When it was originally founded by Mark Fischer (along with his pal Rob Syers), Chicago’s SKiN GRAFT was a purveyor of underground/DIY comics and low-brow punk ‘zines ethos. Conceived and furiously drawn by the pair, Fischer’s and Syers’ comics were sold at punk shows in St. Louis, at high schools during lunch, and local comic and record shops. Thanks to several characters they created, such as “The Zeppelin Patrol” a group of outer space hippies (lovingly inspired by one of the kings of underground comics, the creator of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Gilbert Shelton), “Serious Brown” (best described as a private dick in Muppet form), and “Hot Satan” (who is still proudly represented in the labels logo), SKiN Graft would soon catch the attention of comics giant Caliber Press. At the time, Caliber was considered one of the largest publishers of indie comics in the U.S., and published two issues of SKiN GRAFT, distributing them worldwide before SKiN GRAFT decided to switch gears and try their hand at putting out records. Their first, with St. Louis, Missouri math rock band Dazzling Killmen, combined both aggressive punk rock jams with, of course, comics, for a 7” split in 1991 with Minneapolis spaz-punk band Mother’s Day.

Jumping to 1995 would see the SKiN GRAFT release SIDES 1-4, the first installment in a series of singles and comic book sets featuring bands performing songs “influenced” by AC/DC. Artists on the four-song record included Shellac (formed by Steve Albini and drummer Todd Trainer with the former bassist for the Volcano Suns, Bob Weston), Brise-Glace, Big’n, and Chicago-based noise rock band, U.S. Maple. The release included “crossover” comics—think Batman vs. The Beatles (issue #222, 1970), or one of my personal favorites, the comic collision of Star Trek and the X-Men, in 1996. Instead of having the comics included in SIDES 1-4 directly associated with AC/DC, Fischer and Syers instead hit up their comic catalog, resurrecting Hot Satan, Johnny Oedipus, and Serious Brown in new comics. According to Fischer, the idea for SIDES 1-4 was also inspired by the noise put out by Rene Herbst and his label Gasoline Boost Records in Germany (which included Big’n).
 

Tail Spins #19 (December 1994/January1995). Here Fischer and Syers paid homage to one of the very first comics owned by Fischer, Captain America #203 while homaging the great Jack Kirby. This image is a part of the digital comics released today with ‘SIDES 1-4.’
 
SIDES 1-4 was only produced on vinyl, and noise-loving music fans consider the album a highlight of their record collection. Starting on June 5th and coinciding with Bandcamp’s June “fee-waving day,” SKiN GRAFT will give fans a chance to digitally download a newly remastered SIDES 1-4, various comic sets and a limited number of 7” vinyl copies. All this talk about Hot Satan, AC/DC, and loud, rowdy punk rock got me, an AC/DC lifer, wondering about how some of the creative minds got behind this project, and how they got their first dose of a band beloved by everyone. I mean, have you ever met a person who didn’t like AC/DC? I know I never have. Here’s how U.S. Maple guitarist Todd Rittman, Bob Weston, SKiN GRAFT’s Mark Fischer remember the first time they had their young minds blown by Australia’s greatest export, AC/DC:

Todd Rittman:

“I remember when Highway to Hell (1979) came out. I was 10 and just starting taking an interest in rock music. My best friend had an older brother who would play us his records, and I remember having my mind totally blown forever by AC/DC, Black Sabbath, and Led Zeppelin. The sound of the guitars and tribal drums, Bon Scott’s voice, and how truly happy he was to be doomed to eternal damnation all really impressed me. All I ever heard growing up was the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel. Hard rock brought a whole new palette of colors to my brain. I used to go to a record store called The Flip Side that was within walking distance of the townhouse I grew up in, just look at the LP covers and plan which ones I would spend my money on (once I ever got any). I probably spent the most time looking at the cover of If You Want Blood You Got It (1978) wondering what kind of deranged criminal mind would think of such an image (and actually wondering if it was real!) I’ve never been the same.”

Bob Weston:

“I first heard AC/DC every morning from a boombox that the leather-vested burnouts blasted on the bus to junior high school in 1977. I loved it. Maybe it was “Dirty Deeds”...?”

Mark Fischer:

“I felt the same way as Todd! AC/DC’s cover art seemed a lot seedier and more dangerous than their contemporaries. The album cover of Highway to Hell scared me in all of the right places. I knew my parents would not approve, but it was irresistible - like low hanging forbidden fruit.”

So as we’re all nodding in agreement about Fischer, Weston, and Rittman’s feelings on AC/DC, I have more good news regarding upcoming plans to expand on SKiN GRAFT’s musical exploration and experimentation of/with AC/DC. More covers are planned for the forthcoming SIDES 5-6 such as “Let There Be Rock” by the thunderous Zeni Geva (Japan), and everyone’s favorite AC/DC sing-along about a ding-dong’s two best buddies, “Big Balls” by Palace Contribution (featuring Will Oldham aka, psilocybin connoisseur Bonnie “Prince” Billy). All four songs from SIDES 1-4 can be cranked all the way up below and purchased right here while you scroll through a few of the fantastic accompanying comics in all their delinquent glory.
 

 

An assortment of SKiN GRAFT comic characters.
 

 

ENTER THE KARATE CHIMP!
 

A promotional ad for ‘SIDES 1-4.’
 
HT: With thanks to Mark Fischer and Ron Kretch.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Anyone here tonight ever had gonorrhea?”: AC/DC’s dirty autobiographical version of ‘The Jack’
‘How Should We End This?’: Hilarious supercut of AC/DC song endings
AC/DC vocalist Brian Johnson’s balls out metal vocals for a Hoover vacuum commercial in 1980
Blistering footage of a young AC/DC blowing the roof off the sucker in 1978
Heavy Metal Parking Lot: Photos of AC/DC hanging with a bunch of teenage super-fans in 1979
Knives Out: When Ozzy (maybe) stopped Geezer Butler from stabbing Malcolm Young of AC/DC in 1977
Raw footage of AC/DC killing it at an Australian high school 40 years ago (& Bon Scott’s bagpipes!)
Ultra-rare AC/DC promotional songbook full of sheet music, comics & photos from 1976

David Yow and Steve Albini on the set of ‘Duelin’ Firemen’ (via Bogart9)

The video game Duelin’ Firemen would have blown minds if it had been released in 1995. Think the Jodorowsky Dune of games. Much of the cast is straight out of the pages of Mondo 2000 or Fiz: Rudy Ray Moore, Rev. Ivan Stang, Mark Mothersbaugh, Timothy Leary, David Yow, Steve Albini, the Boredoms, Terence McKenna, Buzz Osborne, and Tony Hawk all had parts to play.

But unlike other worthy computer games that were actually produced in order to suck away vital months of my adolescence, such as DEVO’s Adventures of the Smart Patrol and the Residents’ Bad Day at the Midway, Duelin’ Firemen never passed from becoming into being. All that remains is a seven-minute trailer and a seven-inch record with David Yow on one side and the Boredoms on the other, both embedded below. From 23 years ago, here’s Rev. Ivan Stang’s account of the shoot:

12.21.1994- Run-n-Gun! filming
by Reverend Ivan Stang

I’ve been in Chicago for the last week, and although I took the modem with me, I never had time to plug it in. I was being an actor in a CD-ROM interactive video game called DUELIN’ FIREMEN being produced for the 3D0 system by a group of SubGenius filmakers and computer animator/vr programmers called Runandgun. It’s a combination of multiple-choice filmed scenarios and v.r. game situations, all taking place in Chicago while the entire city burns to the ground. I have played two roles in it so far—first an evil Man-In-Black and second, Cagliostro the evil 1,000-year old Mason whose spells started the fire. What sets this game apart from anything else I’ve ever seen is the TOTAL MIND-RAPE HILLBILLY SPAZZ-OUT STYLE of it. It makes Sam Raimi look like D.W. Griffith by comparison… makes Tim Burton look like Ernie Bushmiller. It is sick, twisted, weird and ‘Frop-besoaked like nothing on earth. It stars Rudy Ray Moore aka DOLEMITE as the main fireman with cameos by Tim Leary, Mark Mothersbaugh, Terrence McKenna, David Yow of Jesus Lizard and all manner of local Chicago freaks and jokers. (YES! I spent the week WORKING with DOLEMITE. We DO BATTLE in a scene and you get to “PLAY” us in the game section. Now is that cool or what. Of course, you’re probably too SOPHISTICATED to even KNOW who Rudy Ray Moore IS!!! (None of the crew did, although the winos outside the set recognized his VOICE.)) The real stars are the animation, fx and sets. It’s like a LIVING-SURREAL CARTOON from the mind of a CRAZY MAN (in this case, director Grady Sein). The Runandgun crew are like this commune of crazed hillbilly technoids. I had the time of my life. The game won’t be finished till July ‘95, though.

Stang

 

 
The trailer’s quality reminds me of the way videos looked on the screen of my Macintosh Performa during the late Nineties, except that back then they were about the size of a matchbox. What I’m trying to say is: prepare your mind and body for ugly fat-pixel video…

Watch after the jump…

 
In 1993 the biggest act in indie rock, by far, was Nirvana, but the Lemonheads weren’t all that far behind. Both acts had enjoyed a spectacularly successful 1992: Nirvana’s Nevermind had hit #1 on the album charts in January, and the Lemonheads followed suit by placing two songs off of the band’s fifth album It’s a Shame About Ray in the top 10, the title track and a cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.”

The lead singer of the Lemonheads was a handsome young lad named Evan Dando, a polarizing figure whose beachy good looks didn’t exactly transmit the requisite values of integrity and struggle to the indie rock faithful. The Lemonheads had jumped to Atlantic for 1990’s Lovey, an act that carried far more symbolic meaning at that time than it would today. (Yes, Nirvana made a similar jump but then, Cobain wasn’t as dreamy-handsome as Dando.) 
 

The Lemonheads
 
In early 1993, Steve Albini and Nirvana were holed up at Pachyderm Studio in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, to record what would become In Utero. At that moment Dando and his band were in Australia for a series of dates that, interestingly enough, would later be documented in a VHS called The Lemonheads: Two Weeks in Australia. While he was there, Dando called up Nirvana to shoot the shit for a while.

Now, indie rockers did not generally have access to email in 1993, and intercontinental telephone calls from hotel rooms were just about the most expensive form of communication imaginable, a fact that doesn’t seem to have fazed Dando a bit. At some point the speculative size of Dando’s hotel bill must have become a topic of conversation in Minnesota because after a while the game became to find a way to keep Dando on the line for as long as possible.

Someone, I’d imagine Kurt, thrusts the receiver in Albini’s face with the mandate to make something up. Forced to improvise, Albini passes himself off as a personal assistant to Madonna, who was just indescribably huge in the early 1990s, any connection with whom would represent a BIG rise in fortune for any former Taang! Records act such as the Lemonheads.

Would Mr. Dando mind waiting on the line while Madonna attends to other business?

And waiting…. and waiting…. and waiting?

Watch Steve Albini himself tell the story after the jump…

 
America’s Funniest Home Videos (and its international offshoots) might represent the most lucrative user-generated content project in history—until the arrival of Facebook and YouTube, anyway. A genius by the name of Vin Di Bona realized that there were untold thousands of hours of hilarious content out there just waiting for a network TV outlet, and that the owners of that content would be only too happy to send a major media corporation their videotapes for a chance at widespread TV recognition (and cash too, let’s not forget the cash). So in 1989 ABC began broadcasting the show, which was originally hosted by Bob Saget and, thrillingly, featured the voiceover work of legendary announcer Ernie Anderson (also known as Ghoulardi). The volume of submissions was so thick that it’s said that the show singlehandedly caused the Hollywood post office to take on increased staff.

The show lasted until—Oh wait. The show, of course, is still on the air even now.

Recently, noted Australian composer Chris Cobilis has immersed himself in the decades-long output of America’s Funniest Home Videos and its Aussie counterpart Australia’s Funniest Home Videos as part of the process to create an experimental orchestral work inspired by the show. That work, created in collaboration with poet Kenneth Goldsmith and Spektral Quartet and engineered by none other than Steve Albini, is called This Is You and will be available for purchase on Bandcamp on October 28 (but you can pre-order it today).

In preparation for the work, Cobilis transcribed entire episodes of show, a process that encompassed dialogue, voiceover, and sound FX cues. In addition, he took chunks of audio from the episodes and converted them to MIDI, resulting in a side-scrolling “animated score.” Perhaps the project’s most fascinating aspect is that funny videos on the Internet were shown to the musicians, who were told to “play what they saw” without any prior knowledge of what they were about to see. Each instrument was given different array of videos to play off of.

Kenneth Goldsmith is a fascinating figure, a renowned poet who is the founding editor of UbuWeb and had a popular show on WFMU for many years. Spektral Quartet is a string quartet that is the ensemble-in-residence at the University of Chicago’s Department of Music. In its 2014 project Mobile Miniatures, Spektral Quartet recorded the (very brief) musical creations of 47 composers including Nico Muhly, David Lang, and Anna Thorvaldsdottir, which were then made available for download as ringtones.

Steve Albini, of course, was in Big Black, Rapeman, and Shellac and has served as the recording engineer for countless classic albums, including Slint’s Tweez, The Jesus Lizard’s Pure, Superchunk’s No Pocky For Kitty, and Craw’s Lost Nation Road.

According to press materials, This Is You is described as “a metaphysical feedback loop” that “traces the 25-year history of the TV program Funniest Home Videos in an attempt to describe the prism of existence as solar vanity.” It’s safe to say that we could all stand to give our solar vanity a little look-see.

Here’s the full piece from Bandcamp:

 
Video after the jump…

 
Legendary producer, engineer and musician Steve Albini—notorious mensch and grouch—does not like electronic dance music, but he also doesn’t care if you use his songs to create your own! Big Black, Shellac, and Rapeman might not seem the prime candidates for a dance beat, but electronic artist Oscar Powell, a.k.a. “Powell” was such a huge Big Black fan that he wrote to Albini requesting permission to sample a clip for a track called “Insomniac.” Albini gave Powell his blessing, but only after telling him exactly how he felt about club culture and electronic dance beats.

Hey Oscar,

Sounds like you’ve got a cool thing set up for yourself. I am absolutely the wrong audience for this kind of music. I’ve always detested mechanized dance music, its stupid simplicity, the clubs where it was played, the people who went to those clubs, the drugs they took, the shit they liked to talk about, the clothes they wore, the battles they fought amongst each other…

Basically all of it: 100 percent hated every scrap.

The electronic music I liked was radical and different, shit like the White Noise, Xenakis, Suicide, Kraftwerk, and the earliest stuff form Cabaret Voltaire, SPK and DAF. When that scene and those people got co-opted by dance/club music I felt like we’d lost a war. I detest club culture as deeply as I detest anything on earth. So I am against what you’re into, and an enemy of where you come from but I have no problem with what you’re doing…

In other words, you’re welcome to do whatever you like with whatever of mine you’ve gotten your hands on. Don’t care. Enjoy yourself.

Steve

Powell found the message so funny, he then asked if he could use it to promote the album. Albini wrote back “Still don’t care,” so now the email has been reproduced on a billboard in east London, which you can see (but barely read) above. Honestly, it’s a hell of an endorsement despite Albini’s total disdain for the music!

If you actually do care, you can hear “Insomniac” below. It starts up at 31:33.
 

 
Via Pitchfork

 
In 1992, five years after their breakup in the wake of their amazing LP Songs About Fucking, the influential and scathing post-hardcore pioneers Big Black released a boxed set called Pig Pile, which featured a shirt, a poster, a VHS tape, a vinyl LP, and a clear-vinyl 5” single. The LP and VHS were documents of the band’s July 1987 concert at London’s Hammersmith Clarendon, and the 5” was a totally incongruous cover of the Mary Jane Girls’ “In My House.”
 

 
Yyyyyyyep.

Talking to NME about the show, the band’s singer/guitarist Steve Albini had this to offer:

We made a splash immediately before we broke up; now a band starts shopping its demos to majors after its third rehearsal. By the end, I think we improved; on the live record and video we were probably as good as we were ever gonna be. That gig was exciting—there was this giant belch and everyone involved in this giant belch felt immensely relieved afterwards.

 

 
It was indeed a hell of a belch. The band at its height was known for a relentlessly concussive and scarifying musical blitz—Albini’s guitar tone alone could practically sever limbs—paired with true-story lyrics that unflinchingly detailed the most reprehensible of human behaviors, often to genuinely chilling effect. The videotape and album show the band slaying an excoriating best-of set, and for their encore, a cover of Wire’s “Heartbeat,” they were joined onstage by Wire’s Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis in what must have been a fan-fantasy score of a lifetime. The LP was rereleased as a CD in short order, and inevitably came out on vinyl again in the ‘oughts, but the video has never been reissued in any format. Per the band’s label, Touch and Go records,

In 1992, Touch and Go released a Big Black live album and video, titled Pig Pile, that were recorded (mostly) in 1987 during Big Black’s final tour. Someday, we might release the video on DVD. Until then, please don’t ask us about it.

As of this writing, used copies of the complete set are being offered on discogs.com for between $60 USD (box condition fair, shirt worn) and well over $200. But if you’re really that hot to watch it, and you don’t mind tiny and fuzzy, here it is.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
‘Shellac Pistols’: Shellac and David Yow do the Sex Pistols, 1998
Awkward, hilarious interview with Steve Albini
Absolute Nirvana: new Steve Albini mixes push in utero anniversary set into essential territory

 
On Halloween night of 1998, Shellac and David Yow of Scratch Acid/Jesus Lizard fame indulged their silly side, pretending to be The Sex Pistols for a set of scorching music. The location was Lounge Ax, the legendary venue on 2438 North Lincoln Avenue in Chicago that had been pummeling audiences with awesome music since 1987. (It closed in 2000; you might remember it as the venue in High Fidelity where John Cusack first meets Lisa Bonet.)

The first performers were Ms. Fits, an all-female Misfits cover band. During their set, Shellac’s Steve Albini stood right in the middle of the audience “to loudly support” the openers, who were facing “a tough crowd.” The middler, Sixto, featured members from Seam and Dis—they’re still active, at least judging by their bandcamp page.

When the crew put up three microphones for the final set, a rumor briefly flared up that this was going to be a Big Black reunion. What the audience got was a lot more special than that: Shellac with David Yow as a spot-on Johnny Rotten doing most of the songs off of Never Mind the Bollocks. Bob Weston was Sid Vicious, Todd Trainer was Paul Cook on drums, and Albini was Steve Jones.
 

 
An attendee of the show submitted the following account:
 

David Yow stalked onto the stage, in full 1970’s-era Johnny Rotten attire to the letter. Bleached and spiked hair, psychotically glaring at the audience, the whole nine yards. He’d done his homework on this one. He was followed by the three Shellacs, with Steve Albini doing his best Steve Jones in vinyl pants (!) and a red doo-rag on his head. Bob Weston *was* Sid Vicious, in spiked black hair, mesh shirt (with scratches and scars visible underneath), glassy-eyed, and an impressively bloody IV bandage on his arm. Only Todd Trainer seemed to buck the whole Pistols image. I mean, he could have found one of those big sweaters or something. Paul Cook had style too.

Anyway, they ripped into “Holidays in the Sun”, and that set the tone for the evening. Yow had Rotten’s nasal Brit accent down pat, even in song. He pulled the whole thing off so well, I tell ya. Weston kept coughing up “blood” and running into things. Steve’s guitar sounded kind of sloppy, but I don’t think Jones could have done it any better. Between songs the band taunted the audience in mock cockney accents, Steve asking if there were “any PAA-ties about”. The audience responded by throwing chunks of a dismembered jack-o-lantern at the band.

The setlist was confined to material from Never Mind the Bollocks, including “Bodies”, “Submission”, “Anarchy in the U.K.”, and closing with “God Save the Queen”. Yow seemed to remember the words to them better than he remembers the words to Jesus Lizard songs.

Yow ended the evening by asking, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” and the band walked offstage, barely an hour after they started. For a long time, nobody left. The house lights came up and nobody left. Todd Trainer started taking his drum set apart and people booed. It finally registered that that was the evening, that they weren’t going to get anymore, and they weren’t getting any Shellac songs.

 
As attendee Andy Larson wrote ten years later to the day, “steve albini said something like ‘does anyone know where there’s a party about?’ in a british accent—and i believe only that. walking up lincoln ave. after the show i passed bob weston (sid vicious) and said ‘hey—great show’ and he said “right” in a british accent.”

There’s no video of the show, and scarcely any pictures—at least on the Internet. The b/w shot above is the only one I could find. There is, however, fairly good audio, which you can download here in flac format.
 

Setlist:
1. Holidays In The Sun
2. Bodies
3. Pretty Vacant
4. Seventeen
5. Sub-mission
6. New York
7. Anarchy In The U.K.
8. God Save The Queen

 
The poster for the show was done by Illinois gig poster legend Jay Ryan of The Bird Machine. The poster run had a limited run of only 100 pressings, which combined with the specialness of the gig makes this an extremely hard-to-get item.

 
In August of 1991, a month before Nevermind was released, and when hair metal was still pretty much the only thing on the radio that bore any resemblance to rock, a tiny indie label called No.6 Records released a compilation of guitar instrumentals called Guitarrorists. It featured names that would be familiar only to resolute undergroundists at the time, but many of them would soon find mainstream attention—these guitarists were members of bands like Afghan Whigs, The Butthole Surfers, The Flaming Lips, Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, and other, less immortal bands that would nonetheless experience some success within a few years of the comp’s release. And it should go without saying that a lot of it is fantastic.
 

 
Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne’s “I Want to Kill My Brother: The Cymbal Head” is an insane, noisy, and dynamic journey through Coyne’s very strange mind:
 

Wayne Coyne - “I Want to Kill My Brother: The Cymbal Head”

Big Black/Rapeman/Shellac guitarist and Nirvana recording engineer Steve Albini’s contribution “Nutty About Lemurs” sounds unsurprisingly abrasive and, well, very very Albinilike.
 

Steve Albini - “Nutty About Lemurs”

A big curveball on the album is “A Little Ethnic Song,” by Dinosaur Jr’s J. Mascis, which sounds nothing like the first thing you thought when you read his name. And it’s really wonderful.
 

J. Mascis - “A Little Ethnic Song”

Tom Hazelmeyer never became a household name playing guitar for Halo Of Flies, but as big boss man at Amphetamine Reptile Records, he shaped the sound of the ‘90s bludgeon-rock underground as much as anyone. He’s lately turned up on the rock radar again, guesting on guitar with the Brisbane band No Anchor. His Guitarrorists contribution is the skin-flaying “Guitar Wank-Off #13.”
 

Tom Hazelmeyer - “Guitar Wank-Off #13”

Interesting for how far this selection sticks out from the crowd, and for how lovely it is amid the sea of distortion that is much of the comp, here’s “I Really Can’t Say,” by Kathy Korniloff from Two Nice Girls, a folk-rock band from Austin, notably loud-and-proud out lesbians at a time when that kind of openness was still highly unusual, and far riskier than it is today. They broke up in 1992, but scored some college radio love with a gem of an anthem called “I Spent My Last $10 on Birth Control and Beer.” 
 

Kathy Korniloff - “I Really Can’t Say”

Lastly, though there are contributions on the CD from all three guitar-wielding Sonic Youths, only one of them seems to have found its way online. Here’s an appropriately stark fan video for Lee Ranaldo’s pensive acoustic solo “Here”:
 

Lee Ranaldo - “Here”

 
At first I thought I was going to be bored by this Steve Albini interview by a guy named Tucker Woodley on his Let’s Chat show. As soon as Woodley opened his mouth I almost turned it off, but decided to stay with it.

I’m glad I did. It’s an awkward interview, the type you see on Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! (like when Richard Dunn met Dave Navarro) or Between Two Ferns, but with… Steve Albini!

It’s highly uncomfortable and very funny. Just watch. I’m assuming that Albini was in on this, but maybe not, it’s pretty hard to tell. NSFW-ish.
 

 
With thanks to Nate DuFort!

 
As a culture, we love our milestones. They provide opportunities for valuable introspection and reassessment. Surely the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s third and final studio album, 1993’s In Utero, is a rich opportunity for that, since it was, perhaps, the single most anticipated album of an important music decade, and one that saw its pre-release publicity significantly and entertainingly overtaken by the band’s decision to record it with the gifted and thoughtful but notoriously polarizing underground sonic wizard recording engineer Steve Albini.

Forgive me while I detour to rehash some obvious consensus rock history, but discussing In Utero without the context of its predecessor’s significance is pointless. I wonder if it’s hard for anyone younger than say around their mid-30s to really grasp how damned HUGE the impact crater of 1991’s Nevermind really was. For those of us who’d spent the ‘80s listening—just like the young men who would become Nirvana had—to stuff like Hüsker Dü, Black Flag, and later, The Pixies, that LP was a Revenge of the Nerds scenario on a national scale, a big fat “I TOLD YOU SO” to the blinkered American culture industry that had spent a decade consigning its most transcendentally great rock artists to cult status, at best. Imagine if The Fugs’ second record made them as popular and important as the Beatles overnight. The sweetness was short-lived once it was realized that the explosion meant that the shows we wanted to see would now be massive, expensive affairs, full to the bursting point with the previously avoidable dicks who’d made an avocation of kicking our punker asses back in high school. And of course Pearl Jam and their ilk rushed in to fill the void of musical douche-chills left in the charts in no-time flat.

Disregarding this alter kaker’s tribalist crabbing, Nevermind wasn’t just a changing of the guard, nor was it a mere paradigm shift. It was a full-bore fucking zeitgeist reset button, making entire genres of pop music obsolete for the rest of the decade within three months of its release. Jane’s Addiction and Dinosaur Jr. had already been pointing the way to the future, but Nirvana brought us there whether we liked it or not, when nobody was looking, least of all Nirvana themselves.
 

 
Problem is, massive success is the first step down the road towards becoming a has-been, and this was the perception problem Nirvana faced with In Utero before they’d even recorded a note of it. Quick, name Deee-Lite’s next single after “Groove Is In The Heart,” or Peter Frampton’s follow-up to Frampton Comes Alive.

So mazel tov, you set off the atom bomb. What else you got?

It helped that, being steeped in punk’s burn-the-establishment disposition, Nirvana weren’t really interested in the pressures being brought to bear to somehow reinvent the wheel, twice, and saw the followup to Nevermind as their opportunity to wear their influences on their sleeves and drop a titanic and genuinely underground album - one that was guaranteed to sell no matter what it sounded like, and bring still more of their noisier forebears’ ideas into the wider marketplace. Hence the selection of Steve Albini to produce.

Having helmed landmark LPs by the Pixies and The Jesus Lizard, Albini had carved out a distinctive and uncompromisingly harsh sound (pretty much anyone listening to independent music in the ‘90s could tell within seconds if Albini produced something, just from the drum sound alone), and a reputation for difficulty that had spread beyond the underground. He was opinionated, vocal, and not one to suffer the machinations of major labels, and The David Geffen Company, Nirvana’s corporate keepers, knew it. Upon being asked to take the job, Albini sent a hand-typed four page letter to Nirvana, reproduced in the anniversary reissue (about which more later), outlining his recording philosophy.

I think the very best thing you could do at this point is exactly what you are talking about doing: bang a record out in a couple of days, with high quality but minimal “production” and no interference from the front office bulletheads. If that is indeed what you want to do, I would love to be involved.

If, instead, you might find yourselves in the position of being temporarily indulged by the record company, only to have them yank the chain at some point (hassling you to rework songs/sequences/production, calling-in hired guns to “sweeten” your record, turning the whole thing over to some remix jockey, whatever…) then you’re in for a bummer and I want no part of it.

I’m only interested in working on records that legitimately reflect the band’s own perception of their music and existence. If you will commit yourselves to that as a tenet of the recording methodology, then I will bust my ass for you. I’ll work circles around you. I’ll rap your head in with a ratchet…

His wishes were very nearly adhered to, but there was still a very public controversy. Ultimately, two songs, the singles “Heart Shaped Box,” and “All Apologies” were remixed by Scott Litt, a producer known for his association with R.E.M. (Also, a Litt remix of “Pennyroyal Tea” was, for some reason, swapped in to the bowdlerized version of the album sold in Marts, Wal and K.) Albini, true to form, delivered some unsparing snark about the matter to the music press, but he won out in the long run, as the album is justly considered Nirvana’s greatest work, and its his name that’s associated with it. But really, it’s not like the Litt mixes were so terrible. Here’s an A/B of Litt and Albini’s mixes, with the caveat that YouTube compresses audio tracks, so obviously this is nowhere near like listening to the masters.
 

 
Albini’s triumph is bolstered by his involvement in In Utero’s amazing 20th Anniversary reissue. (Of course, it had to be a pretty posh set or it wouldn’t have been worth the bother—a simple reissue would be competing with 20 years worth of used CDs, after all.) Though predictably compiling B-sides, live cuts and demos with a remaster of the original release and a live DVD, the reissue also contains a new Albini remix of the entire album. While it may, upon a first casual listen, suffer from the kind of but-but-but-it’s-different-than-what-I’m-UUUUSED-TOOOOO! bias that can afflict reinterpretations of classics, god damn if it ain’t essential, a genuinely valuable new perspective. (This actually isn’t even the first time Albini has bested a classic.)

I truly wish there was some way for me to share these mixes with you, but Universal is, understandably, keeping a tight grip on the release, so there’s no legitimate way to do so and you’ll have to wait until September 24 like everybody else (except lucky fucks like me, of course). The new “All Apologies,” just for one example, is fucking STUNNING, especially in headphones. The overall feel of the song is wider and roomier, the trademark Nirvana quiet verse-loud chorus dynamics are more exaggerated (and more effective) than in the Litt remix, and its glorious cacophony-exhausting-itself ending just absolutely slays. (Notably, it also comes off less like a Cobain suicide note - you know he killed himself, right? - than either the single or the subsequent Unplugged version, though of course the passage of time may be a factor in that.) The new “Heart Shaped Box” is tense, claustrophobic, raw, filthy, and vastly more emotively forceful than the radio version we’re used to. Scrubbing off the R.E.M. guy’s polish reveals an absolute powerhouse of a song. Albini tells the tale better than I can, speaking frankly and at highly edifying length about the original recording and the remix last month here on the Kreative Kontrol podcast.

If recording session details and backstory are your bag, I unconditionally recommend checking out the work of writer Gillian G. Gaar, author of this fine 1997 article and the superb book on In Utero from the 33 1/3 series. Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic talk about the sessions in this interview.
 

 
Of course, Albini has his own band, with its own impressive mastery of tension-and-release dynamics, evidently with a new album on the way. Enjoy this live in studio performance by Shellac.