Requiescat

Thank you, love you, to Steve Albini, a strange role model and friend

We all have these faulty little tickers in our chests.

I’ve been terrified of the way they can dramatically stop working ever since I learned the words “heart attack.”

Steve Albini’s heart stopped on Tuesday night. It feels wrong and unreal. Every death is unbelievable, then believable, and then unbelievable again. Somehow Steve’s, at sixty-one, feels even less believable than that of some younger people I’ve known. In those cases, the shock is so great that it activates your “well, we knew that the most outlandishly bad thing happens sometimes” mental defense tool. Steve’s doesn’t have that quality. It felt like he was squarely in middle-ish life, no polar surprise or expectedness about it. Just a shitty blindside.

I knew Steve mainly as the guy who facilitated the annual 24-hour improv comedy and music shows organized by Heather Whinna—the titanically strong-willed, principled, and skilled person to whom Steve was married—and who joyfully (believe it, joyfully!) cooked gourmet food for Heather and showed up for anyone who needed him in Chicago and beyond.

When I was a teenager, he was the guy who drove from Second City to Electrical Audio to get a bass drum pedal when I had forgotten mine—a drummer’s nightmare (I have actual dreams about this scenario)—and who told me, unprompted, that “eating glass is good” when I was six years old.

I spent many childhood Christmases accompanying Heather, Steve, and a motley crew of musicians and comedians to deliver gifts to extremely deprived families in Chicago. We would walk into apartments, garages, basements, nooks, and crannies where kids and parents lived in conditions I didn’t know any American lived in, let alone blocks away from my own house.

Steve was the indefatigable van driver, the supplier of homemade snacks, and the deadpan philosopher in the background of these all-day trips, providing a baseline of quiet rage about the reality that such mutual aid operations were necessary in the first place, necessary only because of the profound greed and brokenness of the way we’ve organized our world.

It’s funny that I admire Steve so much, because his way of being was largely opposed to a Tweedy family creed. Where Steve was a genius intellectual provocateur, we’re cooperative arguers. Where Steve gave zero fucks about what anyone thought about him (the source of “true freedom,” he said), I get tied in knots when someone misunderstands or straight-up hates on me (though that’s all changing). Where Steve had a world-champion poker face (two World Series of Poker bracelets), no one in my family does. Hearts are on the sleeve, faces are emoting, insecurities are bared, reassurance is sought. And we haven’t even discussed our differing opinions on vocal harmonies in rock music, for example, or any number of artistic disputes.

None of that matters. I admire him because he had integrity, and because he was incorruptibly devoted to making life fairer and more hospitable for other people. Most of that verbal venom was in the service of replacing unholy shit with something better, something that works for the un-resourced and the unaware and the unhip. That’s the core hook that we could hang every hat of our relationship on: the belief that everyone deserves more than the world we’ve made for ourselves so far. Even in our precious wonderland of a music industry, we’re screwed. Steve was saying, fuck your conventions, fuck the default, there’s another way to do this shit, at least a little something we can do, and he always put his money where his mouth was.

Maybe the biggest reason I cry for Steve is that he changed so much in himself. Death ought not to be—and, as far as I can tell, isn’t—doled out based on how perfect or imperfect you are. (By whose standard, anyway?) Certainly no one deserves to die because they wrote incendiary essays or because, as Steve put it, they contributed to the “coarsening of society” with insensitive jokes and lyrics. But it adds a heaping serving of sadness that he had learned so much, made amends, and showed others and particularly other aging public figures what it looks like to really apologize for something you did in the past. His apologies were straightforward, serious, and not self-serving.

As part of that change, Steve talked about the importance of listening to other people, particularly to those who’ve been targeted by patriarchy and white supremacy, even more so if you’re a white man who benefits from such targeting. To some, it seemed like a paradox: How can someone who’s famous around the world for not giving a fuck about other people’s opinions of himself talk about seeking out perspectives? Is he serious?

Even before the idea of zero-fucks was connected (or put in tension) with social justice, I had feared or even judged the concept in the first place. Zero-fucks seemed like a great way to put yourself out on an island where you’re missing out on important criticism and human connections. And what’s wrong with wanting to be liked, anyway? We live with other people. Whether they like us is a big part of how we get by. Is it so bad to operate with their opinions in mind, to harmonize?

These days I see Steve’s zero-fuck conviction in a totally different light. It was never about insulating yourself from criticism and living in discord with everybody. It was about keeping one’s sights on what really matters—ethics, your behavior—instead of capitulating to someone else’s ethics (or lack thereof) because of vanity.

You can’t outsource your conscience. You have to interrogate yourself about yourself. Feel free to use others’ input as clues for interrogation. You probably should. But when it comes down to it, you’re going to have to make your own decisions about what’s right, regardless of the zeitgeist and your standing in the community, and it may or it may not line up with the cue you received from someone else.

I think Steve was opposed to living a life led around by the little self-concerned part of your brain that monitors what everyone else thinks about you, optimizing for likability. You’ll probably land on some good behavior that way, but it’s nowhere nearly as reliable of a system as simply questioning your decisions directly, and using external feedback as clues for your own questioning.

Credit: Susie Tweedy

I find a little bit of comfort—not a lot—in the fact that, while reflecting on the death of a collaborator about a decade ago, Steve said he hoped he would die “embroiled in the middle of things, surrounded by people I love, doing the things that matter most [with] a mountain of shit unfinished, that I have a pan on the stove, a phone call waiting and a pencil in my hand.” Boy, was there a pan on the stove. Knowing that he preferred a slightly untimely end takes some sting away. But I doubt he meant this soon. I certainly would have preferred him to have a “mountain of shit unfinished” at 100, his already birdlike, tiny bones swimming around in an ever-roomier Electrical Audio coverall, still “man enough to be thinking about tomorrow.”

Steve leaves a gargantuan musical legacy but in his wake I’m also taking general inspiration to be bolder and more honest. Saying what you really think and advocating for us to treat each other better (in big and small ways) is more important than politeness. I still think there’s usually a gentle way to get something across, and each of us will find our own tone and technique for communication. But where there isn’t a graceful path, where the goal is better served by a bit of a fuck-you and a blunt shot across the bow, I’ll remember Steve and try to make it.

More than anything, I feel sad for Heather and everyone else who loved him. We loved him. I know many of you did, too. Thank you, Steve, for being you, even though I know there was never any other option, whether anyone liked it or not.

Listening: Shellac live at Lounge Ax, July 22, 1993