A ‘generous and kind soul’
Producer engineered albums for Nirvana and the Pixies, but loved working with Canadian bands
Thirty years later, Toronto’s Don Pyle still sounds shocked that legendary producer and engineer Steve Albini told a music magazine he’d rather work with Pyle’s Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet than British synth superstars Depeche Mode.
The year was 1993 and Albini — riding high after engineering “In Utero, “the third album from Seattle grunge game changers Nirvana — was questioned in an article about the rates he charged for his services.
“In that interview, he said, ‘I’d charge Depeche Mode $1 million, but I’d do Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet for free,’ ” Pyle recalled this week.
“Of course, everybody started contacting us, saying, ‘Wow, oh my God! Did you see this?’ ”
In fact, Albini — who died Tuesday night from a heart attack at age 61 — did indeed record the instrumental rockers right after he completed the “In Utero” sessions.
But for free? No: Shadowy Men paid for the own sessions that eventually resulted in the trio’s sophomore album, “Sport Fishin’: The Lure of the Bait, The Luck of the Hook.” The Shadowy Men — perhaps best remembered for the Kids In The Hall theme song — decided to work with Albini because he was an admirer.
“We first met him from him sending us a fan letter,” Pyle remembered. “When we arrived to record with him (in Chicago) the first time, it was U.S. Thanksgiving and he had made a full Thanksgiving dinner. He was an amazing gourmet chef, and he was so generous and gracious and helpful. He was a lot of fun. He was smart-ass, kind of like we were, with a similar sense of humour and just made everything easy and effortless.”
Although he engineered the albums of many popular artists in his customized Chicago studio, Electrical Audio, — Bush, Cheap Trick, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant among them — Albini carved his reputation with his organic approach of recording underground indie acts, such as Chicago posthardcore rockers Tar; Kentucky indie rockers Slint and New York punk blues rockers Boss Hog.
Albini, also a professional poker champion, was a principled rebel: a Goliath in the underground music scene who treated each of the hundreds of artists he recorded with respect, dignity and a refusal to financially exploit them, especially when he was hired under the auspices of “producer.”
“He really hated the term ‘producer,’ ” said Alan Cross, host of the popular radio program “The Ongoing History of New Music.” “He preferred the term ‘engineer’ or ‘recorder.’
“Steve believed that when a band came to see him, it was his job to capture their vision as accurately as he possibly could without imposing his ideas or motives on the act. He felt that wasn’t his place.
“He was not a producer in the traditional sense.”
Cross said Albini also railed against the standard industry practice of taking a back-end royalty percentage of sales.
“He wouldn’t: he would charge a flat fee,” Cross said.
There’s a published letter written to Nirvana band members Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl by Albini before his work on “In Utero” that states his payment philosophy.
“I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible,” Albini wrote. “The band writes the songs. The band plays the music. It’s the band’s fans who buy the records. The band is responsible for whether it’s a great record or a horrible record. Royalties belong to the band.
“I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it’s worth.”
As much as he worked on landmark albums by Nirvana, the Pixies (1988’s “Surfer Rosa”) and P.J. Harvey (1991’s “Rid Of Me”), he also loved plenty of Canadian bands, engineering projects ranging from Montreal post rockers Godspeed You! Black Emperor to Toronto rock and country outfit the Sadies.
Toronto punk band Metz hired him for 2017’s “Strange Peace” and lead vocalist Alex Edkins said in a statement to the Star that the band was “deeply saddened” by Albini’s death.
“His influence on underground music is impossible to put into words,” Edkins wrote. “His approach to making records/music was an inspiration to so many and his body of work is truly second to none. He was infamously acerbic and outspoken, uncompromising and deeply funny. It was very easy to think of Steve as an elitist crank know-it-all, and he definitely was that, but at his core Steve was an extremely generous and kind soul whose work did unmeasurable good and brought unforeseen beauty into the world. He will be missed.”
Albini oversaw KEN Mode’s 2015 album “Success” and Jesse Matthewson of the Winnipeg hardcore band said meeting Albini “was one of those instances where meeting your hero exceeds the expectation.”
Veteran singer/songwriter Joel Plaskett was also touched by the Albini magic during the ’90s when Plaskett was fronting Halifax rockers Thrush Hermit.
“He was a really incredible force, both as a person and in his productions,” Plaskett said of Albini.
The band met him through a mutual friend and recorded in the basement of his Chicago house for three days.
“I think of him as a documentarian engineer with a real esthetic,” said Plaskett. “He really wasn’t making production suggestions … he was just making jokes a lot. But he was out of the way and yet also present in the way he worked.”
Perhaps one of Albini’s closest Canadian friendships and working relationships was with Shadowy Men’s Pyle, which encompassed other projects like surf-rock instrumental band Phono-Comb and indie rock band King Cobb Steelie. Pyle also assisted Albini in engineering “The Sadies in Concert Vol. 1.”
Pyle said Albini worked quickly and efficiently.
“Pretty much all the bands that did stuff with him, they were quick,” Pyle said. “Our first recordings with him … we were at his home studio, (we) did four or five songs in two days. We had to be superefficient as well, because we were on a tight budget, but it was definitely one of the things that he liked about us, because we were tight; we were rehearsed, we were together and we weren’t high. We would hear stories about his impatience with bands who were doing drugs in the studio.”
As for Depeche Mode? “Depeche Mode did actually ask him to record them and he didn’t want to do it,” Pyle said. “So he asked them for $1 million. And they agreed.”
The band flew Albini to England to meet them and see them perform. As soon as he walked into the stadium and heard the first notes of “Just Can’t Get Enough,” he walked out and never did end up meeting them, according to Pyle.