Steve Albini Is Dead. Long Live Steve Albini.

Eskimo brother. Race baiter. Engineer. And every bit the man who made me the man I am today. For better or for worse. And there are a dozen I'd rather see dead than him.

He bet me the entire session fee for Serenade in Red that I couldn’t beat him at pool. Here I am about to lose. All the while contemplating beating his ass for that self-same fee.

“Ah. So you’re doing a record with Steve AL-BY-KNEE?”

People didn’t know it then, though they seem to know it now, that SST Record’s Greg Ginn, the man behind both the label and Black Flag, can be a hard case. Forget the hippie beach bum vibe. Those Flag tunes didn’t come out of thin air and Ginn had a mean streak a mile wide. Still does if rumors are to be believed. And clearly Steve AL-BEAN-E had gotten under his skin.

No matter how many times he was corrected on the pronunciation of his name, his riposte always followed with his hacked version of Steve’s family name. So many times that midway through OXBOW’s second session with Steve on Serenade in Red, the question had to be asked, of Steve, why?

“Maybe because he believes it’s my fault that he’s such a shoddily incomplete hack of a guitarist?”

BOOM.

I don’t know that I had heard, or even read, that Steve had said this before, but he said it then and there’s no way I’d believe that he hadn’t said it before because I’d never known the man to pull a punch. Well, maybe once (I tried to get him to do so regarding his work with the band Bush but he held fast). But definitely not over Greg Ginn.

And whether he didn’t give a shit or was just acting like he didn’t give a shit, Steve’s angle of attack in 1995 was beyond refreshing. It was revelatory. Revealing, mostly, that you could say whatever you wanted and not pay for it in any way, shape or form. Not in any serious way. It was the purest form of free expression and if your feelings were hurt, well that was your problem if that’s how you responded to this version of the truth.

“Maybe because he believes it’s my fault that he’s such a shoddily incomplete hack of a guitarist?” — Steve Albini on Greg Ginn

Strange sentiments in 2024 and even stranger in 1995 when in the post-punk community he created — he was nothing if not the progenitor of “it all” and that I’m willing to fight over — being politically polite was just how things rolled.

But let’s back up a bit…buckling under the weight of a career, and a life, that was dithering in the face of a decidedly wrong-headed approach to music, art and musical art, as well as life in total, I had decided to kill myself. My suicide note would be Fuckfest, and I had decided to not have any dismissible bridges between the failings of latter day Whipping Boy and this recorded note of my personal end time.

So, no credits, no lyrics, no nothing. Just the note and the expectation of a not early but timely death. As detailed in A Walk Across Dirty Water & Straight Into Murderer’s Row, I even failed at suicide and then released King of the Jews to seal the deal. The acclaim? Enough that we had gotten shows in London and an interest substantial enough that suicide seemed suddenly silly to me.

Then: nothing. Until one day a postcard showed up. With a picture of some mid-century cowboys cowboy’ing on the front, the back was scribble filled with a note asking how we fit that much sound on what was clearly a 16-track studio recording. Signed: Steven Frank Albini.

Now some context: I had been reading Steve a long time before ever listening to him. He wrote for Forced Exposure and the big brothering that that mag delivered, routinely, filled me with both delight and a certain amount of dreaded envy. To them mid-80’s hardcore music, music that had ceased meaning much to me at the time, was some weird macho affectation that had very little to do with real music and a lot to do with Freudian issues.

…[A]fter the man’s death…the “yeah but’ers” were on me asking me to explain his support of Sotos’ child rape mania magazine Pure, [and] his Run Nigger Run project with their piquantly titled song “Pray I Don’t Kill You Faggot.”

They shit on the sacred cows — like Biafra who they dismissed as the mime he once was, the aforementioned Greg Ginn and anyone else that smelled of even the slighest bit of artifice — and though I didn’t always dig on the music that they did, I understood that something significant was happening. And in the midst of that significance was Albini.

Of course after the man’s death, and this is all about his death now, inevitably, the “yeah but’ers” were on me asking me to explain his support of Sotos’ child rape mania magazine Pure, his Run Nigger Run project with their piquantly titled song “Pray I Don’t Kill You Faggot.” His desire to name the second Big Black record Hey Nigger. Also, his naming one of his bands Rapeman.

Asking me like this was information I didn’t know and hadn’t heard. I’d heard it, read some of it in Forced Exposure, and it stood as the thing that made him such a compelling read to me: it was a challenge. I used to work out in a gym with lots of mafia regulars in it. Once they had gotten friendly with you, they’d fuck with you, standing in front of you while you struggled with dumbbell inclines and cracking jokes.

Saying “fuck you” to them was out of the question so you were left with the simple choice: quit. Or concentrate. Albini’s writing had the same effect and I had figured if I could manage to live even one minute of my life as honestly, effectively and, yeah, unpleasantly as he had, I might have achieved…something.

Because the challenge was to your intelligence. Something the working class imposters that were thief thick in punk rock never ever managed to do. And so in it I saw a way out and a way forward.

Though he later repudiated what he described as his “edgelord” years, a welcome realignment given the non-ironic age within which all of the self-same things are said with no nuance, him writing OXBOW still seemed like a punchline waiting to be sprung.

So I wrote him back. We then spoke on the phone. Cordial. And at the conversation’s end I had worked up the nerve to ask, “so did you want to record us?”

He wouldn’t be put off though. So reaching under my pillow I handed him my Colt .45.

His answer was in the affirmative and even skated on by making fun of me for asking it. He flew out, I picked him up from the airport and drove him to my house in what was then the Murder Capitol of America, East Palo Alto. Before he turned in he wanted to take a walk around the neighborhood. His jeans were punk rock shredded and his expensive leather jacket had me demurring on his behalf.

He wouldn’t be put off though. So reaching under my pillow I handed him my Colt .45.

“What’s this for?” he asked, neither smiling nor laughing.

“Your walk.” I replied, neither smiling nor laughing.

He stayed in and the next day when we got to Coast Studios the recording for Let Me Be A Woman had begun in earnest. He was respectful when Kathy Acker came in and started reading “Pussy the King of the Pirates” over one of our songs. He was even respectful when he shit all over my lifelong obsession with martial arts, something I swore he’d have liked. But he surpassed himself in many regards one day when we sat at the Neve console. Alone.

“I have had sex with 100 women.”

This, no context offered, none asked for. I sort of shrugged. It was only later when I realized the genius of it since when I mentioned this to the rest of OXBOW they asked me if I was crazy. I have since made it a life long habit: if the two of us are alone I just might tell you the craziest thing, crazy but true, that you’ve ever heard. If later questioned about it again? I will cock my head to the side and say, as Steve did later, “what?”

The record had no home though but that wasn’t the point of it even in the face of Steve saying “records that are orphans very often NEVER find a home.” This wasn’t true with that record, in the end, or the next one he did for us, Serenade in Red. And here’s something else that flew in the face of the supposed Albini orthodoxy: he spent more than a week recording both of these records.

We, however, never recorded any albums with him again but we maintained an infrequent association, the apotheosis of which came in 2022 when he wrote the cover blurb for my memoir.

“Eugene Robinson is a great writer and I admire him. His imposing size and association with fight culture imply an overpowering personality, but uniquely among his peers, he is unafraid to risk vulnerability. He writes intelligently about fights and fighting of course, but for me he is most enlightening when he writes about life between blows: Frank accounts of aspirations in art or music, personal and societal relationships, his moments of fear or compromise, what he got wrong about a person or situation, what he misunderstood, what he endured. This introspection is rendered as clearly as a crisp left hook and that makes all the difference between limbic alpha-male yowling and the expression of a complete mind, artful, thoughtful, unafraid of itself and aware of its role in its own problems. Most writing, non-fiction included, buffers the writer from consequence with some kind of bullshit. The writer's voice keeps you at a distance with writerly devices, wordplay, echoes of received style or import. I have the luxury of knowing Eugene apart from his writing, and I am certain he is not bullshitting you.”

If I claimed I wasn’t in tears when I read this for the first time, I’d be lying. And, yeah, fuck that. I sobbed like a grandmother.

Just like I did in the bathroom at the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu academy when I first got the news that he had died. Days later, not able to do much but read what everyone else had to say, I was stuck, and sad, and still believing this was some Dwarves-esque prank. Days later, I realized what the problem was: I didn’t think I had managed to tell him how important he was to/for me.

Then I found a note I had written to him asking for him to write the back cover blurb for my memoir, that somewhat ended with… “though it might seem strange hearing it, or it coming from me, but I figure I’d be better off and smarter to tell you this before either of us die but you’ve been massively influential to me as a writer and if for no other reason, not even mentioning the genius you worked on our records, I love you. And if ever asked about this again, I will, of course, deny it.”

I wiped my face clean. And wrote this. Fucking tough month for Steves all around. But if you read this far, not such a bad month for YOU. So count your fucking blessings and tell people that you love that you love them.

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