Albini
Look, without him there would be no Cadence & Slang, no Draft, nothing. None of it. He is why I do what I do. He built his own building from the ground up, owned every inch of the practice, charged a fair price without much regard for the rest of the market, and sat in his own integrity. I’m sure he would have hated what I did for my job if it had ever come up, and he would have really hated my music taste if it had ever come up. But he was a profound inspiration for my own independent streak when I was starting out, and then he was an inspiration for me when he went through his own personal reckoning for some of the dumb things he did. I had first pick of dorm rooms on campus my sophomore year and I chose the one he lived in. I never told him, because that would be weird.
He was one of the greatest writers our generation has seen, and he would never want to be called one. His essay about music was a generational shift, essentially creating indie rock. His letter to Nirvana is one of the greatest pieces of marketing ever written. His posting was s-tier, right up to the end. You could disagree with him, but you would always know that the guy had taste, and the sheer soul-level resolution of his opinions would make him one of the more fearsome debate partners on the planet.
But really, he was just another Chicagoan. He was one of us. He hung out at our bars. He went to our barbeques. He lived inland, in a neighborhood far away from the tourist map. He picked serviceberries in June. He picked up the phone when it rang, and he always had the time. He will be known globally for his work, but he will be known here because he had the spirit. He had the thing that everybody who lives here knows you must have in order to function here.
I ran into him at a couple of barbeques over the years because Chicago is 12 people, and all we did was talk about food & baseball. I’d ask what he thought of trades, what teams he thought had a chance, or what he’d been cooking lately. Almost all of it was meat, fried, or both. He’d remember me from some past barbeque, poke at me for some incorrect opinion I held, and we’d both just be out there, two Chicagoans, remembering some guys, dying softly in the sun.