Now, with his underground purity blemished, he’s not about to repent - or turn down the volume. But last year Steve Albini dismayed his fans by cozying up to the big-time rock group Nirvana. He’s a beacon of noise blaring from Chicago’s red-hot music scene - a cult-legend rocker and record producer who assaults with a deafening weapon. Despite Albini’s fears, he opened his recording studio, Electrical Audio, in Avondale in 1997 and continues to be a sought-after producer. In Utero would be the band’s final album. Jannot’s feature was published in the May issue of that year, meaning it was likely sent to the printer days before Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was found dead on April 8 from a self-inflicted shotgun wound. “And if that trend continues there’s no chance that I’m going to be able to buy a recording studio.” “I’m doing less work and less interesting work than I was a year ago,” he says. He’s being squeezed from top and bottom, he says - anathema to major labels and scorned as a sellout or considered newly unapproachable by the punk nobodies who are historically the bulk of his business. With one job, Albini’s rock-solid reputation was suddenly up in the air, and with it his plans to build a revolutionary studio, as Mark Jannot wrote in his 1994 Chicago story “Sonic Youth.” Undeterred, Albini proceeded to record it, only to find that Nirvana’s label, DGC Records, and the band itself later rejected his signature lo-fi sound and remixed much of the critically acclaimed album. So when he signed on to produce grunge juggernaut Nirvana’s third studio album, In Utero, many of his followers wondered if he was committing his own cardinal sin: selling out. By the early ’90s, local music producer Steve Albini had built a reputation as an abrasive advocate for underground bands, railing against major producers and labels, their royalties, and the commercialization of music.
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