The alt-rock producer and music legend leaves behind a legacy of controversial provocation but uniquely daring music
There was a story that Steve Albini liked to tell about his senior year in high school. Aged 17, he was involved in a serious road accident: hit by a car while riding his motorcycle, he badly broke his leg. It was while recuperating that he learned his first instrument, the bass guitar, but that wasn’t really the crux of the tale. It was that, while he was in hospital, he received a succession of phone calls from his classmates. They weren’t calling to inquire after his welfare, or to wish him to get well soon: they hated him so much they’d rung up to tell him they were glad he was in pain.
It was a very Steve Albini kind of anecdote. For most of his musical career – and apparently for years before it – he cut a wilfully confrontational, provocative and polarising figure: as Michael Azerrad noted in his peerless history of American post-punk alternative rock, Our Band Could Be Your Life, a lot of what Albini did “implicitly screamed ‘hate me, please!’” There were the spectacularly abusive columns he wrote for fanzines in his adopted home town of Chicago, the subject matter of the songs by his band Big Black, and even the way their records were packaged (Albini stuffed razor blades and fish-hooks into the sleeve of their debut EP Lungs; 1987’s Headache featured a cover photograph of a shotgun suicide victim whose head had split in half).
