Weedeater’s Dixie Collins Remembers Steve Albini: 'One Of The Best In The World'

Welcome to Open Up and Read, the newsletter from music journalist Jason Brow.

Weedeater should have been wrapping up their new album with Steve Albini by now.

Albini produced Weedeater’s last three albums and planned to work together again on a fourth.

“We were slated in December to start recording with him,” says frontman Dave “Dixie” Collins in this exclusive interview with Open Up and Read, “so I got to figure that out.”

When we talk, it’s just a few weeks into the new year. Dixie’s calling from his home in Cape Fear, North Carolina. A freak blizzard had just covered the Mid-Atlantic, the worst winter storm in a decade. My family, which lives about 90 minutes away from Dixie, sent photos of the foot of snow in their front yard.

“We’re used to hurricanes,” says Dixie, “so it’s pretty wild. We all went out to the golf course last night, like two in the morning, and slid down the hills and shit. Nobody’s got sleds, so people are on cardboard boxes. Nobody has anything, I mean, it would be stupid to have a sled—you’d never use it.”

If it’s hard to imagine Dixie, whose snarling voice can send demonic swamp monsters scurrying back into the muck, having a gleeful time in the snow, well, then—you just need to imagine harder.

Yeah, Weedeater sounds like you’re trudging waist-deep in the backwater slurry of a superfund site. They are sludge metal; this shit isn’t heavy, this this shit is thick—and it’s humid.

But there’s some subtle and not-so-subtle frivolity in Weedeater’s music. They aren’t afraid of puns and ludicrous titles, creating songs like “Turkey Warlock,” “Cain Enabler,” and “Mancoon.” If you’re not smiling deliriously while listening to them, switch to a different strain. Then listen to their records again.

Steve Albini overseeing a Weedeater recording session is, at first, an odd thought. Albini was notorious for his outspoken opinions and unwavering principles. He seemed the straightest of strait-laced men, and he worked with a stoner band?

But while talking with Dixie, it’s clear why Weedeater and Albini worked so well together. And it becomes even more of a shame that it won’t ever again.

Albini died on May 7, 2024. Heart attack; age 61. The felling of this once-indomitable force sent a disquieting ripple throughout the music world. The typical publications (Rolling Stone, Billboard) gave him his due, but his death pierced the mainstream, resulting in multiple write-ups in unexpected places like The New York Times.

Most, if not all, of these pieces pointed to two landmark albums he produced: Nirvana’s In Utero and Pixies’ Surfer Rosa. But his production discography is absurdly long. Once you get into the 2000s, you see Weedeater’s name a few times. And to me, that was odd and cool.

The lowland stoner metal miscreants first linked with Albini to make God Luck and Good Speed, after producer Billy Anderson, who’d worked with the band on their first two albums (…And Justice For Y’all and Sixteen Tons), was unavailable.

“I believe he was in Buenos Aires,” says Dixie. “And our booking agent and management were like, ‘Well, would you think about going with Steve Albini?’ I was like, ‘yeah, of course. That would be awesome.’ And he was down to do it.”

The band—Dixie on vocals and bass, Dave “Shep” Shepherd on Guitar, and at the time, Keith “Kirko” Kirkum on drums—traveled to Albini’s Chicago recording studio, Electrical Audio. “That studio’s so fucking awesome,” says Dixie. “It’s just so easy. You don’t have to, but we stayed on site. You’ve got your own room and there are intercoms in there, so they can hit you up when they need you in the studio.”

Dixie speaks of Electrical Audio with reverence. If there is a physical representation of Steve Albini’s legacy, it’s the building and the technology housed within it. “He’s got world-class equipment in there. His collection of microphones is ridiculous,” says Dixie.

The different rooms have specific names, representative of personalities (or possibly inside jokes we’re not privy to). The vocal booth is Alcatraz, and the drum room is Kentucky.

“And I swear,” says Dixie, “we would be all the way downstairs, and he’d be sitting behind the control booth or the desk, and we’d go upstairs and he’d be in the kitchen. Like, he has some Scooby-Doo tunnels in that thing or something. He’s got some shit in there that you don’t know about.”

Steve’s maneuvering may have been a mystery, but his recording process was rather forthright. Though the first part of his music career was defined by unabashed (and oft unsolicited) opinions on music—both on the stage with his band Big Black and on the page with his Matter zine—Albini kept his thoughts to himself when behind the boards.  

For a man described as “detached from ego as you could possibly get,” it makes sense he would eschew that kind of production shittheaddery. Developing a production style identifiable as the artist you’re working with? The music equivalent of a photo filter? Fuck that.

The best compliment anyone could likely pay him is that you could not hear any Albini in an album he produced. He regarded himself as an engineer more than a producer, whose quest was securing music’s unfiltered expression on 2” analog tape.

“He forces the bands into more of a production role,” says Dixie. “I think he is a producer, obviously, and a hell of a badass one, but he is technically just a really badass engineer that knows his shit.”

“For instance, I’d ask him, ‘So what do you think? How does this sound, Steve?’ and I’m waiting for him to say, ‘oh, it’s fucking badass. It sounds great. I love this part and that part.’ But he’s like, ‘I don’t hear any drum hits that are out of place, and everything sounds in tune.’ Okay, but do you like it?”

Dixie eventually got some validation out of him. “One time, I got him to say he liked something,” he says, beaming with well-earned pride. It was during those God Luck And Good Speed sessions, likely recording the title track to the album (though Dixie can’t recall exactly which song it was).

As usual, he asked Albini his thoughts. “I’m ready for him to say the same thing he always says. And he’s like, ‘sounds like pussy.’ So I was like, ‘Oh, awesome!” says Dixie with a laugh. “I guess that means he likes that. We got him to act like he might’ve barely liked something!”

It is and isn’t surprising that Weedeater and Albini meshed well together. Albini approached the process the same if the person was an A-lister (Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, Bush, The Stooges) or a no-lister (Mclusky, OM, Man or Astro-Man?). Finding camaraderie and a lack of bullshit, Albini and Weedeater worked again on two more albums: Jason…the Dragon and Goliathan.

“We just got more and more comfortable with him,” says Dixie,” and he started to figure out our MO pretty much. We would record a song, and he’d say, ‘Great, okay. Let’s keep rolling and record another song.’ And I’d say, ‘well, no. Let’s mix that one.’ And we would mix that song, and then he would go home, and we would stay up all night and write another song for the next.”

“He finally figured it out. He said, ‘You guys are showing up here with no music, and are just writing it here.’ And I was like, ‘well, yeah.’”

But Albini was okay with this. Dixie recalls him as being “really great at capturing live performances,” which gelled perfectly with Weedeater’s approach. Whereas most bands approach recording by constructing a song from the ground up—laying down drum tracks, then the rhythm section, and then the vocalists—Dixie says, “that’s just weird to me.”

“Most people do like, ‘okay, drummer, go play all the songs.’ He’s not going to play ‘em the same with the same feeling. And we’re not necessarily in time a lot. Things slow down and speed up. There’s an ebb and flow to that, and you’re not going to get the same thing when the drummer is playing straight through by himself.”

So, instead of coming to Electrical Audio with a group of completed compositions to record piece by piece, Weedeater used their time in the studio to write, practice, and record, capturing the album at the point of creation.

Those records are crisp and unembellished in presenting Weedeater. What you hear on the album is what you see on stage.

“I’ve always been of the mindset that if your band sounds better on the record, that you have a better time listening to record than seeing them live, then the band in question sucks,” says Dixie. “And Steve was great at capturing that live feeling.”

There is no filtering. There are no touch-ups. The sound Steve Albini captured on tape is what you’ll hear when you see them live. The band belting out “Claw of the Sloth” and “Potbelly” is the same that’ll smoke up with you afterwards before grabbing some discarded boxes to go sledding. Both Albini and Weedeater are no bullshit in their approach. They’re blunt (pun intended).

Dixie says that Weedeater will talk with Billy Anderson about producing their next album (“I love Billy to death,” says Dixie. “He’s awesome. So damn good at what he does, too”). When exactly that will happen is up in the air. The band’s 2025 is booked.

When we talk, the band is a few months out from kicking off the spring with Bask, before joining the first leg of the Melvins-Napalm Death co-headlining tour. Weedeater’s also tapped to play Ripplefest in September and open for one of Acid Bath’s reunion dates in June.

As for Albini, Dixie remembers him as being “just a cool motherfucker, man.”

“He showed up, put on his Dickies EA suit that he wore—it’s a zip-up—and it’s just a trip. He was a great dude. he really was. He was damn one of the best in the world at what he did. Can’t argue with that. The proof’s in the pudding.”

Thanks to Dixie of Weedeater, Will Yarbrough, and Season of Mist for making this interview possible.

Open Up and Read is the newsletter from music journalist Jason Brow. Thanks for reading. Tell your friends to subscribe at OpenUpAndRead.com. You can also toss a few dollars his way via Ko-Fi. Be kind to cats. Music is the best.