“He wanted to bringeverybody up together”
STEVE ALBINI |1962–2024
Smart, funny, generous and fiercely uncompromising – the underground rock revolutionary is remembered by those who were drawn to his righteous cause
DAVID GRUBBS
PAULNATKIN/GETTYIMAGES;JOHNFOSTER;PAULBERGEN/REDFERNS
Squirrel Bait, Bastro, Gastr Del Sol
I first met Steve in 1984 when I was 16, visiting a friend at Northwestern [University] in Chicago. I was familiar with Big Black, so I went to see them play with Urge Overkill. It was revelatory, and I wrote about them in my high school fanzine. Steve sent me some Big Black live cassettes and made me a couple of mixtapes. That was the first time I heard Ivor Cutler and Scratch Acid and The Cravats. It was a hilarious mix of things – there was some Leonard Nimoy…
In Squirrel Bait, we shared bills with Big Black. Steve was five years older and felt like a crucial older sibling. He was so fucking smart and brilliantly funny. He would do things I’d never do in a million years. One Fourth Of July, he set off thousands of firecrackers in the kitchen of our house. He did a hell of a lot of damage, but we loved him so much we didn’t really mind.
When he started recording, he was immediately incredibly generous. If he liked your music, he’d ensure the studio was available. Money was never an issue. I worked with him on many projects from punk bands like Bastro to recordings with Red Krayola, The Palace Brothers and Tony Conrad. His engineering skills broadened. He started with more aggressive bands but was soon doing exquisite recordings of people like Low and Will Oldham, gorgeous-sounding records. He grew with the artists around him and they grew with him in this organic process as he became a much more versatile recording engineer.