Steve Albini died today. He died of a heart attack. That’s how I’m going to die, too. I’m sorry, but I’m going to make Steve Albini’s death about me. Shellac was going to tour their new album this year. I’m fucking pissed I’m not going to see Shellac this year.
I got into Big Black and Shellac when I was in college. My brother Alex and I used to smoke hash and listen to Songs about Fucking and At Action Park and 1000 Hurts. Apropos of nothing, we used to scream “Just a bad penny!!!” into each other’s face.
When I was twenty and Alex was eighteen, we got to see Shellac at the Grey Eagle in Asheville. August 29, 2006, to be exact. Shellac didn’t tour much, and they mostly played in Europe. It was astonishing to us that Shellac would play a little club in our off-the-path mountain town. It was a blistering fucking show.
A couple of years later, Alex and I and a couple of our friends drove to Monticello, New York for the ATP festival curated by MBV, and Shellac played a ferocious set. All weekend we saw Steve Albini walking around the hotel and grounds. Late at night, he hosted a poker tournament. I was a pretty decent hold ‘em player at the time, and I wanted to play with Albini, but we weren’t staying at the hotel, and it just didn’t work out.
When I was twenty-four and she was twenty-one, Marilena and I moved to Portland, Oregon. We paid five-fifty a month for a one-bedroom apartment by a porno shop on SE 148th and Stark. In stereotypically Portland style, we were experimenting with an “open relationship” (young, stupid). So I had an OKCupid account. In 2010, you could still meet pretty cool freaks on OKC. I came across the profile of a girl from Wooster, Ohio who was traveling in Portland. She’d just turned eighteen. Under “favorite music” she’d listed only two names: J Dilla and Shellac.
I’ve got to meet this fucking teenager.
We made plans and I scooped her in my ‘97 Honda Accord. She was even cooler than I thought she’d be. She told me a story about a friend of hers publishing a book about robotripping. He was interviewed on Good Morning America, and he brought her and some other friends from Wooster along, and they all took LSD before the interview. I called Marilena and said, “You’ve got to meet this fucking teenager.” Marilena got out of work by telling her boss that her boyfriend (me) was in the hospital after having a heart attack. I scooped her, and we went back to the apartment on 148th and Stark. That night we all drank Livingston wine and had sex with each other on an eggcrate foam mattress on the floor of our apartment.
We’re still friends with that girl. She’s in Australia now.
A year later, I was going through the most miserable time of my entire life. I’d gotten out of grad school, and I couldn’t find a job. Marilena had started stripping, and she was fucking her DJ behind my back. She didn’t know I knew. Or maybe she did know I knew—it doesn’t fucking matter now. One day toward the end of October, a friend of mine got word that Shellac was playing a surprise show that night at the Holocene. Tickets were only available at the door and only about three hundred people could fit in there.
Fuck this depression. Today I’m getting drunk and going to the Shellac show by my fucking self.
I bought a bottle of 151 rum and joined the crowd gathered outside the Holocene.
I blacked out.
I came to on the living room floor of our apartment. The back of my pea coat was covered in vomit. The best I could figure, I’d puked then fallen backward into my puke. Or I’d fallen backward into somebody else’s puke. To this day I don’t know if I saw the show or not, but the exact price of a ticket was missing from my wallet.
Marilena and I broke up for a few months then got back together and moved to New Orleans. We lived by the St. Roch cemetery. This was the summer of 2015. Shellac announced four US tour dates—two in Seattle and two in Portland. At the time I was listening to the Rapeman record a lot, Two Nuns and a Pack Mule.
Fuck it, it’s too damn hot in Nola anyway. Let’s fly to Portland for the Shellac show, and maybe we’ll stick around for a while.
It was at Revolution Hall, a venue converted from an old high school auditorium. The show was great, but I have to admit that it wasn’t as electrifying as the times I’d seen Shellac in the past. After the set, Albini sat on the edge of the stage and talked to whomever wanted to talk. I was drunk enough to ignore my shyness, and I asked him for a photo. I’d just gotten my first smart phone, and I didn’t know how to take a picture with it. Albini said, “Give it to me.” He opened the photo app and handed the phone to some chick to take our picture. The misanthropic old cunt even smiled for the camera.
I ended up staying in Portland another seven years.
I was still out there in 2021 when Shellac announced a PNW run. I got tickets to see them in both Seattle and Portland, but the shows were canceled due to Covid concerns.
This year, Shellac announced their first album in ten years. A tour was forthcoming. Canceled.
Albini worked on thousands of records. Everybody knows about the ones he made with Pixies, Jesus Lizard, Breeders, Nirvana, PJ Harvey, etc. He also made seven records with an artist named Nina Nastasia. I recommend those records. I know Steve was particularly proud of them.