Big Black
Big Black was an American punk rock band from Evanston, Illinois, active from 1981 to 1987. Founded first as a solo project by singer and guitarist Steve Albini, the band became a trio with an initial lineup that included guitarist Santiago Durango and bassist Jeff Pezzati, both of Naked Raygun. In 1985, Pezzati was replaced by Dave Riley, who played on Big Black's two full-length studio albums, Atomizer and Songs About Fucking.
Big Black's aggressive and abrasive music was characterized by distinctively clanky guitars and the use of a drum machine rather than a drum kit, elements that foreshadowed industrial rock. The band's lyrics flouted commonly held taboos and dealt frankly—and often explicitly—with politically and culturally loaded topics including murder, rape, child sexual abuse, arson, racism, and misogyny. Though the band's lyrics contained controversial material, the lyrics were meant to serve as a commentary or a display of distaste for the subject matter. They were staunchly critical of the commercial nature of rock, shunning the mainstream music industry and insisting on complete control over all aspects of their career. At the height of their success, they booked their own tours, paid for their own recordings, refused to sign contracts, and eschewed many of the traditional corporate trappings of rock bands. In doing so, they had a significant impact on the aesthetic and political development of independent and underground rock music.
In addition to two studio albums, Big Black released two live albums, two compilation albums, four EPs, and five singles, all through independent record labels. Most of the band's catalog was kept in print through Touch and Go Records for years following their breakup.
History
1981–1982: Formation and ''Lungs''
Big Black was founded by Steve Albini in 1981 during his second year of college at Northwestern University. Albini had become a fan of punk rock during his high school years in Missoula, Montana, and taught himself to play bass guitar in the fall of 1979, his senior year, while recuperating from a badly broken leg resulting from being struck by a car while riding his motorcycle. Moving to Evanston, Illinois the following year to pursue a journalism degree and fine art minor at Northwestern, Albini immersed himself in the fledgling Chicago punk scene and became a devoted fan of the band Naked Raygun. He also DJ'd for the campus radio station, from which he was repeatedly fired for playing loud and abrasive music during the morning time slot as well as not completing the required logs. He also wrote a controversial column titled "Tired of Ugly Fat?" for the Chicago zine Matter, publishing confrontational rants about the local music scene which polarized readers into either respecting or hating him.Albini began playing in college bands, including a short-lived "arty new wave" act called Stations that featured a drum machine. Seeing the advantage in a machine that could play incredibly fast without tiring, always kept a steady beat, and would follow commands exactly, he purchased a Roland TR-606 drum machine and began writing what would become the first Big Black songs. However, he was unable to find other musicians who could play the songs to his satisfaction, later stating in Forced Exposure that "I couldn't find anybody who didn't blow out of a pig's asshole." Instead, in the spring of 1981, he bought a guitar, borrowed a four-track multitrack recorder from a friend in exchange for a case of beer, and spent his spring break week recording the Lungs EP in his living room, handling the guitar, bass, and vocals by himself and programming the Roland TR-606 to provide the drum sound. Albini would come to dislike the album, regarding it as too "slavishly imitative" of personal favorites like the Cure, Killing Joke, and Cabaret Voltaire. The EP is described by Our Band Could Be Your Life author Michael Azerrad as "cold, dark, and resolutely unlistenable", with the lyrics describing child abusers and other controversial topics.
Albini named his new musical project Big Black, calling the moniker "just sort of a reduction of the concept of a large, scary, ominous figure. All the historical images of fear and all the things that kids are afraid of are all big and black, basically." He used the Lungs tape to try to enlist other musicians to the project, briefly recruiting Minor Threat guitarist Lyle Preslar who was attending Northwestern, but the two proved incompatible as musicians. Albini passed Lungs on to John Babbin of the small local label Ruthless Records, who released 1,500 copies of the EP in December 1982 with random objects such as dollar bills, used condoms, photographs of Bruce Lee, and bloody pieces of paper thrown into the inserts.
1983: Full lineup and ''Bulldozer''
In early 1983 Albini met Naked Raygun singer Jeff Pezzati through mutual friends and convinced him to play bass guitar with Big Black. Pezzati recalled that Albini "knew a heck of a lot about, right from the start, how to release a record and get the word out that you have a record", and that "He jumped at the chance to have a band play his stuff." The two practiced in Pezzati's basement, and one day Naked Raygun guitarist Santiago Durango came downstairs and asked to play along. The trio clicked as a unit, Durango's ability to rework arrangements and tweak sounds helping to refine Albini's song ideas. According to Albini, "He ended up being absolutely crucial to Big Black."Albini "sorta conned" small local label Fever Records into financing the next Big Black EP, bringing in drummer Pat Byrne of Urge Overkill to play on the sessions as accompaniment to the drum machine, which they dubbed "Roland" for album credits. Albini achieved a signature "clanky" sound with his guitar by using metal guitar picks notched with sheet metal clips, creating the effect of two guitar picks at once. The Bulldozer EP was recorded with engineer Iain Burgess and released in December 1983, with the first two hundred copies packaged in a galvanized sheet metal sleeve in homage to Public Image Ltd.'s Metal Box. Many of the EP's lyrics depicted scenarios drawn from Albini's rural upbringing, such as "Cables", which described the slaughtering of cows at a Montana abattoir, and "Pigeon Kill", about a rural Indiana town that dealt with an overpopulation of pigeons by feeding them poisoned corn.
1984: Touring and label signing
Even with Bulldozer released, Big Black drew very small crowds in their native Chicago. They began venturing outside of Illinois to play shows in Madison, Minneapolis, Detroit, and Muncie, transporting themselves and their equipment in a cramped car and sleeping on people's floors. Albini handled much of the band's logistics himself, setting up rehearsals, booking studio time, and arranging tours. With their reputation growing through small tours, he was able to set up a run of East Coast dates including performances in Washington, D.C., and Boston and at New York City's Danceteria, followed by a European tour on which they won acclaim in the United Kingdom's music press. Big Black simultaneously found themselves gaining popularity in their hometown, but felt embittered that the same locals who had snubbed them just months before were suddenly interested now that they had built a reputation outside the city, and the band actually refused to play in Chicago for some time.Part of Big Black's local unpopularity stemmed from Albini and the vitriol he regularly directed at Chicago's rock scene: by 1985, the Metro Chicago was the only club in the city that was booking punk rock shows and was also large enough to accommodate Big Black, but after performing there Albini badmouthed the club in an interview and found himself banned from it permanently. Compounding the problem were the band's aggressive, noise-driven sound and Albini's confrontational lyrics, which tested the tolerance of his white liberal audience by mercilessly satirizing racism, sexism, chauvinism, and stereotypes of homosexuality, sometimes using pejoratives like "darkie" and "fag" to drive home the point; this led some listeners to consider him a bigot.
Looking for better distribution of their records, Big Black negotiated a deal with Homestead Records. Gerard Cosloy, who had befriended Albini through writing for Matter and gone on to work at Homestead, negotiated an unorthodox deal for the band: Big Black merely licensed their recordings to Homestead for specific lengths of time, rather than the label retaining the rights to the recordings as was typical. Further, the band took no advance payments, paid for their own recordings, and signed no contracts. Durango later remarked that "We came from a punk perspective—we did not want to get sucked into a corporate culture where basically you're signing a contract because you don't trust the other person to live up to their word. We had ideals, and that was one of our ideals." The band members figured that if a record company were going to cheat them, they would be able to do so with or without a contract because the band could not afford to defend themselves.
Albini believed that Big Black had nothing to gain by adopting the usual corporate trappings of rock bands: "If you don't use contracts, you don't have any contracts to worry about. If you don't have a tour rider, you don't have a tour rider to argue about. If you don't have a booking agent, you don't have a booking agent to argue with." Handling the tour booking, equipment hauling, setup, and breakdown of shows themselves also meant that the band did not have to hire a booking agent or road crew with whom they would have to share profits. The lack of a drummer also meant one less member to split profits with, and since there was no drum kit the band did not have to rent a tour van to fit all of their equipment. Thus Big Black was able to profit from most of their tours. They embarked on a 1984 national tour of the United States in preparation for their forthcoming Homestead EP, utilizing the close-knit network of independent rock bands to learn of cities and venues to play.