The Shellac and Big Black frontman, who recorded classic albums by Nirvana, Pixies, PJ Harvey, and more, has died of a heart attack
If you’ve listened to anything in the last 30 years that could be characterized as alternative rock, you’ve heard his sound. Utterly shocking to me.
Wow… I actually have an Albini playlist. I could often pick out music he recorded by the drums. In an interview with Steve, Dave Grohl, and Chris Novasellic, they said that Kurt wanted to work with Albini because of the drums.
“That’s our snare!”
Just heard this a minute ago. I still have my jacket with the matchbox from Atomizer painted on the back. Death of a motherfuckng giant.
I heard it when it broke on AM news radio two-ish hours ago. Absolutely shocked. Besides the production work he did his Shellac album At Action Park was one of my most-played albums in college. Somewhere I have a collection of whatever written work of his I could find in The Daily Northwestern (he was a journalism major.) He was a quirky dude especially in his writing, and he made some fantastic music, whether his own or others. Much too young to be taken away from us.
Yeah, his writing could be pretty great. This article was eye opening to me back in the day.
I met him briefly at a Shellac show. He was a lot nicer than you’d expect. He definitely loved to troll, something he regretted later, but I think it was obvious he was on the underdog’s side. His influence can’t be denied. I didn’t know what to make of Big Black at first, but Songs About Fucking grew on me
He also did comics for the paper as well, and this was his ad for a project for art class he was doing where he invited people to throw things at him and hid behind a sheet of plexiglass. He tried to mostly antagonize the folks he thought were douche bros, like frat guys:
If you want to read the article he wrote about it, you can click here.
Love every track off that record, I brutalized a drummer who only uses a single kick drum pedal trying to cover “Jordan, Minnesota” with its autocannon kick part. He can still bust out the drum part if I play the riff, but he wears out before the second chorus now. Roland was inadvertently the perfect drummer for Big Black.
My favorite track on it is the live version of “Cables”, though. It murders the studio version, and it was recorded at “The only benefit gig I’ve ever heard of where the club owner insisted on taking his standard cut from the door.”
This was his final Twitter post.
Nice. Going out being 100% yourself. I wonder if anyone has ever compiled a collection of “famous last social media words.” Could be an interesting project. Somehow, this one works for Steve, no deisrespecf to all he had accomplished.