In six soon years, Big Black pushed underground rock to become edgier, scarier and more pyrotechnic. On a handful of EPs and two full-lengths, Sprayer and Songs about fucking, were released, Steve Albini, who died Tuesday, wrote about everything from child abuse to murderous gangsters and always with a wink as if shining a dark mirror back on buttoned-up middle America. But by 1987, the band — which included guitarist Santiago Durango, bassist Dave Riley and a drum machine called Roland — decided it had accomplished its mission. So they booked a farewell concert at a steam plant at Boeing Field in Seattle.
Thanks to a video called The Last Blast released in the following years, the concert became legendary. The video shows Northwesterners dressed in clean white T-shirts walking through the dirty factory. Among those in attendance were Soundgarden's Kim Thayil, Green River's Mark Arm, and Mudhoney and Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, the latter of whom is visible around the 31:14 mark of the video per Dangerous minds. Steven Jesse Berstein read some poetry, and then the band came out to perform an aggressive set list of fan favorites like “Kerosene,” “Jordan, MN,” “Bad Penny,” and “Cables,” among others. When they were done, they destroyed their instruments.
“[The promoter] Larry Reed shut it down like you would at a wedding or a bar mitzvah,” Albini recalled in a 2017. Rolling rock interview. “He booked this industrial power plant and they said, 'Yeah, sure, you could do that.' You had to drive on a certain access road to the airport and you had to go through a checkpoint and show them your ticket and they would let you just drive into the airport. And then you'd go to this power plant and then you'd see the concert. It was on a makeshift stage surrounded by this huge equipment and machinery. It was really fucked up. It was one of the weirdest places we've played and one of the weirdest gigs I've ever been to.”
He also recalled a moment a famous client reminded him of years later. “I remember after I broke my guitar, this kid asked if he could have a piece of it that was on the ground,” he said. “I said, 'Sure, yeah. It's rubbish now.' Then when I was working at In the womb album with Nirvana, Kurt Cobain said he had asked me if he could take a piece of my guitar and I told him he could, and he still had the little guitar piece. The point of this story is that it was a really cool concert and weird things happened, and long after the fact, people remember the cool things that happened.”
Although the band vowed never to play again, Albini and Durango reunited with the band's first bassist, Jeff Pezzatti, who played in the Big Black's. Bulldozer and Racer-X EP, for a rare gig at a festival celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Touch and Go label in 2006. They began their four-song set by lighting firecrackers on stage.
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