The day after my friend, fellow religion scholar Emily Pothast‘s interview with Shellac dropped, their guitarist, Steve Albini dropped dead while working in his studio. The striking thing for me is how he found new ways to be meaningful to me across every different context of my adult life though I never met him. His email about not knowing how to say Emily’s last name gives a pretty good picture of his vibe:
I found his writing on a newsstand in 1990, the first day of my first year living away from home. It was in a fanzine called Forced Exposure and it was by far the most stark, arresting thing in a stark, arresting magazie the likes of which I had never seen. I seized on it as a new way to be: intense and uncompromising about art and ideas (in practice this meant imitating the wild abrasiveness of the music by being wildly abrasive about it).
His early music with Big Black was more dramatic than I had imagined possible, adapting the challenging British postpunk of Gang of Four, the Pop Group, and Rema Rema into a Midwestern futurist noir twisting drum machines and epics of conventional human nastiness with an outrageous treble edge.
Having even heard of this stuff was at this point itself like a password into the underworld. The more you thought about it the more you became part of underground music, a community circulating around self-published media. It felt like knowing who he was and having thoughts about him, or really having thoughts about his thoughts, made you a different person.
But this wasn’t all good. An ugly part of this hidden public involved being hip to a “mean boys” kind of fanzine bullying, homophobic attacks on a few scene underdogs that Albini and his friends found annoying. I’m still a friend and admirer of at least one of the targets, who has no reason to feel forgiving about it.
It took me years to become a more real person and realize it was worse than not OK. I mean “real” in the old colloquial sense of honest with people around me. What do my words mean to them? How do things look from where they stand? I had to ask myself, what was this scene about for everyone in it? Was our belonging built around shit like this, taking ironic jabs at vulnerable people, as much as any independent communal spirit?
I was not alone here; Steve became more real too over time. He had come to realize that dramatizing cruelty and passing on hateful shit ironically was a disgusting thing to do. He made a point of denouncing it as starkly and clearly as anything he ever said, without lying about his past stupidity in any attempt at cheap self-exoneration.
At the height of his underground cachet he turned his stark writing style to publishing “The Problem With Music” in the Baffler (which I then wrote for) what stands as the most clear-eyed analysis of rock music’s labor exploitation, the way bands are tricked into giving up control of their work. As a friend of mine from that era, the political commentator Ana Marie Cox writes,
“The Problem with Music” had as much impact on my life and politics as No Logo or The Monkey Wrench Gang or Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. I wouldn’t be who I am without Steve Albini. What I’m saying is that Steve Albini radicalized me. Also, yes, music. It’s not long or explicitly political and that’s just the point. At 20, I had read Marx but I hadn’t yet started thinking about the labor that created the music I loved and the culture I swam in. And that it mattered all the time.
I knew Steve only secondhand but that opened up new things for me by itself. I knew him as a friend of friends like David Grubbs, then a U of Chicago English PhD student, and part of a semi-legendary group of musicians in Louisville who had produced the churning hardcore group Squirrel Bait, which David played guitar for, and the weird, cinematic Slint. Grubbs was part of a neighborhood roommate/avant-garde group I thought of as ON-SHORE, a mnemonic for the apartment’s phone number. The shifting group of residents included people like Tortoise co-founder and fellow DJ Ken “Bundy” Brown.
Through Grubbs I entered a world of music unimaginably far from Squirrel Bait’s fine froth or Big Black’s metal edge via WHPK’s Radio Dada. This was writer and collector John Corbett’s show that felt like a parlor and seemed to create new genres by juxtaposition every week.
The concert flyer, featuring Albini’s distinctive architect-like script, from which Squirrel Bait took their band logo.
Albini too became best known for opening up space, but as a realist documentarian of sound at his Electrical Audio recording studio. He described his ideal recording as “sounding like a band in a room.” I was struck by how he described his engineering work as pluralist, helping enable anyone who went into his studio to make the record that they really wanted to make.
He engineered the sound on benchmarks in my life like Sunn’s “Life Metal,” my soundtrack for the universe vastly bigger than us, driving out through endless California forests and hills on my father’s death, and High on Fire’s glorious, sweeping “Blessed Black Wings“ recorded soon before my music teacher Jeff Matz joined (my kindergartner is learning to ape the title track on drums, which he retitled “Night of the Sabretooth, Death of the Gods”).
To conclude and in his spirit, I will point the finger at the two people who obviously killed him.
First, my WHPK friend Matt Gambino now (ironically!) a physician who, as an undergrad, upon the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995 went to a park to hand out Steve’s personal phone number to grieving deadheads with the label JERRY GRIEF HOTLINE. He said Steve, after changing his phone number, grudgingly admitted it was a pretty good one. I will be accusing Matt retroactively to the AMA.
UPDATE: my other WHPK friend James Black had already posted an oral history of pranking Steve Albini. that reminds me that this shit was actually even funnier, more friends at WHPK (first offenders in the new history of college radio “Live from the Underground“!) were complicit, and it was, hilariously, an even bigger pain in the ass to Steve than I remembered.
Second, my colleague Emily Pothast, an incredibly perceptive and incisive writer, whose questions to Steve in the new Shellac interview may have gone a little too hard. Don’t believe me? READ TO FIND OUT. With my love and gratitude,
God bless all you silly assholes
Folder of cassette Albini made for David Grubbs; “Knapsack Rebel” was his malapropism for Nadsat Rebel, possibly the first band other than his own that he recorded. The demo sounds like a bunch of 14 year olds covering “Ace of Spades” inside a washing machine.
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PS: Since his band Shellac’s first album in ten years is due for release on May 17, the record Emily interviewed them about, I’m told that “Nothing would send (his wife) Heather, his band mates, friends and family a clearer message of support than pre-ordering, which you can do now over at Bandcamp.” I’m especially eager to hear the concluding track, “I Don’t Fear Hell.”
sethlsanders 