Steve Albini Slams Amanda Palmer for Asking Fans to Play in Her Band for Free

Photo credit: Palmer by Shervin Lainez and Albini by Ryan Muir

For those of you not following the recent path of former Dresden Dolls frontwoman Amanda Palmer, a little primer: The latest iteration of her solo career has been funded almost entirely by her fans, who banded together to raise a whopping $1.2 million on Kickstarter so that she could record her new album, Theatre Is Evil.

She's continued asking her fans for favors, crowd-sourcing a string quartet and a horn section for her current tour. She's asking professional string and horn players in each city to volunteer in each city, and will compensate them in beer and hugs. (In an interview with The New York Times, Palmer said that she couldn't afford to pay the musicians, since it would cost her $35,000.)

Palmer has experienced a backlash after these requests, including some particularly biting comments from underground music jack-of-all-trades Steve Albini. He writes on the message board for his studio Electrical Audio:

I have no fundamental problem with either asking your fans to pay you to make your record or go on tour or play for free in your band or gather at a mud pit downstate and sell meth and blowjobs to each other. I wouldn't stoop to doing any of them myself, but horses for courses. The reason I don't appeal to other people in this manner is that all those things can easily pay for themselves, and I value self-sufficiency and independence, even (or especially) from an audience.

If your position is that you aren't able to figure out how to do that, that you are forced by your ignorance into pleading for donations and charity work, you are then publicly admitting you are an idiot, and demonstrably not as good at your profession as Jandek, Moondog, GG Allin, every band ever to go on tour without a slush fund or the kids who play on buckets downtown.

Pretty much everybody on earth has a threshold for how much to indulge an idiot who doesn't know how to conduct herself, and I think Ms Palmer has found her audience's threshold.

Watch the (NSFW) video for the Flaming Lips' "The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face", featuring Palmer: