sort of, how a house worked, but fairly early in the occupation he locked himself out, so he picked the front door and then nailed the front door shut with a two-by-four and he would do all this coming and going through a window in the attic — like, he would go up to the attic and climb out the window, and then hop down on the porch, and then out, and then he would get back in through… and that was the same way that the cat got in and out of the house."

When asked if the song Mouth Breather could be about Britt, David Yow evasively answered, "could be." Still, he elaborated on the dilemma which Steve relayed to the documentarian rather damningly:

"Something else went wrong with the kitchen or bathroom or something overflowed and was leaking, and Steve had a studio down in the basement, and it rained pee-water down in the basement."

Yow aptly summed that up with the lyric, "and in my basement, I found rainin' piss". Too, he abridged Albini's whole experience with the matter in just two lyrics: "I expect when I return, / I return to some sort of order / Such is not the case, / no, such is not the case."

And, as for the mouth breathing, Albini said:

“[...] I actually think I was relaying the story to David Yow at one point, and I was complaining about the state of my house, and what had happened on that trip. I said—I literally said—'don’t get me wrong, he’s a nice guy, I like him just fine… but he’s a mouth-breather.'"

Suffice to say, Yow took creative liberties of his typical brutal, jarring fashion with Mouth Breather's closing line of, "And in my kitchen, I found my friend deceased". Britt Walford survived his time house-sitting relatively unscathed, and as of 2020, has been playing with Tim Ruth of Evergreen and touring with the plethora of bands he is involved in, per Joyzine.