Steve Albini and Ian MacKaye Interview Each Other About Their Long Shared History

Steve Albini and Ian MacKaye have interviewed each other on the newest episode of Kreative Kontrol, a podcast run by music journalist (and Pitchfork contributor) Vish Khanna. You can listen to the first part of the two-part interview below.

Albini and MacKaye covered a lot of ground, starting with their roots in the 1980s independent music scene. MacKaye remembered Albini from writing a particularly mean review of Rites of Spring (Albini: “they were awful”), then being surprised upon meeting him and finding out he was a very nice guy. Albini rated Minor Threat as “the very best of the pissed off, super hardcore bands,” and one of only a few hardcore bands he ever rated as any good. (Bad Brains and Void being two of the others.)

They talked about their revelatory experiences watching the Butthole Surfers (MacKaye: “They freaked the fuck out of me”; Albini: “It was like watching a contortionist”), as well as their apathy toward the culture that formed around the Wax Trax label. “A lot of people in Chicago didn’t take to club culture, and I’m one of those people,” Albini said. “I thought all of it was stupid… I hated all of it.”

Later, MacKaye reminisced about his first band, the Teen Idles, getting mocked by the engineer during their first recording session. They also talked about Fugazi recording with Albini, during sessions which later became 1993′s In On the Kill Taker (which, ultimately, Albini didn’t produce). MacKaye referred to some of those efforts with Albini as “the greatest session we ever had.” They also talked about how the demos from those sessions got leaked and began circulating, despite their best efforts.

Listen to the whole thing here:

Comments are closed.