I can fault the people who put them in that position-agents, lawyers, music business professionals who put him in a position of signing away the next twenty years of his life.
I can’t fault someone who operates out of ignorance and gets involved with a corrupt industry. If I had been approached by a big record label when I was eighteen years old, after I had just made my first demo-that happens quite often now, bands get approached quite young-I have no doubt whatsoever I would have signed the first thing anybody waggled in front of my nose. That’s the kind of choice I never want to have to make for myself. I know some bands feel like they have the choice between working with someone at the independent level who they think is inept, or working with someone in the mainstream-who may also be inept, but at the very least may give them some money. But by the same token I don’t know what circumstances every other band is in and what they feel forces their hand at some point. You’re another catalog item, another name on the list of people who are collaborating with the enemy. There’s no way you can get involved in a racket and not someway be filthied by it. Participating in the mainstream music business is, to me, like getting involved in a racket. I’m not really interested in participating in mainstream culture. GQ caught up with him at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in upstate New York, in Kutsher’s Country Club’s once-regal piano bar, before he headed over to the Ecutive Card Suite to set up his nightly game of Texas Hold’em.Ĭan you talk about Shellac’s involvement with All Tomorrow’s Parties over the years, and how the festival has changed? Otherwise, the firebrand lives a quiet life in a leafy neighborhood with his wife and cats, indulging his wicked poker addiction. Their most recent record, Excellent Italian Greyhound, was inspired by drummer Todd Trainer’s beloved pet Uffizi (they appeared together on the Animal Planet show Dogs 101) Albini, meanwhile, still gets up every day and goes to work at his Electrical Audio recording studio in Chicago, where any band with a couple thousand dollars can receive his golden analog blessing.
The band members don’t make music their full-time job, preferring to keep their art separate from their income. Shellac rarely plays live, making them the kind of rare, sought-after 45 of the touring world. He loathes the mainstream music industry and encourages musicians to seize the means of production in order to escape parasitic hordes of publicists, agents, managers, and hangers-on. The mastermind engineer behind universe-altering neo-punk records like The Pixies’ Surfer Rosa and Nirvana’s In Utero, as well as lead singer/guitarist of seminal Chicago noise-rock band Shellac, has a bit of an independent streak. Steve Albini has a reputation for being a hard-ass.
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