Steve Albini 1962-2024

I was 18, a freshman in college, a doofus, but also a sponge. Like so many others I’d be dropped into a vast and rich lagoon, and I was soaking up anything I could, and a whole lot of it had to do with music.

Christmas came around, and here I have to tell the story just a little out of order. I opened a gift. It was a compact disc. And my dad explained that he researched to determine what to get me. He had read music magazines like CMJ to try and figure out what current thing going was the thing I should most have.

That was how I got my copy of Shellac’s At Action Park. That’s where this story begins.

Steve Albini died last night, from a heart attack at home. He was only 61. There are so many tributes out there today. You can read all kinds of articles about how influential he was, what famous albums he recorded, what his approach in the studio was, and really, you should. There’s truly a lot to be said.

Some of you were in shock this morning when the news broke. Some of you may be curious about how all of these people are in shock over the death of a man best known as a recording engineer.

To all of you, I want to say, Steve Albini was not just a musician and a recording engineer. He had a completely unique role in music. He was, I would argue, the conscience of the music industry. And as such, he was truly much more than that.

My college diploma says I majored in history and political science, and this is true enough. But truth be told, what I really majored in was college radio. And a lot of the music I was exposed to was recorded by or somehow influenced by Steve Albini. And his band Shellac felt like some kind of secret entry to… I’m not really sure what exactly. A graduate class in college radio, perhaps.

At Action Park did but didn’t sound like anything else I’d ever heard. It was harsh but precise, gruff but compact. I didn’t know terms like “post-hardcore” then. I didn’t really know much at all. But I couldn’t soak it all up fast enough.

It was while I was Music Director at WESN that someone recommended reading a piece Albini had written. This was “The Problem With Music”, originally published in The Baffler in 1993. If you’ve never read it, here it is.

No writing before or since has more directly modified my political worldview. I don’t mean narrowly about the politics of music. I mean politics. I mean how economics actually work in practice. I mean how corporations do and don’t function.

As someone majoring in history and political science I was of course attuned to the idea that there are people with power and people not so much with power. Political science is largely the study of how power dynamics work, and history is largely the study of how power dynamics have played out.

“The Problem With Music” is the single most important study of power dynamics I’ve ever encountered. If you read it for the first time today, you may not understand what I’m getting at. What I’m getting at is that this is the piece where things clicked. This is where everything that sponge had absorbed started to synthesize into something new. Everything my dad ever said about his job had a context it never had before. Basic personal economics had a context that it never had before. How all of this impacted music, art broadly, everything having to do with what it means for people to try and forge their own path creatively and what the encounter in the process of doing so… I understood it as being beyond just struggling musicians driving from gig to gig and not getting paid well. I understood it as: This is why we still need unions. This is why we need guaranteed health care. This is why our politics are so wretched. This explains so many of the things that I kind of understood but had not fully tied together. All from an essay explaining what could go wrong from signing to a major label.

There was a record store in downtown Normal called Appletree Records and I think it was the fall of 1995 they started selling off their inventory. I was in there one day and they had all kinds of weird stuff in their used racks for cheap. I don’t remember what all else I walked away with that day, but I definitely walked away with a copy of Silkworm’s In the West.

Within a couple of years, among all of the other music I had access to, among all of the huge music collection I was personally gathering, Silkworm had emerged as my favorite band, and almost three decades later, they still are. Silkworm is my idea of what a rock band should sound like. Loud but not too heavy, sharp and sometimes slicing guitars, powerful drums. In CMJ once I saw a sound referred to as “fractured guitar rock” and the bands cited were Pavement, Archers of Loaf, and Silkworm, and yeah, that’s my realm.

I didn’t know it at the time I found In the West but of all recording artists out there in the world, the band Steve Albini had the closest relationship with was Silkworm. Over the decade following that trip to Appletree, I acquired every Silkworm artifact I could. I saw the band nine times.

In 2005, a suicidal woman accelerated approaching an intersection, and slammed her car into another, instantly killing the three occupants: Doug Meis, John Glick, and Michael Dahlquist. Michael was Silkworm’s drummer. It was an absurd and terrible tragedy.

A wake was announced, to be held at Electrical Audio - Steve Albini’s studio, and, if you go up a floor, also his home.

I drove up from Normal for the wake. I felt like I was supposed to be there. And, yes, I was supposed to be there. I found my friend Mark as soon as I got there, and we walked into the studio, where Michael’s intimidating drum kit was set up. And at this point, I’d just ask that you read Steve’s tribute to Michael, because it too managed to become something of a formative document to me. I’d seen Silkworm enough times that I’d starting chatting with them before or after shows. And this image I’d formed, that many of us had formed, of what this tall, goofy, handsome drummer was like… well, according to Steve, he was all of those things and much more; and in the process, Steve too was much more.

So of course when an appropriate opportunity came up a few years later I went up and talked to Steve, because the man had literally invited me, as a stranger, into his house, to share in the memories of one his closest friends.

Tim Midyett and Andy Cohen immediately ended Silkworm when Michael died. Months later, they started a new band, Bottomless Pit.

October 18, 2009, I went to see Bottomless Pit in a basement somewhere along North Avenue, at a place called Union Rock Yards. Between sets I was walking around and Steve Albini was there, because of course he was there, it was a Bottomless Pit show. And I went up and talked to him and told him how important what he wrote had been to my worldview, and how it had substantially put me on the activist track that I was on. (This was during my peak engagement in the Green Party. The corporate critique that was bedrock to Green thinking followed very logically from “The Problem With Music”.)

I was this unknown dude in his early 30s telling this famous recording engineer how he’d impacted his life, and Steve Albini responded with humility. He seemed truly moved by the idea that what he’d written had been inspirational. I think he thanked me. Not that I was seeking it, but I felt what I can only call validation. I will never forget that.

I still own about 700 CDs. A little irony here: Albini hated CDs. This is what it says on the inside of my copy of In Action Park:

And yet I’d guess 25-30 of the CDs on my shelf were recorded by Steve Albini and/or at Electrical Audio. It might be more. Plus a lot of vinyl.

Dirty Three’s Ocean Songs.

Urge Overkill’s Supersonic Storybook.

Low’s Things We Lost in the Fire.

All of the Silkworm, Bottomless Pit, Mint Mile stuff.

Songs: Ohia’s The Magnolia Electric Co.

And a lot more. You take all this away and… I’m simply not the same person.

There are so many songs Steve Albini was involved in which I could share here. I’m choosing three.

Steve’s rise to prominence came with his band Big Black. They were noisy, often caustic. One thing you should know about Steve: he loved Cheap Trick, actually recorded them multiple times. And, in 1987, Big Black released a 7”, the A-side of which was originally found on Cheap Trick’s eponymous first album. This may seem like a weird choice but it’s just such an awesome cover:

I could nominate any number of Silkworm songs, but I’ll stake to this one, from 1997’s Developer:

And choosing any one song from The Magnolia Electric Co. is difficult, but what could be a more appropriate representation of style and ethos than this:

A lot of other places used this photo. But I like it too, because, you know, he’s wearing a Low t-shirt almost identical to mine:

Requiescat, Steve. Thank you for everything.