Alex Goldman Reads to You

Read to the end for yet another Steve Albini eulogy

I was at my most voracious as a reader in probably 2009. I had a 45-minute subway commute to my tech support job, cell phones didn’t work in the subway at the time, and, most importantly, I didn’t have a smart phone (for whatever reputation I have as a tech person, I was a late adopter to cell phones, smart phones, twitter, instagram, and even substack).

Fast forward to the present, and my attention span is pretty much ran through. I have a hard time picking up a book when I could doomscroll or text my friends or play video games or noodle on my guitar. I’m struggling to hit about 15 books a year, and frankly, I’m over this.

One facet of my twisted psychology is that it’s much easier for me to do things that are good for me if they have some secondary benefit. I struggle to get on a treadmill, but if I can use a bike for transportation instead of a car or a train, I’m in. So I’ve been trying to manufacture that benefit somehow in my life, and then I stumbled upon an idea: reading would be inifinitely more attractive to me if I were reading to someone as opposed to just reading on my own, to myself. So let me ask all of you — if I had a night or two a week where I got on twitch and sat around reading a book for 90 minutes or so, would you join me? Please answer the poll below:

If there are enough yesses, I plan to start reading at 8:30 PM ET on Mondays to start. Maybe another day if it seems popular. If you are a person who absolutely needs some kind of visual or written distraction while performing tasks, there will be the twitch chat, or you can just goof off on Twitter or whatever. I’m not your boss.

The big question is what to read - I don’t know the rules about reading books that are still in copyright, but I feel excited to try maybe reading one anyway, and if Twitch doesn’t like it, they can just take down the archive of the stream and I can start over with a public domain book. And to be honest, there are plenty of public domain books I need to read anyway. If this idea goes over well, I’ll drop a possible list of books to read next week.

This could be fun! Or you all could hate it! No way to find out except to ask. I’ll let you know how it went last week!

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A little bit of housekeeping: I realized in my post of every job I’ve ever had ranked, I left out one very formative job, so I am going to put it in this newsletter. Just know if you are referring to that post, this job would sit between my job as a Subway sandwich artist, and my job at WNYC.

Mover (2010) - My friend Dave from college started a moving company a couple years after I moved to NYC, and every so often if I needed some quick cash or to justify a fancy purchase, I would work a day with him as a mover. I began working for him more regularly to supplement my income when I quit my tech job and started working as an unpaid intern at WNYC. In some ways the job was great - a lot of my friends from college worked there, it paid pretty well, I got exercise, and my friend was the boss so I could always appeal to him when something weird happened, which was fairly frequent. For example, I had a mover bail on me when we were supposed to be doing a morning job in the West Village, only to find out that he was in New Jersey, on acid, and too high to get back to the city and help. Dave filled in. Another time I didn’t take into account the moving truck’s insanely wide turning radius and clipped a city bus. The client, the bus driver, and the cops all started yelling at me, and I was very overwhelmed. Dave came and helped. The actual work wasn’t bad, and the payt was solid (and all cash) but the hours and the work were brutal, and the customers were by and large rude cheapskates.

If you could mentally project this description to that post, I would appreciate it. The editors of the Cool Dude Zone apologize for the oversight.

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When I was in high school, I knew I liked music that lived on the precipice of chaos, and my musical palette was pretty broad, but I hadn’t found my band yet. Until one day in roughly 1993, when I picked up a new non-album Nirvana single that was back up by band called The Jesus Lizard on the B-side. I had never really heard anything like it — it sound like a controlled demolition. It sounded like driving a car that was perpetually coming apart. The singer was nearly incomprehensible, but the opening lyric was very clearly and very menacingly “get me something to stop the bleeding.” It was energizing and unsettling and silly and angry all at once. It was perfect.

That song, along with the first four albums by The Jesus Lizard, were recorded by music engineer Steve Albini, and I quickly found out that he was responsible for much more that I liked than I realized. He produced the first Pixies LP, the best Wedding Present Album, the last Nirvana record, PJ Harvey, Silkworm, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Cheap fuckin’ Trick! His track record was solid enough that when I found out he was an engineer on an album, it inspired me to give it a chance.

He was also a musician, behind the bands Big Black and Shellac among others, and he had figured out a way to get a sound of his guitar that sounded like sort of like a buzzsaw, and sort of like a jackhammer. It was unrelenting and sometimes deeply frightening.

When Terraform, the second Shellac album was released, it was such an event in my little world that my friend Michael and I recorded it to cassettes and had our inaugural listen while we were tripping on Robitussin in the woods in the middle of the night. It was the best possible way I could have experienced it.

And then I learned more about him as a person. On the one hand he was an outspoken and principled critic of the music industry. He refused to take royalties on records he worked on, he was loathe to work with major labels at all, he charged big bands a fortune and if you were a tiny band and he liked your music, he’d charge next to nothing. On the other hand, he was a notorious edgelord and misogynist, who wrote long screeds in indie publications about his fascination with disgusting porn and was generally, deliberately, as off-putting as possible. I mean, the guy had a band called Rapeman.

But in his final years, a wonderful thing happened. He became a poster. He got on Twitter, and later Bluesky, and was incredibly open about to answering not just sychophantic questions about his work, or technical questions about his process, but questions about his past behavior as well. He expressed contrition and made no excuses for himself, and demonstrated in his support of marginalized communities that he regretted some of his more out there behavior.

Much of his antagonism was very silly. I saw him play a show at a bowling alley at 10AM on New Year’s Day one year, a time which he explained they chose because it was too late to have stayed up all night, but too early to get a decent night’s sleep. They toasted Pop-Tart’s on stage and handed them out to the crowd. Another time his band played a 21-and-up show in Chicago, and the next afternoon played a 20-and-under show. I was there, and believe me, they were checking IDs and only letting kids in.

I got to interview him for a story that never aired about an album called The Futurist which was released by his band, Shellac. It was only meant to go to his friends, so they printed the name of every recipient of the album on the front cover, and circled the name of the specific recipient on the front cover so if you sold it, the band would know. He was polite but cantankerous and slightly impatient, and had no real interest in me or the questions I was asking. I expected absolutely nothing less.

Steve Albini defined the sound of a music scene and of a number of years of my life. I only spoke to him briefly, and he seemed put out to have to talk to me at all. But I’ll miss him.

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I usually put up a Spotify playlist at the end of my newsletters, but this week I’m doing a Steve Albini playlist, and it will not surprise you at all to find out that he despised Spotify and all the ways they had eroded pay for artists, so he pulled all of his music from the service years ago. As such, this week’s playlist, both Albini’s own music and music he produced, will be a YouTube Playlist. Please keep in mind that this playlist barely scratches the surface of his total recorded output, this is just the stuff I know and love. RIP, friend. I hate Steely Dan too, but I’ll never achieve as pure a hatred of them as you did.

since it appears that Substack is not liking me trying to embed a playlist, please follow this link

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxavrnzhxM9u4_EoeXDpXLdBNjY_Z8UAy&si=1qreIbEfwtO3IHnG