Hello, this is Ben Cissario. I'm a reporter at the New York Times and I am the guest

host this week for Popgast. We're just like. We're just like. We're just listening to Keracy by Big Black, the band featuring Steve Albini, the

legendary musician, producer, in quote marks, iconoclast, gadfly of rock music, who recently

died at the untimely age of 61. And I am joined here by two esteemed guests to talk about his

legacy. First, I'm joined by Jeremy Gordon. He's a senior editor at The Atlantic and written a lot of great pieces for The Times.

And Jeremy wrote a major feature, an interview with Elbini last year in The Guardian, which we're going to get to.

Jeremy, thank you for being on the show.

Thanks for having me. And next we have Joe Gross, freelance writer, long time culture writer at the Austin American

Statesman, author of the 33 and a third book on

Fugazi Inn on the killtaker. And Joe, I'm going to embarrass you. This is like

personal for me since we met as college students more than 30 years ago and right from the get-go you were like

Mr. Steve Albini and I'm sure that you taught me a great deal of what we're going to talk about today.

So Joe, thank you for being here for

journalistic and personal reasons. Thank you, man. This was a tough one all around.

The untimely death of Steve Valbini, somebody who we've seen it talked about on social media in the last day or so,

just a larger than life presence who meant so much to so many different people. I want to wait on getting to his music. We will get to that in a minute, but I wanted to know if maybe we could start by talking about character, like his character, the character he embodied in the music world, which

seems to be one of the things that people are responding to.

He was the troll who had this like zealous moral compass and eventually he

apologized for his trolling he took accountability and and I think that that really resonated with people and a lot of what you're hearing in people's responses are just like moral side of what he was all about, both in how he made music and how he comported himself.

Jeremy, this was a big subject of your interview with him in the Guardian last year.

Can you talk about that side of him and maybe about how that piece came about?

My editor at The Guardian had reached out to me because he had wanted to a sign up profile on Steve for a very long time

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