When I sat down to write this, I saw Steve Albini ’85 rolling his eyes at me from beyond the grave.
Steve was a legendary musician and producer, an icon of America’s avant-garde soundscape and a fixture of Chicago’s music culture. If you’ve read any of the innumerable obituaries that have oozed with praise for his work since he died at the age of 61 of a heart attack on May 7, you already know this. Steve, they’ve all said, was a lovably elitist visionary whose production chops bestowed us with Nirvana’s In Utero and the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa. We have Steve to thank for Electrical Audio, a Chicago recording studio that might just be alt-rock’s Holy of Holies, and his refusal to accept royalties from album sales for his engineering efforts breathed fresh air right in the face of the corporate music industry.
This is what the indie fanzines and international media conglomerates have all said, and I’m not here to deny any of it. Steve was indeed a big personality who made big contributions to music. Beyond that, he was also an avid cook, a cat lover and a brilliant satirist with a pretty funny Twitter page to boot. To me, Steve was a hero, an incredibly patient interview subject and my absolute favorite Wildcat. As a contributor to WNUR’s Wavelength magazine, I’m honored to have conducted one of his last on-the-record conversations.
I first encountered Steve’s genius in 2019 through his band Big Black, a staple of the ’80s indie scene now immortalized in Chicago’s musical pantheon. Big Black’s lyrics, penned by Steve, teem with a menagerie of taboos — and for my punk-obsessed, teenage self, the band’s unrelentingly nihilistic noise rock act, with songs like “Kerosene” and “Pavement Saw,” offered medicinal properties.
A VHS recording of the group playing at CBGB, New York City’s foremost underground music club, in July 1986 offers a glimpse of Steve, a 23-year-old Medill School of Journalism graduate and former WNUR DJ, at his most harrowing.
A crunch. A crash. A stringed instrument hums in the key of B, rolling and roiling like a prehistoric tar pit caught in a humid summer storm. Steve, wearing the world’s most out-of-place fedora, hangs from a microphone stand. With his hunched shoulders and brow-line eyeglasses, he looks like a cross between one of Notre Dame Cathedral’s gargoyles and an extra from Revenge of the Nerds. His voice is as nasally as his outfit is nerdy. “This is a little number … ”
The humming gets higher and turns into a screech. Steve presses his lips against the microphone and rocks back and forth. “… called …”
The screeching begins to oscillate, and Steve keeps rocking. His voice becomes a snarl. “… CLEAR OUT!”
Hum, screech, rock, rock.
“Clear out!” he yelps again through a spit-filled throat.
Crash, buzz, rock, rock.
Two guitars and a bass squeal in unison while Steve’s rage swells with every repetition of his vitriolic mantra. A bassline cuts through the din as Steve and company erupt into song, taking turns to shriek into their mics. Big Black was scary, and I was hooked.
As I transitioned from high school to college in the depths of the pandemic’s isolation, Steve stayed by my side. I started listening to his post–Big Black music with Shellac, which I honestly never enjoyed quite as much. When I arrived at Northwestern in 2020, I wasn’t going to the same school as George R.R. Martin [’70, ’71 MS, ’21H] or Meghan Markle [’03]; I was going to the same school as Steve f---ing Albini. All four years at Northwestern, I serenaded my friends with each and every Big Black album and EP in all their grinding glory, and I even threw on a song or two at parties. Those maneuvers weren’t well received.
I found it curious that, despite his musical pedigree, Steve’s time at Northwestern remained shrouded in mystery, even to my peers who knew about him. With my name now attached to Wavelength (proudly advertised as Northwestern’s only official music periodical), I was determined to find out more.
I was eager to have an audience with Steve the regular human being, not just Steve the elder statesman of punk. I knew that he set off fireworks onstage. I knew that he was given Nirvana’s blessing to pretend to be Kurt Cobain on a phone call with Gene Simmons. But I also knew that he used to blog each and every dinner he cooked for his wife, that he had a cat named Bacon and that he absolutely hated Joe Rogan and Barstool Sports. I made it my mission to get in touch with Steve. He made that mission easier than I had anticipated. I shot him a DM on Twitter, and he responded within 10 minutes.
When we connected via email in December 2021, his wit was apparent, even in disembodied chunks of text, and it was clear that his journalistic sharpness still held up decades after his Medill days. At his suggestion, I emailed him my questions, and we followed up to discuss his answers on Zoom later that month.
His answers were full of the utilitarian bluntness he was known for.
Why was Northwestern such an infrequent topic of conversation for him? “I was in college a long time ago, and there’s a lot else to talk about.”
Well, were any Big Black lyrics inspired by Northwestern experiences? “Nah.”
OK then, what about his dorm life? “I lived in Bobb Hall. Hated it. Got out into an apartment literally as soon as I could.”
What did he — as a lifelong food obsessive — eat in college? “When I lived off-campus and no longer had a meal plan, I would occasionally steal a meal [from Norris’ cafeteria] by filling a tray with food, then walking back out the entrance into the seating area without going past the cashiers. I’m not proud.”
It was so easy to reduce Steve to a monolith of misanthropy. And yet, it didn’t take much to get him out of his shell. His succinct answers about college and music were accompanied by an entire recipe for vegetable soup, a starry-eyed admiration for Upton Sinclair and Ida B. Wells, and a generous spiel against Barstool’s hypermasculine toxicity. By the time we met on Zoom, I knew how to get the conversation going.
Clad in a black jumpsuit with a matching surgical mask, schoolmaster-ish glasses and his signature gray beanie, Steve peered at me from Electrical Audio’s control room in Chicago as I sat on my bed in New York City. Soundproofed and solitary, he rarely looked away from the screen as I, sweaty-palmed and stammering, asked for some culinary advice for a college guy who could barely make mac and cheese in his dorm microwave.
Steve: “Don’t do anything elaborate, just do some simple bullshit. Scramble some eggs. I make my own food basically exclusively now. … We have a garden at my place, and we eat out of the garden all summer. Once you get in the habit of making your own food, you realize that it’s actually not difficult and you can cook to your tastes. Like, if you feel like having fuckin’ tacos five days a week, have fuckin’ tacos five days a week! I really love being able to, at the spur of the moment, start with nothing and 30 minutes later you’ve got a big fuckin’ meal.”
Curtness be damned — Steve Albini, the scourge of CBGB, the emperor of engineering, the navigator of noise, was absolutely gushing about cooking, right to my face. “Don’t get hung up on recipes — learn techniques,” he continued. “Once you get over that initial hurdle of learning the one technique, then the world is your oyster.”
My anxiety melted away as Steve went on and on, his cuss-laden musings punctuated with “likes” and “ums.” For such a deliberate, discerning man, it seemed I’d cracked the code to his heart. Even when Steve inevitably lapsed back into his terse persona for a moment or two, he remained gentle.
Steve’s true tenderness, however, shone the brightest in one of his shortest comments. “I’m actually not a journalism major,” I told him toward the end of our conversation. “I’m an art history major. This is the second interview I’ve done.”
Steve: “Well, you’re doing great so far.”
He couldn’t have cared less that I went to Northwestern. He couldn’t have cared less that I was in WNUR. He never even responded when I sent him my published article, but it couldn’t have mattered less. Beyond merely tolerating my intrusions into his never-ending schedule, he took a moment to compliment and encourage me. Three years and several interviews later, he’s still the only one who has.
My final correspondence with Steve Albini came a year after that fateful Twitter DM, when I emailed him an invite to my band’s show at a bar in Chicago’s Logan Square — our first gig that wasn’t in a cramped Evanston basement. Committed to the well-being of his colleagues and family, Steve had continued to avoid large gatherings well after the last pandemic restrictions were lifted and respectfully declined. “Hope it goes well regardless,” he wrote.
Steve Albini wrote songs about murder and arson, and he played those songs on an aluminum guitar that he strummed with a copper pick. He wrote edgy zine articles in his 20s and made snarky tweets in his 50s. At some of Shellac’s final shows, he wore a shirt that read “I am begging you to stop e-mailing me.” If these are the things you choose to remember him by, I won’t stop you. But right behind that veneer of intensity, there was a big old softy who could wax eloquent about French chef Jacques Pépin for hours at a time, who would miss out on packed concerts to spend the evening making dinner for the love of his life, and who — without a shred of hesitation — looked up from the mixing board to speak to a starstruck fanboy.
“Thanks for talking to me. See you later,” Steve says as he waves at me from his computer screen, and I’m almost positive that I can see a smile emerging from beneath his mask before he disappears.
See you later, Steve. Thank you.
Zeki Hirsch ’24 of New York City graduated from Northwestern with a degree in art history in June 2024.
Reader Responses
Thanks for writing this. I’m glad to see Steve’s Northwestern days memorialized (if not necessarily by him). I met Steve sophomore year, while he was spending his student loan money to make his first album. He was crazy smart, ridiculously talented and totally hilarious. That time he put up a sheet of Plexiglas behind Norris and invited people to throw things at him: genius. Though he was genuinely surprised when the Plexiglas broke. Whoops.
He introduced me to a bunch of bands I enjoyed much more than Big Black, which I found — and still find — unlistenable. But it was fun to hear him talk about it. He taught me how to make eggs, smoke clove cigarettes and stop living some generic version of the Big 10 college life and start figuring out how to forge my own path.
Anyhow, we were supposed to get dinner last time I was in Chicago, but he canceled at the last minute, saying hopefully we would both live long enough to catch up later. His death was like a kick in the head. As a mutual friend put it, “albini presence seemed permanent.” Requiescat, my friend.
—Lori Montgomery '84, Washington, D.C., via Northwestern Magazine
I didn’t meet Steve at Northwestern, but I appeared in the Rubber Teeth (comedy magazine) calendar with him. He wasn’t involved with the magazine, as I recall; someone just knew him. Oh, and he could grab his crotch by putting his arm behind himself. Multitalented!
—Toni Gallagher '87, United States, via Northwestern Magazine
Nicely done, Zeki. You caught a glimpse into a soulful guy — and made me want to go scramble some eggs.
—David Beard '81, Santa Monica, Calif., via Northwestern Magazine
No one has commented on this page yet.
Submit a Response