A Friend Sends a Special Gift from Beyond the Grave

The music iconoclast Steve Albini had a gift for me in 1997, but I didn’t receive until last week — nearly a year after he died.

I’ve owned thousands of records over the years — LPs, EPs, 45s, 78s, box sets, flexi-discs, bootlegs, test pressings, promotional freebies, and more. But the LP shown above — Shellac’s self-released Futurist album, which showed up on my doorstep last week — is unlike any other record I’ve ever owned.

Some quick background: Shellac was a noise-rock band fronted by the Chicago-based indie/punk iconoclast Steve Albini. Steve was best known as a producer/engineer (his credits include Nirvana’s In Utero, the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa; the Breeders’ Pod, PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant’s Walking into Clarksdale, and tons more), but he was also extremely influential in underground circles because of his first band, Big Black (I was a big fan), and because of his writing in a bunch of indie publications (which had a huge impact on me during my 20s).

I never hung out with Albini, but we communicated periodically over the years. He was a fan of my 1990s zine, Beer Frame: The Journal of Inconspicuous Consumption, which led to him writing the foreword to my 1997 book, Inconspicuous Consumption: An Obsessive Look at the Stuff We Take for Granted, In 2023, I published a long, wide-ranging interview with him, in which we discussed the visual aesthetics of records and bands, the uniforms worn by the staff at his recording studio, the unusual way that he strapped on his guitar, and a lot more. I don’t mind saying that I consider it one of the best things I’ve ever published.

Steve unexpectedly died of a heart attack last May. About five months later, in October, I received an email from someone close to him, as follows:

Following the demise of the band Shellac after Steve’s untimely death, I am helping to disburse their effects into the universe. One of these things is a copy of the “friends” record they put out; you were one of the friends printed on the cover and therefore due one of these. According to the ancient Records of Yore, you were never given yours. If you don't mind sharing a shipping address, you should be getting a care package from Shellac Inc. at some point, now decades past the original effort.

I vaguely knew what this note was referring to, although I had to consult the internet to refresh my memory on the details, which are as follows: In 1997, Shellac self-released an album called Futurist. It is sometimes referred to as “the ‘friends’ record,” because its front cover lists the names of 779 of the band’s friends, along with the following preamble:

FRIEND! At most, people become what their friends enable them to be. In our case, we are (all of us) what we have made of ourself, among ourselves. You have been one of us, a friend, and we love you. Comrade! Friend! Thank you!

So what they were saying there, I think, was essentially, “Thanks for your support of our thing. And we, in turn, salute you and your thing!” It’s a nice message.

Futurist was not made available for retail sale. It was produced in a limited edition of about 800, so that each of the 779 friends listed on the front cover could receive their own copy, plus a few extra copies were made for friends who fell into the “Oops, we forgot to include them!” category. (If you scroll up to the photo at the top of the page, the blank box at the bottom of the cover design is for these “Oops” people, whose names were written into that box.)

I remember hearing about all of this when the LP came out, but it never occurred to me that I might be one of those 779 friends listed on the cover. Yet apparently I was, at least according to that email I received five months after Steve’s death. I had no idea!

Another four months went by after I received that email, during which time I forgot about the whole thing. Then, last week, a package arrived in the mail. Inside was a copy of Futurist. There on the cover were the preamble and the 779 names, including mine, which was circled.

You can see a more legible listing of all 779 names here.

I am sooooo thankful that my first and last names didn’t split over two lines, like the names directly above and below mine.

Every copy of Futurist has the recipient’s name circled like this (or, for the “Oops” people, written in), making each copy distinct and personalized.

I wondered how many of the other 778 intended recipients never received their copy when it originally came out in 1997 and instead received it after Steve’s death, as I did. I put that question to the person who sent me my copy, who told me that most of the albums were mailed out (or, in the case of local friends, handed out) soon after the LP’s release, but then the band got busy with other things and a bunch of copies languished for years — for decades — somewhere in Albini’s recording studio. At the time of his death, there were 124 of these undistributed copies. Of those 124:

• The person I communicated with has so far successfully tracked down 57 of the intended recipients (including me) and sent out their copies of the album.

• Attempts to contact another 45 people — via Facebook, record labels, etc. — have so far been unsuccessful, but efforts are ongoing.

• Another 16 people are names that the remaining band members no longer recognize, and Googling these names has so far not turned up any connections.

• Six people have died.

Wow. Personally, I’m very happy with how the timing worked out. I mean, if I had gotten the LP back in ’97, I certainly would have enjoyed that — I’m sure it would’ve made me feel “cool,” like I had a certain status. But receiving it now, in the wake of Steve’s death, is much more meaningful. It’s like he left behind a little piece of himself for me. (The 28-year gap also makes the album’s title, Futurist, nicely prophetic.)

I’m apparently not the only person who feels this way. My contact says that one recent recipient “left a really sweet and tearful message in my voicemail about how much it meant to him.”

Steve was a perfectionist, so I think he’d appreciate my one gripe about my copy of the record: The spine is torn right in the spot where the band’s name was printed.

Dang.

Man, I hate it when an LP’s spine text is marred, off-center, or otherwise imperfect. It ruins the presentation when the records are filed away on the shelf! If I had encountered this record at a store, I would have put it back in the bin and chosen a different copy with a properly intact spine. Obviously, that isn’t possible in this instance, so I’m trying to view this slight flaw as another unique detail of my copy of the album. (As you may recall, I also have some strong feelings about book spine design.)

As for the music: The 10 tracks on Futurist were originally recorded for the Montreal modern dance group La La La Human Steps, so the music is all-instrumental and more abstract and experimental than most of Shellac’s other work — not really my thing, honestly. (If you’re curious, you can hear the entire album here.)

But in the case of this record, the music isn’t that important to me. What matters is the physical object, the communitarian spirit of generosity that went into its conception, the sentiment that led to my name appearing on it, and the story of how it finally made its way to me, 28 years after the fact. Even though I’ll probably never play it again, I know I’ll always smile when I see it on the shelf, split spine and all. Thanks, friend.

Right there in the center.

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Inconspicuous News Roundup

• Here’s something I’ve never seen before: a sidewalk snow plow. This one’s being used in Alexandria, Virginia, although some other cities also use them. Check it out (additional info here):

(Photo by Bluesky user @alexgoyette.bsky.social)

• I spotted this beautiful old hand-painted sign a little more than a mile from my house the other day:

I especially like the dot (instead of a hyphen) in the phone number.

• Here’s an old Bell Telephone ad with a great little phone spokescharacter I’ve never seen before:

  

  (Photo from Mid Century Advertising group on Facebook)

• Here’s a highly entertaining deep dive on the font that’s used on lots of keyboards, among other places. Spectacular work — wish I’d written this myself. (From Steve Silverstein and Neal Pozner)

• Another thing I wish I’d done: I just became aware of this excellent photo project from 2014, which documents the END sign at the terminus of every dead-end street in Brooklyn. The concept is admirably obsessive, the pics are wonderful, the accompanying text is very smart, and the repetition of all the ENDs becomes a mantra of sorts. Highly recommended.

(Photo by David Mandl)

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.