DrAwkward wrote: Wed May 08, 2024 3:53 pm Look. I could make another long as fuck post explaining all the ways Steve Albini touched my life. I could talk about how "The Problem With Music" fundamentally rocked my world and caused me to re-evaluate my approach to and relationship with music. I could talk about the day that I walked into my dorm room and my roommate Kory was listening to his new copy of the just-released At Action Park and how it bowled me over. "Are guitars allowed to sound like this?" was a real sentence I uttered. I could talk about digging a copy of Atomizer out of the WRST library at 3:30 AM during a Cross Currents shift because "oh, shit, this is Albini's first band" and how I spun "Bazooka Joe" in a vacant campus building in the dead of night and it scared the shit out of me. There's the time Shellac played the Concert Cafe and he stopped playing right in the middle of "Prayer to God" to ask me to shut the fuck up and not sing along right in front of him because it was throwing him off rhythm. (I apologized after the show and he apologized back. "No, I'm sorry, I'm the asshole here.") There was the time I interviewed him for the Milwaukee AV Club and I got a bunch of angry reader comments because all I asked him about was baseball (fuck, man, how many questions can he answer about recording, anyway? Google exists, find one of 5000 other interviews!). Then Shellac played Club G later that week and a bunch of us threw thrift store granny panties up onto the stage mid-song (they thought it was hilarious). There was the time they played with Fugazi at the Congress Theater and they closed with "Didn't We Deserve" and a bunch of people there JUST for Fugazi got REALLY AGITATED. There was the time HiFi gave him a ride back to Electrical after the Drug Church PRF BBQ and he helped us load out before we left, then proclaimed his love for "a broke-dick van" like ours.

I could go on. But really, the gift that Steve left us, his real legacy, was in living in a way that brought me and my loved ones into the orbit of SO. MANY. WONDERFUL. PEOPLE. Because of the Electrical Audio message board I have met literally hundreds of amazing people, some of which I count among the people I love the most. You people changed my life, and Steve changing my life through his art and his ethos was the catalyst for that.

I hope that when it's my turn, that people look back at me, and they remember me for the connections I had a small part in fomenting, because human connection is, when you get to the core of it, all that matters in this goddamn world. I think Steve knew that and I hope that wherever he is right now (if he's not facing off with Bradley in a vicious poker game right now then Heaven isn't a real thing), he is proud of the human connections he was a catalyst for, because this world is a fucking shit show and having wonderful people to ride it out with is the best gift any of us can hope for. Thanks for everything, Steve.