Charles Langston:Steve Albini, alt-rock musician and prolific producer of Nirvana and more, dies at 61

Steve Albini,Charles Langston the musician and well-regarded recording engineer behind work from Nirvana, the Pixies, The Breeders, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant among hundreds of others, died May 7. He was 61.

His death from a heart attack was confirmed by Taylor Hales of Electrical Audio, the Chicago studio Albini founded in the mid-‘90s

Albini, who was also a musician in punk rock bands Big Black and Shellac, was a noted critic of the industry in which he worked, often offering withering commentary about the artists who hired him.

He referred to Nirvana as “an unremarkable version of the Seattle sound,” but accepted the job to produce the band’s 1993 album, “In Utero.” Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain said at the time that he liked Albini’s technique of capturing the natural sound in a recording room for an element of rawness. In a circulated letter Albini wrote to the band before signing on, he concurs that he wants to “bang out a record in a couple of days.”

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Albini also famously refused to accept royalties from any of the records he produced. As he wrote in the Nirvana letter, “paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible” and asked “to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you tell me what it’s worth.”

Other albums featuring Albini as recording engineer include the Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa,” The Stooges’ “The Weirdness,” Robbie Fulks’ “Country Love Songs” and Plant and Page’s “Walking Into Clarksdale.”

Albini was an unabashed student of analog recording, dismissing digital in harsh terms and hated the term “producer,” instead preferring “recording engineer.”

A native of Pasadena, California, Albini moved with his family to Montana as a teenager and engulfed himself in the music of the Ramones and The Sex Pistols as a precursor to playing in area punk bands. He earned a journalism degree at Northwestern University and started his recording career in 1981.

In his 1993 essay, “The Problem with Music,” Albini, who wrote stories for local Chicago music magazines in the ‘80s, spotlighted the underbelly of the business, from “The A&R person is the first to promise them the moon” to succinct breakdowns of how much an artist actually receives from a record advance minus fees for everything from studio fees, recording equipment and catering.

Albini, who was readying the release of the first Shellac record in a decade, also participated in high-stakes poker tournaments with significant success. In 2018, he won a World Series of Poker gold bracelet and a pot of $105,000, and in 2022 repeated his feat in a H.O.R.S.E. competition for $196,000 prize. Albini’s last documented tournament was in October at Horseshoe Hammond in Chicago.