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- - SHELLAC'S STEVE ALBINI AND BOB WESTON THINK THE MUSIC BUSINESS SHOULD BE COVERED, WITH ABOUT TEN FEET OF DIRT.
CHEERFUL INQUIRIES BY JASON PETTIGREW. SHOTS TO THE HEAD BY BRAD MILLER. - -
In an interview prepared for an English magazine, Shellac guitarist and recording engineer Steve Albini asked Pj Harvey what Lenny Kravitz, Pearl jam, the Black Crowes and the Spin Doctors all had in common. When Ms. Harvey said she didn't know, Albini replied, "I will pay you to kill them."
Shellac is Albini's first foray into band membership since the implosion of Rapeman in 1989 and the self-imposed retirement of the highly regarded Big Black. Late last year, Albini, bassist Bob Weston and drummer Todd Trainer released two well-received singles, The Rude Gesture: A Pictorial History and Uranus. Two years ago, in an interview discussing the Big Black re-issues, Albini answered charges of cynics who assumed he was washed up creatively and couldn't top the fury of Big Black. "Well, I suppose that could be very true that I couldn't top that stuff," he said. "But that doesn't mean dick to me. I was always in bands for my own entertainment anyway. I don't particularly give a shit if anyone likes it." Today, it's obvious why he decided to be in a band again. Given the amount of shit laying around passing as music, he was tired of walking on desktops.
SHELLAC, LIKE BLONDIE, IS A BAND
Weston was the bass player in the last line-up of the Volcano Suns, whose final album, Career in Rock, Albini recorded. When the band folded at the top of '92, Bob worked as an engineer at an AM radio station, played in Crush Sr. (whose Homestead LP he also engineered), as well as doing a tour with squeaky cuddle-bunny Juliana Hatfield. Weston, who has a degree in electrical engineering, was invited to move to Chicago to become the full-time technician at Albini's 24-track basement studio, keeping up with the schedule of recording the nearly 100 records which Albini works on each year.
"Informally, Shellac has been going on for quite some time," Steve explains down the phone in his home studio. "Todd and I had been playing together in a form of Shellac two years ago. It started to feel like masturbation doing it in private all the time, so we decided to go public. Bob moving to Chicago was the catalyst."
Steve's distaste for the music business in general made him hesitant about starting a band again. He totally hates the celebrity aspect" he's saddled with it despite his trademark guitar sound and defined production style. So why deal with people perceiving Shellac as the Steve Albini Experience? Albini is affable, but he doesn't suffer fools gladly.
"That is a reductionist argument," he says. "You can take any argument and reduce it to its simplest form and make it ludicrous. Why do you do anything to give your life any meaning? Ultimately you are going to die. It's obvious that being in a rock band gives all the members of a band satisfaction. One of the things bands do is to successfully conduct live shows. That aspect defines being in a rock band."
"People don't know anything about the band yet," Bob reasons. "But they do know about Steve."
"If people think Shellac is my band and I'm calling the shots, then they're idiots," dismisses Steve. "Because they've obviously never been to one of our rehearsals where Bob is going, 'No. No, no, no, no, no, I am not going Onstage in a bunny suit.""We're going to do a show in Belfast and Steve's going to wear a pope hat," Bob reveals.
"With a big orange marksman's target," Steve adds. "Bob's got this temporary swastika tattoo he'll put on his forehead when we play Germany. But seriously, how many years has it been and people still think that water runs down the drain backwards in the southern hemisphere? You cannot deflate the simplest insubstantial misconception."
Why not just make records? No driving, no bad food, no shady promoters to contend with...
"Then that would be a project," he responds with dry contempt. "Projects are one of the most offensive developments in music in the '80s and '90s. Projects fully suck.'
"What about the Joe Perry Project?" corrects Bob.
'Okay, one exception," Steve relents. 'The notion of a project undermines the credibility of a rock band. If rock bands are considered to be social, political, and creative entities that have a life onto themselves, distinct from the lives of its members. The fact that Al Jourgensen can spend five minutes in a studio and release four LPs under six different names is exploitive. It's taking an audience and wringing them for their money, by repackaging.'
THE MEDIUM IS STILL THE MASSAGE
It seems that Shellac need to remind people that nobody forms a band to be miserable; despite much clamoring by the ,underground rock scene for a full-length album, the songs on their two singles were the only ones the band liked enough to release. When Shellac is ready to do a proper album, Albini says it'll be through his longstanding affiliation with Touch and Go. The band is fascinated with packaging, as exemplified by the single sleeves' semi-difficult "slot A/tab B" format. So if you're willing to release a single shrinkwrapped with a steak, the band would like to talk with you.
"We like doing geeky weird things that I don't feel we should saddle [Touch and Go] with. If we decide to put out a single with some preposterous masonry or pottery package that's going to weigh 5o pounds, I don't want to tell Touch and Go, 'Heyyyy, guess what your bummer's gonna be for the next couple of weeks?"' "I like the idea that somebody buying our records is getting something unique that we made ourselves and totally getting their money's worth," beams Bob. 'Maybe the album will come out with a set of stainless steel cookware. It'll be $300 for the set, and the record you get thrown in."
"I don't like the idea that people are paying inflated prices for music. All they get is a different series of notes, you know?" figures Steve. "The only thing that separates one record from another is the music'. I like the idea that someone is buying a Shellac record for its content and presentation."
ALTERNATIVE ROCK: THE BIG LIE
Shellac's fierce DIY ethic is probably second only to Fugazi's modus operandi. Steve's highly controversial essay in the Chicago journal The Baffler entitled "The Problem With Music' takes on such topics as the pompousness of producers and the treachery of major-label accounting. Albini claims that his refusal to shut up about the alleged brouhaha over his recording of Nirvana's In Utero has cost him some clients. When it comes to music being termed 'alter-native," the bird is the most popular finger,
"There has always been a legitimate underground," Steve stresses. "The difference now is that some of the mainstream music is stylistically similar to some common antecedents in underground music. You can listen to records on major labels that get played on the radio and think, 'Wow, some of this sounds like the Stooges or the Ramones or whatever.'That does not mean in any way that those people operating in the legitimate underground are common in any way with the people in the mainstream. I made the comparison that Smashing Pumpkins are REO Speedwagon, and I'll stick by that."
But a Butthole Surfers record is sonically different than a Damn Yankees album.
"Yes," he replies, "but they have the same motivation. They use the same indulgent rock star technique to make their records. People often confuse the sound coming out of the speakers for the aesthetic soul at work. Go to a college campus and see what they're playing out the speakers perilously perched out the dorm windows. They're no longer playing Loverboy-the crap happens to be the Gin Blossoms and fucking S'mashin Pumpkee. It's still crap; it still appeals to lunkheads."
What about a band like Sonic Youth, a band that Big Black and Rapeman shared stages with?
"When you talk about Sonic Youth there's a few things at play here: the people in Sonic Youth whose company I have always enjoyed; then there's Sonic Youth as a flagship sellout band; and then there's Sonic Youth as a creative entity that makes records that can be evaluated on their own terms. As people, I haven't had as much interaction with them in the past couple of years, although I did speak to Lee [Ranaldol recently a couple times. Personally, I still think they're fine people. I think they've been a singularly destructive force in the underground by giving credibility to all these halfwit liars that work for major record labels. Sonic Youth were trying to make a career by being in a funny sounding rock band. And a career to them means a different thing than it does for me.",
"When you're in a band, you quit your job, go out on tour, come back and find another,' says Weston, slamming down the bottom line. "You save your pennies so you can go out on the road like I did with the Volcano Suns."
Shellac are in no hurry to do anything. Trainer still lives in Minneapolis, and the trio usually get together one weekend a month to practice and shoot pool. Although they have played a few unannounced secret shows in Chicago and have done tours of Australia and Japan, there's no hurry to inspect America's turnpikes and dives. Instead, they have other ideas in mind.
"Biosphere II," reveals Bob. "A couple tractor pulls, rodeos, state fairs. Stuff like that,second tent at Lollapalooza."
"Is anybody as offended by Lollapalooza as much as I am?" asks Steve. "That second-stage thing is real offensive. It's a cheap way for a corporate circus to usurp credibility. It's like Mobil giving a $100 donation to Greenpeace and then spending a million-and-a-half-dollar ad campaign about it."
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