Legendary Producer Steve Albini Passes Away At 61

Producer and recording engineer Steve Albini, the man instrumental in albums by Nirvana, Bush, Flogging Molly, Pixies, the Jesus Lizard, Helmet, The Breeders and several thousand more, has died of a heart attack. He was 61 years old.

Albini was legendary in that he refused to take future royalties from bands for the work he did instead taking a flat rate for each album. “A lot of people making records don’t have a grasp of the process,” he previously told Billboard. “They do it thinking that it’s some abstract art form that doesn’t need to be comprehended on a technical procedural level. In those cases you’ll end up with a record that isn’t formally completed, but that’s finished when the bell rings.”

Albini also wasn’t a fan of corporate-sounding records. “The sound of contemporary rock records, especially those made with big budgets, is so homogeneous,” he said. “You hear exactly the same mix balance, the same dynamic, the same production techniques brought to bear on every single band.”

Perhaps the most well-known record Albini produced was Nirvana’s “In Utero.” “I’m only interested in working on records that legitimately reflect the band’s own perception of their music and existence,” he wrote to Nirvana at the time prior to getting the job as their producer/engineer. “If you will commit yourselves to that as a tenet of the recording methodology, then I will bust my *ss for you.”

Dave Grohl said of the album to biographer Paul Brannigan: “’Nevermind and ‘In Utero’ are two totally different albums. ‘Nevermind’ was intentional, as much as any revisionists might say it was a contrived version of Nirvana, it wasn’t: we went down there to make that record, we rehearsed hours and hours and hours, day after day, to get to ‘Nevermind.’ But ‘In Utero’ was so different. There was no labored process, it was just… bleurgh…it just came out, like a purge, and it was so pure and natural. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking back on things I’ve done. But In Utero, man, what a trip.”

Albini told Louder he didn’t feel any pressure doing “In Utero,” which was the follow-up to Nirvana’s smash-hit “Nevermind.” “I can say pretty frankly that neither the band nor I felt any pressure while making the record, ” he said. “The pressure was all on the industry people, the people who were terrified of losing their status, influence, and income if the record wasn’t a success. The band knew they had a good record in them, I knew they were doing a great job in the studio. We all knew it sounded great.”

“After they finished, those frightened little people started trying to influence them, tried very hard to convince them they’d made a mistake and the record wasn’t actually good. When that didn’t work, they mounted a kind of campaign to smear the record in the press, to put additional pressure on the band to change their minds. I know this because I was getting the brunt of the complaints and I was hearing as much from journalists who called me for comment.”

“To their credit, the record survived intact and the version that made it into the stores is precisely the record Nirvana wanted to make. I think their perseverance was laudable and unique, and they should get all the credit for how that record came out.”