Albini pitching Nirvana: “I would like to be paid like a plumber” (1992)
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If you want to get into it, start by putting the released version on repeat and listen to it a few times in a row. To start, focus on Kurt Cobain’s voice, specifically where it ‘sits’ in the mix. Then, switch to Steve Albini’s version.
When I hear Steve Albini’s version, Kurt Cobain’s voice is less pronounced. What do you think??
If that helps, I can point out more differences. Or, maybe you can point out some you hear?
Which is funny, as there are many very repetitive tracks I like with long running times which never bore me. (Random example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXbdzLgwME0 .)
I might be wrong, but I've always felt like Albini's aim to sound like you're in the room with the band, where the drums boom and the vocals are quieter.
[1] https://youtu.be/W6Gp8up3l8Y [2] https://youtu.be/F9pwGlgQz2E?t=173
Very much like it's a person in a room, instead of processed.
It is far less "in your face", and arguably, teenagers then might not have thought it cool. Like a band from the 70's or 80's.
Albini's does lack that separation that differentiated the remixed songs from contemporary and then recent punk and "always-on" grudge imho.
As a total aside: Albini's attitude and writing is a breath of fresh air in today's world polluted by corporate backstabbery and doublespeak. Albini is a professional. He says what he thinks, wants do his work and make his money, and doesn't try and lay claim to the entire future legacy of the band because he's good at slinging electrons around a board.
Like you said, it's the difference between it sounding like you're in a small room with a band or in a large venue where some of the clarity is lost.
Overall Albini's mix sounds much more live, which is exactly what he had in mind before he recorded with the band. The final mix is compressed, balanced, radio-friendly: it sounds more like it could fit on Nevermind than some of the other songs on In Utero.
Deerhoof for example has the drummer right front.
Nirvana is an excellent rabbit hole band, though. There are plenty of b-sides, bootlegs, demos, technically unreleased tracks, compilations, etc etc. They've released box sets that have pretty much everything besides the live bootlegs.
In a totally other genre, Michael Jackson Thriller vocal studo outtakes are breathtaking.
I'm a professional record producer and songwriter. Here are my thoughts:
Very likely it's the other way around. Albini is notoriously hard-headed about refusing to use compression on tracks and mixes. He's gone on record about how compressors ruin the tone, expressivity, and micro-dynamics of recorded sounds.
Regardless of whether you agree with that, and he does have a point, compression performs one job admirably: it prevents dynamic sounds from unexpectedly popping out of a determined dynamic range.
This is a disagreement lots of people have had with Albini's method, and he's also a little prickly about these things. He has an artistic vision of "properly" recording bands and mixing them in a way that doesn't adulterate or modify their live sound. In other words, he tries to get the final sound just through exacting microphone placement while recording, and applies the absolute minimum of post-processing.
However, the consensus in commercial record production at this point is that signal processing such as compression, distortion, and equalization, even in dramatic quantity, can create a more compelling audio result. Albini certainly views this as leading to a decline in fidelity (in the etymological sense of truth), and possibly as leading to a decline in artistic integrity (heavily debated).
A couple final ideas:
- In a recorded-music world, what constitutes an "authentic" or "true" sound?
- Should a studio operator (recording/mixing) aim to respect the real-world sound of the artist, or the intentions of the artist? How do you identify the intentions of an artist?
I actually always felt the original track stood out (in a bad way) on the album and it's interesting to hear how much of that was introduced by the remix.
The recording style Albini uses here was also in evidence with another classic rock album he references here, PJ Harvey's 'Rid of Me'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVeP-AHFk-s
Some people (eg. Elvis Costello) hate this 'naturalistic' style, but I think the overproduced style that dominates radio often strips tracks of their personality.
My take is that as a singer songwriter he can't stand the fact that Albini makes the drums and guitars as prominent as the vocals, and gives the vocals so much room ambience. I think it works fantastically on a rock album that's supposed to be dark and brooding anyway.
It definitely feel more "indie" but not 100% in a good way for me.
This is a little extreme. "Teen spirit", "Come as you are", "Lithium" are great, but "On a plain" and other heavier numbers are jarringly plasticky.
I'm sure it was covered by others before that, but his was the first version I ever heard and of the million versions I've heard since there's not a single one that comes anywhere close. And the way it and the next song go together are the definition of a centerpiece.
It's one of the great albums and I can't believe how much we lost because he decided to go swimming at night in a river. I also can't believe the same dude mixed Nevermind. Cheers.
I know Kurt liked the Pixies, but after something as high end as Nevermind, who knows what he was looking for.
I think I read somewhere that P.J. Harvey wasn't happy with the way "Rid of Me" came out - but I thought it was incredible and nothing afterwards really compares.
My only real complaint about the production on “Rid of Me” is the obnoxious volume shifts on the title track and “Highway 61 Revisited” which seem to neither reflect what the live performances sounded like nor accommodate home listening.
Listening to the album again now it's such a relief to hear a recording with such dynamic range, not the appallingly over-compressed loudness wars derived style we're subjected to now.
I agree that the volume on Highway 61 Revisited is an imperfection, but it's still one of my favorite tracks. I have no reverence for Bob Dylan and no interest in listening to him sing his lyrics.
Mh. As a teenager at the time, I always thought Nevermind was the real deal. Then the whole media phenomenon took over, so In Utero could have been shite and still sell bazillions - it was promoted massively. That's not to say it was shite, but IMHO it wasn't as perfect as Nevermind.
The punk folks around Nirvana were surprised with how pliable they were with Geffen. Albini was pissed and wanted his name off of it.
He wasn’t easy to work with. Abrasive, rude, rigidly principled. He’s mellowed out with age, but really hasn’t touched much major label stuff since the 90s, if any.
If you listen to the original mixes on the reissue you hear how much more consistent it feels as an album. And I won’t lie. I have a bias. I love the quality of Albini’s work. Crisp and raw and uses the whole spectrum. And those drums…
Jesus Lizard, early Pixies, this album, PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me are more well known work he’s done that is great. Bush was awful. His band Shellac w/ the mentioned Bob Weston is f’n incredible.
These days, he works a super reasonable flat rate and will record anyone. Had friends who recorded at his Chicago studio. Brilliant guy.
Why does a record producer or recording engineer need an EE degree? They might need to repair a console, I guess, but they aren't going to design one from scratch.
And even if you look closer at rock, the most groundbreaking and successful acts have always been at the forefront of innovation in the sound / production department (from the Beatles to U2 or Radiohead)
Signals processing
Noise
I though the sound on In Utero was too glossy. Listen to live Nirvana, including their official live album. Nothing in a studio, by anyone, can compare and with the live material available it has no reason to exist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhYNe6yu0JM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGc8jL4dzao
Admit it - you were sleeping. Was it for years? Now you're awake again.
For example at one point it wasn’t a cliche to talk about Lord of the Rings characters over alternating bouts of English folk music and heavy rock. And then it was. But in the middle there was the part where people waited in line outside the record store and rushed home to get it on the turntable and had their minds blown.
As someone who was around and actually working as a record producer in the same era this letter was written I feel confident saying that the ethos described here was in fact out of step with the mainstream approach to making rock and roll records. Doing things the way he’s describing was in fact an “alternative” approach to coin a phrase.
That it was rapidly becoming the mainstream at the time and eventually a cliche is also true. But I think it’s fun to evaluate things in the relevant context, or you’ll skip right from considering things obscure to overdone and miss the exhilarating part where something genuinely valuable and novel is gaining mass acceptance for the first time.
Grohl had been in a Dischord band and Kurt/Dave on Subpop with Kurt being great friends with Buzz Osborne (among so so so many other things in Seattle scene). I’m sure Steve knew that too. Different pedigrees, sure, but explaining an alternative approach would be speaking to the choir - so it was never a letter to Nirvana, more like a letter to Geffen.
Was Albini really an "engineer extraordinaire", like the introduction says? Why does live almost always sound better to me than studio, lacking the energy and creativity that make rock'n'roll great. Is it just me? For the most part, I stopped buying studio albums. Why wouldn't they just record Nirvana (or Bruce Springsteen or whoever) playing their new songs live?
(I have been making my living as an audio engineer)
One of those is, that live doesn't actually sound good, it is just a good experience — the people, the light, the atmosphere, you went there and payed potentially a ton of money for it, you are a little drunk, it is loud, everybody who is there is in a good mood, it happens live in front of your eyes... In short: It sounds better than it actually sounds for psychological reasons.
While this is not necessarily true for all genres of music equally, audio engineers still have to pull a ton of strings and jump through a bunch of hoops to recreate the energy people felt who were in the room. And sometimes it easier to do so in the studio where the band just plays for the recording and you don't have to compromise between coices that are good for a stage and choices that are good for a recording.
Certainly I've had this experience! But there are so many great live bootleg recordings, don't they seem like evidence that live music can sound fantastic (in the sense of music, not recording quality)? Listen to the Nirvana clips upthread.
But thinking about it, I've forgotten that many, many bands are worse live than in a studio, and far more are no better live. The Rolling Stones stand out to me as a band known for legendary live concerts but who, if you hear the music only, play poorly. I love live music so I realize I have a very strong selection bias toward people who are fantastic live performers. Not everyone, or maybe nobody, is Nirvana.
- Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out
- Waiting for Columbus
- Stop Making Sense
Cliches signal to me that the speaker doesn't mean seriously what they are saying - they haven't thought enough to construct their own language (and at more than a superficial level, it's unlikely the cliche represents anyone's serious, nuanced point-of-view); they only have a vague notion and copy and paste a phrase that matches somewhat.
When Nirvana was at the height of their popularity, imagine all the people approaching them, saying what they thought Nirvana wanted to hear. That is how Albini's letter reads to me: A lot of cliche demonstrating that Albini didn't really think these things. But obviously Nirvana knew their values, their business, and the situation far better than I do now, and they hired Albini. Also, someone else in this thread was a record producer at the time and sees the letter as significant, and we should probably listen to them too.
He has a distinctive sound; there's a long list of artists who've had him do 1-2 records. Listen to Surfer Rosa and then Trompe Le Monde, or Pod and then Last Splash, or Rid Of Me and then the 4 Track Demos, where you get some of the same songs, even.
Good lord. I love Nirvana but the differences between all these mixes are minor and barely noticeable unless you're swapping back and forth. Kurt would hate this shit.
I originally wrote something in the rude, direct, challenging nature of that subculture, but in this one I'll just say: Let it in, past your defenses, and it will activate nerves and neurons and biochemicals you forgot were in living.
I think a lot of what made that era productive was a peaking of tension between slick commercial music and grittier, "underground" sounds and themes. Ozzy & Black Sabbath went from shocking to mainstream. Punk became a main street cafe aesthetic.
In the 90s, after the grunge explosion, "underground" was ironically mainstream and that contradiction resulted in some terrific albums.
Nirvana and Kurt certainly traded in this tension.
My favourite example is rage against the machine. Extremely dissident sound and vibe. I think they recorded very raw.
But, they still achieved pop music ideals. Ratm songs are catchy and iconic in exactly the same way a Michael Jackson song is. You start tapping your pencil to it from the first note.
It's too bad his work with Fugazi didn't work out. Apparently the band and Albini decided they both didn't like and they re-recorded it at another studio.
My March 2020 Shellac tickets are finally going to be used in May, I’m excited!
I liked Goat, Liar, and Down better than Shot, which seems to correlate with Albini producing only the first three.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKHsSz1dAac
(good speakers, loud, or you're only cheating yourself.)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smells_Like_Teen_Spirit#Writin...
Pod or Rid of Me would be my Albini production picks, if only for how different they each are to their immediate successor albums. If I can't pick an actual Albini album, that is (my pick would be At Action Park).
In Utero is a truly fantastic album, and the sound was/is radical and unusual and …
It’s unclear to me whether this had anything to do with what the band wanted, being true to how the band heard themselves, or any of that stuff.
What does “in the courtyard” mean?
Albini loves to paint himself as different. A lot of it is, maybe unintentionally, geared towards making his side of the job simpler, while also feeding the ego of his clients, making all the creativity about them, which bands of course love. Credits where credits are due, that's pretty smart.
> Most contemporary engineers and producers see a record as a “project,” and the band as only one element of the project. [...] My approach is exactly the opposite. I consider the band the most important thing"
There is nothing oppositional about this statement. A record is by all worldly definitions a project and most producers would still agree that the band is the most important element of that project.
> I do not want and will not take a royalty on any record I record. No points. Period. I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible.
Royalties for producers are like buying stock in a band. The producers gives money (offered as production time), and gets shares in return. Just like stock, it makes projects possible that otherwise wouldn't be. That's a good thing. It's also immensely smart for the band, because obviously not everyone is as great a guy as Albini is, and having your producer have financial motivation to make sure the record succeeds (which you don't have to have when being paid flat) is a sensible thing to want for a working band in their producers.
FWIW, the way that Albini describes his work I completely agree with his no-royalties stance, but only in regards to himself: If your thing is making a big show out of how you are not getting involved in things, you best stay a hired hand. Turns out tho, a lot of bands actually want a producer that helps decide. It's kinda what you go into the studio for now. Everyone chump can mic up an amp well enough.
> I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it's worth. [...] Whatever. I trust you guys to be fair to me and I know you must be familiar with what a regular industry goon would want.
Well, Albini, that is exactly not how a plumber gets paid. As a plumber you will be able and expected to to produce a detailed offer and not make their clients guess a number.
Pay-what-you-want is a cop-out for people in power, just like job descriptions without salary (ranges) are a copout. Yeah, you have an idea of what you want. Stop making it awkward for the other party. Speak the fuck up.
> I, however, already have more work than I can handle
Nobody in this industry does it without an ego and a varying measure of arrogance (since nobody in music can give you any answers but as a maker you have to believe you do know better). That ego is dependent on people wanting to work with you, and that is dependent on the people you worked with. Past clients predict future clients. Nobody wants to work with shit clients in the future but that is what will happen when the stream of good clients ebbs. Best case Albini was being dishonest to himself. But probably just boasting.
For me Nevermind is more pop.
Nevermind is also clearly the more influential of the two albums. Zillions of bands have tried to make albums that sound like Nevermind. In Utero? Maybe Neutral Milk Hotel? And they did it better!
I remember something Jim DeRogatis said about Big Black on Sound Opinions back when it was on WKQX, something about how Albini was an interesting artist with lots to say but that his albums were really unpleasant to listen to. That's In Utero for me. As an edgy teen? Loved it. Today? I can barely get through it. 7.4/10.0.
Part of it is that as a 90s kid who owned a couple of Big Black albums, I listened to a lot of albums just because Albini recorded them; In Utero is not the most interesting affect he had on a band.
"Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle" is, however, the best Nirvana song.
Heart Shaped Box is probably my favorite Nirvana song by a wide margin.
I feel like this is Hard Days Night vs The White Album (aka The Beatles)
Which is more influential? Which is better? Which is more real?
Edit: Which one is more like “Bleach” … which one caused Metallica to try downtuning their guitars?
The guy is problematic.
You’ll be forever in debt to my priceless advice.
I understand capturing as much value as possible, but that's not in the cards for me. I feel as long as I make enough money to be happy, that's ok. Everyone tells me I'm dumb so I'm probably hurting myself, but I really appreciate Albini's insistence not to take so much money.
If you are after maximizing the amount of money you earn rather than focus the creation of good work and/or art audio engineering might not be the right field for you anyways. Firstly because there is not a lot of money in it, secondly because there is not a lot of money in it for people who always priorize money over art.
I'm watching the Kanye doc on Netflix right now and there is a discussion where someone wanted him to give them beats for points. He responded hell no wanted his fee (30-50k) instead. Not every person he worked with was JayZ, so getting paid well up front was a way to remove risk.