A DEAD FRIEND, SOME LOST TIMES
It’s been four weeks since Tim Midyett called and told me that Steve Albini had died in the night. I didn’t seek out the role of The Death Guy, but since I’ve posted essayistic ramblings on several musical friends who have journeyed on, it would be weird to leave out Steve, one of the closest and longest.
We met on Halloween night 1986, when I went to his house on Francisco St. on Chicago’s north side to record six songs. I had been in Chicago three years and was working a day job and playing occasional club dates and trying to meet local players. Now and then I set up a “demo” session at a studio recommended by someone or other, in this case, a friend I worked with at my day gig who’d played sax with Big Black. I couldn’t have said exactly what a demo was, but I used the word a lot. I guess it was to demonstrate to a record company that you could do a thing even though this wasn’t the thing itself?
It was a time of many questionable activities, and planning a session of about six hours to track six songs was one. The go-go-go schedule was mostly because money was tight, but also because there was punk rock and it was 1986. I admired a lot of the punk spirit, and I did snarl and bang and bleed a bit when I played, but the idiom overall was of limited interest to a guy like me who equated music with lines of cultural and personal ancestry, and who worked daily on improving as a player.
Steve had been featured in a brief article in SPIN magazine. It described a soi-disant sociological experiment he had done on the street near Northwestern U. in Evanston, standing behind a plexiglass shield, yelling vicious insults at passersby, thereby tempting them to hurl objects at him, hard. (When we were last together, which turned out to be actually last together, on a little stage in L.A. last December, we talked about that stunt, for the first time.) Being written about in SPIN elevated someone immeasurably, in my dewy Eighties eyes. I noticed that the subjects themselves did not necessarily feel elevated. Steve, for one, seemed not to let any sort of coverage affect him much, except perhaps for a Groucho-like response of thinking less of the outlet; when I mentioned SPIN’s article on Beausoleil to Michael Doucet, around this same time, he simply said, “That writer was an asshole.” I was always getting these reminders that, at 23, I was an anonymous figure talking about musicians and admiring them from afar, not a talked-about or admired musician. I was itching to move up onto the platform, be written about, cordon myself off from the chattering herd, and call them assholes. So I was excited to edge into Steve’s orbit, and I was sensitive enough to the punk-rock stigma against careerism and fame-courting to conceal my excitement, or so I imagined.
At Steve’s house, you performed in the cellar. Calling it a studio, not a concrete-slab three-room dungeon, was a stretch. But the microphone complement was impressive, and the board, which Steve ran from the attic, was very respectable (I think a Neotek, even back then?). Most important, the audiophile knowledge on hand was deep, considerably deeper than with any previous engineer I’d hired. To hear playback after you’d done a take or two, you’d hustle up the stairs, pass through the first-floor kitchen with its view of the big living room, and proceed up another tiny staircase to the cramped aerie, where the rail-thin impresario sat twiddling knobs and issuing acerbic commentary. The living area on the main floor was an EPA cleanup site strewn with Edison cylinders, junky couches, takeout boxes, lethargic punks with smileproof faces and old-man hats, and various zines — underground culture rags like Forced Exposure, comix, and esoteric porn, including a memorable pictorial pamphlet titled Two Nuns and A Pack Mule.
Two Stevemouth moments stand out from that first night of getting to know him and hearing what my music sounded like filtered through his gear and his brain. One moment confirms his aesthetic reputation and the other contradicts it. I had written a bad, derivative song (most of my songs hit both marks in those days) about a cute Korean girl I had a crush on (notwithstanding I was living with another girl whose child I had fathered; moral character isn’t one of my strong suits). The tune was in E, and started with a decisive double stop on the first and second strings of my black Ibanez electric guitar. But on the take of the song that we liked best, I overshot the double-stop by one fret. The song started, in other words, with everyone else striking an E chord and me striking two-thirds of an F. It was over fast, but it was horrible. This clam, as it turned out, was Steve’s favorite part of the whole song. I don’t think he disliked the song so much as he cherished the mistake. Up in the aerie, I politely tried to investigate the means by which we could edit the offending fraction of a second out and replace it with the intended chord, Steve pressed back, insisting that it sounded wonderful as was, and to correct it would be like scraping the lips off Mona Lisa. After a minute or two of this nonsense, he let me have my way. Giving free rein to dissonance, haphazard error, and loud, listener-alienating effects were classic Albini moves. Giving the artist his way was another.
The other moment was toward the direction of musical orderliness, and came afterward when we were mixing, sitting side-by side at the board. The players I’d used on the six songs were dear friends who had traveled from back east to help me. Now they’d all gone off somewhere. Wrapping up the mix, Steve wheeled around to me in his springy office chair. He spoke softly and plainly, as was his way. “This isn’t the kind of music I particularly like or know very much about,” he said. “But you’ve got good ideas, and you know what you’re doing. Your players here aren’t up to that level. If you want to do more of these sessions, I know many good players who would meet the material with more skill. I understand that there are personal relationships here, but inasmuch as your music has any claim above or outside these relationships, and since your hard-earned money is on the line, I suggest you consider using different players next time, and I would be happy to make specific recommendations.”
I haven’t shared that moment with anyone before, because I didn’t want my friends to know about it, and because it didn’t really amount to anything other than to plant a seed in my head. Enough years have passed to let go of the concern about wounding feelings, and I share it now because it shows an undersung side of Steve. “I hear he’s just an asshole to bands a lot of the time,” reports my middle son, who plays in a band and never met Steve. Well, maybe, but. There are critical things young musicians should get to hear about themselves in order to better their craft, criticisms that are not only hard to hear but hard to state with delicacy. When your brand is plain speaking, you’re well-positioned to deliver the goods. In this case the remark was completely non-obligatory, and as such, an act of kindness and respect. Several more such critical remarks, of me and my hired players both, followed over the years, but as my circle slowly widened and I came to work with more experienced players, the criticisms ebbed.
What Steve knew about music was sometimes hard for me to assess. I admit I never thought of him foremost as a musician, the way I thought, for instance, of Todd, the outstanding, greyhound-loving drummer in Shellac. But now and then Steve would toss off a comment that was surprisingly on-point about something that seemed far out of his bailiwick, like the tone of a five-string banjo or the technique of its player. Certainly his head was crammed with information on the manufacture and mechanics of esoteric instruments like Chamberlains and less-loved gear like Soviet amplifiers and Romanian lathes. His ear was as nuanced as any first-rate engineer’s on balance matters like when someone in a group of singers needed to get three inches closer to the capsule. At a 2008 session in his post-Francisco St., fancy-schmancy studio called Electrical Audio, I had brought in a quartet of horn players for an R&B-ish song. Something sounded fishy in the first couple takes, and I went into the control room to sort it out with Steve. “I’m not getting a strong ‘I can play’ vibe from the trombonist,” he said. Hilarious, and accurate.
No, no one can say Steve didn’t know about or care for music. But he was a science guy, and a word guy, and his skills in those domains colored his thoughts about music and his approach to it. His philosophy of keeping out of the way of the performance and staying focused on the minimally adorned documentation of it didn’t emerge simply from ideology; I believe it was also grounded in a sober assessment of his own strengths. I think his respect for people like George Massenburg and Tom Dowd was as primary and as quasi-religious as mine is for the people those two men produced, like Linda Ronstadt and Wilson Pickett — though we both admired all those people.
This predisposition toward the practical, and against tinkering with the interpersonal chemistry of players, underlay his lifelong wish to be known and credited as an engineer, not a producer — a word that, he stated in an interview, “sounds a lot like ‘cocksucker’.” Very quotable, but really he was uninterested in massaging artist egos and neuroses, helping them compose words or music, or interacting with the promotional side of the business in any way, and even if he had wanted to do those things, he wouldn’t have been very good at them. Shortly after the release of my first solo record, Country Love Songs, a record on which about two-thirds of the songs were Steve-engineered, my friends in the trad-country band BR549 decided to visit Electrical to go after the same kind of sound. The recordings they got sounded fairly powerful to me, but disappointed the band. “He didn’t help us with our arrangements,” said Chuck. No, he hardly ever did that.
The combo of energetically skilled playing and room resonance on those BR recordings reminds me of the Cheap Trick recordings Steve helmed. The band remade their second record, In Color, with Steve. The original record was full of terrific songs but the, er, what you might call arrangements, were twee and inapposite. So it was a good idea, if you had a do-over, to go someplace where no one interfered with that stuff, and where hard music sounded itself or harder yet. I thought the remake sounded killer, and so did my Chicago friend Jay O’Rourke, another highly talented recordist. Jay had mixed Cheap Trick live, and his comment stayed with me: “That record sounded exactly like that band did, coming out of their monitors.”
The tl;dr on Young Steve was that he already seemed to have forgotten everything not worth knowing about engineering records, and already struck a commanding presence with his opinions and intuitions on mic choice and placement and mix decisionmaking. His philosophy of being a plumber-like figure, ultimately at the service of the artist who had hired him, didn’t make a perfect tongue-and-groove fit with his steady confidence in his personalized audio aesthetics. He officially wanted you to sound like nothing but yourself, yet the records you made with him always sounded like yourself-via-him. To be sure, any engineer you hire becomes like an additional band member. But Steve’s added voice was unusually strong and unique. Unlike the digital vs. analogue gap, which is somewhat of a nerdy audiophile obsession, that voice was pretty easily detectable to the average listener.
Steve interned for a while at Chicago Recording under Hank Neuberger. Hank once told me that he ended a long argument about recording methods with Steve by saying, “I agree with every part of your argument, except your conclusion.” Classic! It was that final step that made Steve Steve. Every time I tracked with him, whether at his house or Electrical, I had the experience of walking to the control room to hear playback after performing a song and thinking, “That doesn’t sound just like it sounded in the room, yet no enhancements have been added. What’s the deal?”
Part of the deal was room mic’ing, part the size and resonance of the room. But part of it, the brain-of-the-engineer part, remained mysterious. Talking about this recently with Alex Hall, Alex pointed out that the idea of transparency in a studio, where you make a noise and the sound wave goes into a capsule, through a wire, into another room, into a board with hundreds of settings, and through various coils and metals and papers to pass through a speaker and back into your ears, is ridiculous. Lots happens on that journey, even before you deliberately add anything. When Steve was helming the session, his values and his brain were the main thing that happened.
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I returned to Steve and to Electrical time and again after that Halloween night. We worked together on six records of mine, Brennen Leigh’s record which I cocksu— uh, produced; a short film soundtrack; a couple smaller projects. All enjoyable, efficient, collaborative, and full of witty banter. On my own records, I perpetrated a broad range of sound waves, hardly any of which resembled PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me or any of the abrasive music by which he was known. I did quiet balladry, whispering into a ribbon mic. I did antique-sounding songs with a single mic placed several feet distant to capture instrument and voice both. I did string section overdubs with ceiling-hung mics in concentric motion. I put together a horn section where each chart was passed one person down so that no player couldn’t make out his instructions. I did a session where wine glasses were thrown across the room between piano and sax stabs. Handing him an unorthodox assignment was the most reliable way to make Steve happy, and getting closer to him inspired me to think of unorthodox ideas I never would have otherwise. I imbibed a lot of his wisdom, and came to apply it both consciously and less consciously, in all my records, in any studio.
He strongly preferred that a recording be a document of an event, not a science-lab concoction. That idea has changed in significance and meaning across the decades. In 1945 it wouldn’t have been an idea at all because it had no practical alternatives, whereas in 1985 it seemed like a lost cause one clung to only out of ill-advised pertinacity. It’s not necessarily a noble or correct way, steering around what’s easy and cheap and modern. Documented in-the-moment performance puts a burden on musicians to do it right in a reasonable timeframe and on engineers not to let their attention flag. It stands in contrast to the idea of a record as a painstaking commercial collage, shaped to deliberately satisfy the non-fans who would make important decisions on promoting and distributing the music, and conform to the mediocre platforms, like car radios, on which it would be heard. I was happy to think of people in office buildings promoting me and of car radios carrying my songs, but from Steve’s view these considerations were basically concessions toward absurd demands from people who were, at least in my case, imaginary. Lashing the audio engineering to an idea of market demands also tended to waste time and money. Someone told me about a Jeff Lynne production where the first day was spent positioning the high-hat mic, the first week or so getting the sounds on the full drum kit.
I like Steve’s way better. For one thing, it reflects how I put music together when not in a studio — try out ideas with others, listening and thinking and discussing as you go, and finally perform them together and simultaneously, not piece by piece. Thus the studio environment is tamed, less strange and daunting, as it tends to be. There’s a common perception, when you enter one of these floating-floor-and-glass-booth sanctums, that suddenly all the outside rules no longer apply. This is The Studio — prick up your ears, folks! — trust me, I’m a pro — we’ll start with the high-hat. To Steve all that was bunk. Through him I came to believe that the goal is always to play just like you sound, and then be excited by what you hear at playback — not to forestall judgement until the later stages of mixing or, God forbid, mastering. You want the rightness to be palpable at once, just like when you’re playing in your living room. The tools and the tech are all at the service of a musical experience, and how you compose and communicate that experience to other ears and minds isn’t different, in any way that much matters, than it was in 1985, or 1945, or 45.
This sort of realistic, wide-perspective essentialism ran through all of Steve’s resumé and his thinking. He didn’t like to automate a mix, because it mechanized thought and preserved a one-time decision — better to keep thinking and re-evaluating as the hands move, pass after pass. He favored tape over digital media because of tape’s infinite resolution — tape sounds deeper and better, to put it simplistically — and because analog was an older medium whose qualities and quirks had long ago been discovered and worked out. T Bone Burnett, in a recent interview in Variety, spoke insightfully about the evolution of recording media. It’s worth quoting at length, even though I’m writing about someone else, because T Bone puts it in terms that are easy to understand:
"The most profound experience of hearing music is to be sitting across from a musician when he’s playing it. And the next most profound experience of hearing music is to hear a high-fidelity recording on a great system, on a good format, so that you can close your eyes and think you’re sitting in the room with the person playing it. What’s happened to us now is we’ve gone from sitting in the room hearing people playing it to high-fidelity recordings of people playing it — the most high-fidelity recording is an acetate….Then you step way down to digital, which is not a sound wave, but a sample of a sound wave. So you’re just getting a piece of the high fidelity, and they call it high definition. I guess it’s better defined, but you’re still only getting a percentage of the recording of the experience. And then you go from CDs to MP3s… to, now, we’re listening to music being bounced off satellites in space and coming back to us. That’s how far we’ve been removed from the profound experience of actually hearing somebody play a song in the living room, like was happening in all of time before the last century. So, the experience of listening has been degraded steadily.”
Steve would have endorsed all of this. On the supply side, there’s an economic angle that the above argument leaves unaddressed. Making a record on your iPhone is more within the reach of most of us than buying time at a studio that has well-maintained old tape machines and a crusty oldster that knows how to use them, to say nothing of the cost of the two-inch and quarter-inch reels. As fast as sessions with Albini were paced, paying for the tape was still burdensome. I eventually came to feel that the main advantage to digital, over its cheapness, is editing ease and capability. I don’t know how many times I watched Steve whip out his razor blade and make a diagonal cut across a section of quarter-inch to splice together a couple group performances in which I liked a part of one and another part of another. Twenty times, maybe? It was neat to watch, but you couldn’t help watching the minute hand on the clock as the surgery was performed and think, We could be making five of these cuts with greater delicacy and reversibility on a screen in less time.
For this reason, I went to Steve in advance of my record Gone Away Backward in 2012 with the idea of recording onto digital and editing onscreen, then dumping to tape for mix. Happily, he was amenable at once (another blow to his reputation as an old-school-tech militant), and we brought into Electrical a laptop and a suave Frenchman who was conversant with ProTools. Steve set up mics and listened as we played, and did very little else during the tracking of the record. I was delighted with the results, and repeated the method on my next record, Upland Stories. After thirty-some years of trying to get a comfortable and productive sort of routine going in studios, I landed happily here: record on a computer, edit, switch to tape if affordable. Ultimately, Steve Fishell and George Massenburg and five other living people can hear a recording and tell you whether it’s analogue or digital — I can’t — and so the outlay of money is, to my mind, discretionary, not crucial to quality. A small difference of opinion between me and my late friend.
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Over the last 15 years, my experiences with Steve were focused on intense, productive work weeks. Before that, we were younger, different people, with more time to kill and metabolism to burn, and the experiences were more frequent and less work-related. In 1989 I was living in a dingy apartment in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago. My four-year-old son was there too, Mondays through Thursdays. I mentioned questionable activities; baby Nick was exposed to many during this era. With Steve around, things were likely to be said that a four-year-old’s father might not want him to hear, and Steve was even likelier to say them knowing the father’s skittishness. Once, a colored glass candle fell to the floor in my kitchen and broke in many pieces. “Do you know,” Steve purred in Nick’s ear, “that broken glass tastes exactly like sweet candy?” “Steve,” I said, “stop it.”
Another time, Steve asked me if it would be okay to share with Nick a joke that was “dirty — well, not that dirty.” Okay, I said, already feeling like Charlie teeing up the ball for Lucy. The joke that ensued had an anodyne set-up, followed by a punchline that, though succinct, somehow managed to cover lesbianism, anal sex, property devaluation, and casual sadism. Many of you elders may recall this joke, which, like so much 1980s-vintage small talk, is now unrepeatable. Whatever its humor quotient, one thing it was certainly not was “not that dirty.” “Steve,” I said, ashen, “we’re trying to create a person here.”
We were at a John Waters show at Park West where John took questions from the crowd after doing his bit. Steve’s hand went up. “Do you light your farts?” he inquired. John replied that he did not, turned to look toward the next question, then did a brief double-take. “What an odd question,” he mused, I think appreciatively. Another playing-to-a-theatrical-crowd anecdote came to me second-hand. Steve went to the Music Box theater at midnight, where an X-rated movie starring Johnny “Wadd” Holmes was showing. It was a late-career project for Johnny, who was infected with AIDS during his scenes, and was soon to die of the virus. Steve’s voice rang out across the theater at the conclusion of the group-sex scenes: “Thanks — and so long!”
It was fun being with Steve outside of his home environment, because you could observe his words ricochet off of people who were innocent of his style. In 1998, he and George Massenburg and I spent a day touring Nashville studios, plotting out a record of old-time country performers like Porter Wagoner and Jean Shepard, one of those projects that I visualized and began to plan before it fell through. At Woodland, a studio manager pointed out a rather tattered piece of furniture where colleagues or label overseers could sit and observe sessions. “Ah, the blow-job couch,” Steve murmured thoughtfully, to no one’s delight. Over at Ray Kennedy’s place, Steve Earle’s name naturally came up, since he was part-owner of the studio. When Ray disclosed that the troubadour had just married his sixth wife, Albini looked abstractedly at the ceiling. “What’s half of half of half of half of half of half?” he wondered aloud. I chuckled midway through that, but no one else did. They just waited around for the sentence to end.
Here’s his most purely delightful off-the-cuff comment that I know of. At Abbey Road in London, Steve was mixing some band when Paul McCartney stuck his head through the door unannounced. Paul listened a moment before asking who the band was. The assistant answered, and then Steve turned, saying politely, “And you are…?” A great anecdote right there — but to give the composer of “Eleanor Rigby” his due, he bit. “Name’s Paul,” he replied good-naturedly. “I used to be in a group called The Beatles.” Poker ace, meet pokerface.
Steve was younger when he delivered his nastiest statements, and as the obits made sure to mention, he later recanted and apologized for them, credibly and unemotionally. Once happily married he began improving upon himself, like most of us men. He became more sensitive to the historical injuries of some peoples, accepting a responsibility as a luckier person not to add to their suffering with careless speech. Having lived through this careless-talking, insult-hurling, gratuitously mean era, I’d say two things. One is that a social norm of being nice and sensitive to one another is a clear improvement on a social norm of being dicks. We were such dicks, back then! Speaking largely for myself.
My second thought is that the effort to understand the context of times gone by, so that you can proceed past “what a lot of unbelievable dicks they were” to a fuller assessment, is amazingly challenging. It’s challenging even for people who lived in, who were themselves adults in, the earlier time. (This includes some of the obit writers, older music-scene observers who, it seems to me, are pretending to have forgotten bygone behavioral norms for the benefit of their reputation among priggish younger readers.) In Sue Miller’s book, The World Below, a character grapples with her dead grandmother’s diary detailing her early love life and her confinement in a tuberculosis sanatorium. The character reflects that the job of an historian is “to explain how life felt as it went by. Not just what happened, but how differently it signified: what happened.” Naturally, getting into the mindset of a medieval serf or courtier is effortful. But it’s a little incredible to live to 60 and find it almost as hard to explain how differently things signified just 35 years ago, to others or even to oneself.
Once, for Steve’s birthday, he booked an upstairs room at a place called Club Dreamerz. There’s currently a Facebook page for the club where you can share your memories. “Former regular at Dreamerz?” the page intro says. “Work there? Band play there? Have sex there?” We Eighties youngsters went fucking nuts in these clubs, let me assure you. Two bands played the night of Steve’s birthday, mine and a special-for-the-occasion assemblage — a quartet if I remember right — of guys from bands that hung around Steve’s living room, bands with Kill in their names. My little power-pop trio was called Those Ferns. We had zero cultural overlap with the party attendees; it was like Amy Ray playing at a Trump rally. After us, the bassist from the group following asked to borrow my guy’s bass. Hearing him flail around on it in the act, my bassist, a sociable, unpretentious jobber named Gary, shouted in my ear: “Has that guy ever played the bass before?” “Yes,” I shouted back, “he’s in a very successful band called Kill-something, or Something-kill. He’s one of the better-known bassists of our time!” But Gary didn’t really believe me, because the guy seemed so unfamiliar with the basic functions of the instrument. He couldn’t locate notes and he couldn’t keep time. Punk rock!
After the music, everyone destroyed everything in the room. It didn’t feel spontaneous, and it wasn’t in the least joyful. It felt like people were carrying out a grim duty. Bottles and glass whizzed around and smashed on the walls, until no intact bottle or glass remained. Mirrors crumbled. Chairs were kicked to pieces, tables beaten methodically until they broke apart. Little was said; the room was eerily quiet between bursts of things breaking. A fistfight broke out, briefly, when my dwarfish drummer pinned a much larger fellow from a Kill-something band to the wall. He screamed at the taller, cowering fellow as bottles smashed like tiny fireworks near his head. “I come from the South Side!” he said. Through all this, no one got very hurt; only property was destroyed, drunkenly and thoroughly. Dodging projectiles, I cased my guitar and I hoofed it downstairs and outside. Steve was sitting against the curb, there on Milwaukee Avenue, mumbling miserably and holding his head. It was the only time I ever saw him out of his wits. I wish I’d written down what he said, because it was sloppy and embarrassing. Some amusingly inarticulate Albini-isms would make a colorful contribution to his memory.
Thinking about this time and this “scene,” or loose collection of midwestern social acquaintances, brings me hard against some tableaux that aren’t all that pleasant. They reflect poorly on us. My honest effort to recreate these distant on-the-ground realities on paper may be distorted by the regret-ridden tenor of dotage, or by my not having really been an insider in this scene to begin with. Anyway, here’s the rub, as I see it: we were all wantonly attracted to violence. This seems to me as prime a candidate for regret and apology as any words that fell from our mouths. Reveling in murder and misery, I’m suggesting, is a worse character trait than reveling in insult and profanity, or getting into fistfights.
Of course violence that was official, large-scale, and government-sponsored repelled us twentysomethings. Nuclear armaments, death penalties, vigilante cops, and Marines running roughshod over the beaches of Guatemala — solidly against. As for more pedestrian, less “system”-implicating forms of real-life violence, like the “Faces of Death” videos, or serial killers with creepily attractive personalities, that was a different category. That depended. It was portrayals of extreme violence in art that we devoured. We sang lustily about our darkest fantasies. We named our bands things like Rapeman. We immersed ourselves in images of torture. Those in the films of the above-referenced Mr. Waters, whom I loved and still harbor a warm and nostalgic affection for, were mostly staged. But the Manson killers, to one of whom my favorite Waters film was dedicated, didn’t “stage” their cruelty or just sing their anti-social impulses. The victims of John Wayne Gacy were innocent; were you, if you bought his paintings? The bloodlust in our circle ran high, and even though this was pretty recent and I was myself culpable, I’m not sure I can say why; but I think cruelty and violence made us feel alive with the thrill of transgression. Footage of the suicide by gunshot of R. Budd Dwyer, the Pennsylvania state treasurer, played on a loop in Steve’s living room for a while. So did a grainy video of a crappy comic in a small club losing his temper and seriously braining a heckler with his guitar.
It went beyond imagery at times. We did things that could hurt people, and sometimes did. Young Steve kicked a front-row weirdo hard in the face with his boot and wrote about it in Forced Exposure. Young me broke someone’s nose in a bar with my shoe. If there was blood or a broken bone at a show, whether our own injuries onstage or someone else’s, it was recounted with a smirk or a shrug — privately thrilling.
What, as Rickie Lee Jones said, could make a boy behave this way? 1980s youngsters had a sense that adult leadership had failed, or was dangerously flawed, and saw the status quo — it then included Nancy Reagan’s astrology and just-say-no ignorance, SDI, AIDS, Iran-Contra, the Meese commission, nuclear proliferation, and voodoo economics, as George H.W. Bush called it — as intolerable. It was felt by some that end times were upon us. It’s true that I was politically reactionary in those days, and tended to cheerlead obnoxiously for the status quo rather than loathe or denounce it, but that was as reflexive as my friends’ tribal attachments, and possibly less well-informed too. We all shared the same polluted air, and we were all impatient and more than happy to give offense, regardless of politics. Even at the remove of a generation or two, contemporary youngsters should understand the spirit of impatience and the lure of tear-it-down antinomianism.
Beyond politics, we were culturally outraged. Culture meant music, above all. We might not have quite known how to play a bass guitar, but silly radio noise, absurdly narrow intertribal conflicts, and corporate malfeasance at the majors really got us in a dither. The old order needed to be kicked to pieces before we might replace it with something better. Beyond music, we gagged on the junk food we were spoon-fed, that three-channel mediasphere of “The Jeffersons” and “Apple’s Way,” the nightly news starring this haircut or that, the morning-after-the-me-decade nauseous self-absorption of suburban teen melodrama and Jane Fonda workouts. Vomit it back in their stupid faces. The rule in America is that people in their 20s get to raise hell and trash the previous generation’s institutions, right? And raising hell, apart from whatever politics or ethical points are being advanced, is such fun, especially when the consequences are minor. My best memory says there was no shortage of fun in the 1980s, whether you were riding on mainstream trends — wearing a narrow tie and jittering like a robot to cocaine tempos — or crouched in a dank pit watching agricultural accidents back-projected behind a punk band and getting piss foully squirted on you by the lead “singer.”
And now let the defense speak. Though the worst of what we said shocked and irritated some, as intended, most of it was recognizably juvenile and fast forgotten. The bourgeoisie can withstand a lot of epater. It’s a rough and venerable sport. The damage we inflicted on bodies and lives and property was mostly minor and easily patched up, especially because our families were decently well-off, our bodies were young, and we were usually careful not to truly ruin things. We were unwilling to subject ourselves to prosecution and trial. The second-floor of Club Dreamerz was cleaned up and redone a day or two later. I got the tooth I broke onstage capped. As far as I know the guy from Jesus Lizard fixed his mouth too, and the guy Steve kicked lived on, and the lady whose nose I broke is doing just fine. (We’re still friends!) After going half-deaf from cymbals and amps aimed at my head, I have an expensive hearing-aid set to which I’m deeply attached, just like many sexagenerian punk rockers. Mostly we made noise, and a lot of it.
Tough guys. But tough only in affect, since most of us were educated at four-year colleges, not subject to military service or a wartime draft, and weren’t fighting our way up from dire poverty or second-class citizenship.
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Tim Midyett said something pithy and true, during a longer conversation we had a few days after his initial call. “If you disliked Steve,” Tim said, “it was because of something he said; if you liked him, it was because of something he did.” One thing Steve did was to raise money for poor people each December, alongside his wife Heather. “Letters To Santa” was an energy-intensive job. Staying up all night for improvisations and music at Second City, like middle-aged Jerry Lewis, and delivering goods to the penurious on Christmas morning, those efforts were just the public-facing centerpiece of the project, which took up a lot of Steve’s non-studio hours, along with his poker championships. The charity work went loudly unmentioned in the Times’s obituary and others, but it was key to Steve’s character and view of the world. Seconding Tim’s observation: if you were a celebrity supermodel or a label exec you were a sitting target for our friend’s savage animadversions, but if you were a South Side kid in a single-parent one-room apartment, you’d remember the stranger on your doorstep who redeemed an otherwise Dickensian Christmas morning. In the back half of his life, Steve refined his ire, backing his principled outrage at the misallocation of good luck and economic goods with both speech and actions.
His greatest act toward the end of his life, just last summer in fact, was to help guide Heather through a precarious surgery that planted two electrodes into her brain to help with the motor control loss resulting from her Parkinson’s. Steve was by her side from beginning to end. He put 30 of us on a text thread, where he sent hourly updates; we sent Heather jokes and warm wishes and you-go-girls. The life plan these two had, going forward, was akin to the one all of us have: Work less while maintaining adequate income, set up a calm steady environment for old age, manage each other’s health challenges —- though in this case the management was expected to be a round-the-clock task falling mainly on one party. Amid the sadness of a premature passing, it’s a beautiful legacy, I feel, that a person who couldn’t get out of bed unassisted as of a year ago now has a substantially renewed capacity for self-care, thanks to her spouse’s excellent stewardship.
The lesser acts of generosity are too many to list. Steve was fervently committed to friendship as a core ideal grounding a meaningful life. Probably partly because he didn’t have kids, he was able to effectuate the ideal at a college-friend level throughout his life. Comradeship, along with the ideal of amateur music-making (I mean “amateur” in the noblest sense) and serving as a worthy husband: these were the three things that most directed his energies, as far as I can see. When we were young and none of us was doing that well, we looked up to Steve as the friend whose financial health most resembled that of a 40-year-old. He was happy to live up to the consequent expectations. After he bought our mutual sax-playing friend a thousand dollars’ worth of violent pulp novels (a special interest of the friend’s) for his birthday, he assured me that my $50 gift “meant more” because it represented a bigger percentage of my assets. When I was recording somewhere in Chicago outside Electrical and needed a certain kind of electric guitar, Steve threw one in a cab and had it delivered it to the South Side. It delighted him that it was a guitar from the band Bush, who he had recently engineered-not-produced, and that he was tossing it blithely into a taxi. When I was separated from my oldest kid’s mom, stuck in a dead-end job, and generally at a low emotional point, Steve spent a lot of time on the phone with me, picking up my mood with expert listening and plain empathy.
And get this. When Heather turned 30, Steve hired me and Silkworm to write and record songs glorifying her. From these he had 45-RPM records pressed. Then he hired out the roller rink where she had skated as a kid for a private surprise party. Then, and this is the big “then,” he reunited the metal band that had played at the rink about twenty years earlier, when Teeny Heather skated there, and hired them to play a set at the party. She was brought in blindfolded. When it was stripped off, her face didn’t register an adequate level of surprise, as no face really could. The surprise must have taken days to sink in. None of our wives who were privy to this spectacle of spousal solicitude ever admired any of us as fully again.
We all know people who manifest good qualities for us to model, and feel luckier for it. I feel fortunate to have met, while young, a few peers whose fuck-you moxie helped me stand stiffer than I was apt to. Against my tendency to yield to melancholy, sentimentality, and limpid thinking, Steve inched me toward toughness, in a way that was both helpfully therapeutic and better-aligned with the reality of physical constraints and other conscious beings. Viewing the world coolly, sticking by your guns (while reforming some ingrained behaviors over time), thinking of yourself with as little self-pity as you can manage, and saying what you mean, precisely and unapologetically: these traits help one to form a shield against hard luck and sadness, and put one in a better position to be of service. Acquaintances who behave with such stolidity are motivational. Thinking of Steve razoring tape, paging through the Economist at his Neotek, preparing a specialty espresso drink, or patiently explaining at enormous length why it was strictly necessary to follow some audio-recording protocol that no one else on earth followed, I do feel lucky to have spent as much time as I did around such a supremely self-possessed person. He once explained to me why I was fretting too much over the formation of my kid’s moral character. His theory, as I recall, was that the child takes the reins or doesn’t, early on, and the inputs matter much less than most of us imagine. If the end of that theory is that you can tell hyperviolent R-rated jokes to a four-year-old, then it’s a conclusion with which I disagree, though the argument that leads to it is absolutely creditable.
You can’t help speculating about causes, symptoms, and origins when a friend drops dead of a heart attack at 61. Maybe it’s little more than indulgent storytelling. But Steve suffered another heart attack about thirty years ago. He also put on some weight over the last several years, just like a lot of us. Most saliently, it seems to me, there was ongoing stress in his life ever since he bought Electrical 25+ years ago. Making payroll was often a challenge. The prices attached to the two tracking rooms fluctuated as the wider business wobbled, from the 1990s on; meanwhile the rate Steve personally commanded for running a session more than doubled. In other words, the success of the place fell mainly on his thin shoulders. He remained uncompromisingly committed, through his life, to a number of articulately defended but objectively risky bets. A well-maintained, first-class, two-room studio situated in Chicago. Mixing by hand. The punk ethos generally and his three-man touring band specifically. Tape. His craziest commitment was to refuse points on the records he oversaw. It was like demonstrating your small-government bona fides and concern about ballooning deficits by refusing Social Security checks. Crazy! I recommend everyone reading this take stock of all commitments undertaken when you were 20, and see whether you might be healthier going forward just to cash them in. To live is to maneuver, as Whittaker Chambers said.
The reason I’m thrown, but not devastated, by my friend’s death is that the friend himself gave me the tools to deal with it. Steve’s passing reminds us of the facts of our situation, which we should face with cool aplomb and high-humored fierceness, the way he faced anything he judged a fact. None of us is guaranteed four-score-and-ten, any moment could be the last, and until that moment we’d do well to take care of our work and the well-being of those closest to us.