By Jim Walsh
When his friends and family gather to remember Suicide Commandos co-founder Steve Almaas on Friday, September 18 at Hook & Ladder, the mood will undoubtedly be similar to memorials held for him in his hometown of Beacon and stomping grounds of Manhattan, New York earlier this summer.
“I thought they were fabulous. Casual but poignant. They all kept saying, ‘You can feel all the love in this room,’” said Almaas’ sister Janet Almaas Pickford, who joined surviving Commandos Chris Osgood and Dave Ahl, and Ahl’s wife, photographer Lisa Nebenzahl, to plan the Minneapolis memorial.
Sitting at the dining room table of the Ahl-Nebenzahl home in Richfield, the four friends tried to wrap their collective head around the Minneapolis-to-New York rock & roll legacy of Almaas, and the fact that he’s gone too soon, felled by throat cancer at age 69.
“I’m a couple years younger than Steve, so my whole life was, ‘I can get into the bar because I’m on the band list,’” said Pickford. “That was great. But he’s always been sort of this larger-than-life thing. When I try to explain to friends, I say, ‘Well, he’s kind of a big deal in Minnesota.’ And I’ve had so many of my friends say, ‘Well, that was a bit of an understatement’ when all this stuff was hitting the newspaper and hitting Facebook [upon his death].”
A longtime public-school teacher of media in New York and a beloved employee of The Woodstock Public Library, Almaas was the forever young bassist-singer-songwriter of The Commandos, who remain the godfathers of the Minneapolis punk scene. They have been an inspiration for original music makers for decades since, and a testament to the idea that friends who crack one another up make for the best bandmates.
“If you spend two or three years of your life in a van with somebody, you develop a collective sense of humor that just comes automatically,” said Osgood. “But Steve was automatically and instantly a good fit with me and Dave because he’d been to parties at Utopia House, and he knew how cool we were, and he respected that. You know, he thought, ‘Wow, those guys are cool.’ So we were a little bit like older brothers to him, slightly older.”
Osgood and Ahl graduated from Minnetonka High School in 1972, and Almaas graduated from Hopkins Lindbergh in 1975. Upon formation, the trio set out on tours of any place that would host their loud, fast, funny, and smart blasts of noise at the dawn of punk.
“We played CBGB [Club] a couple of times, and Max’s Kansas City in New York, but we didn’t make any money because nobody came to see us. Until finally they did,” said Osgood. “You have to remember that we were a little Minnesota band, and we were trying to make a living making music that everybody hated.”
What would his longtime bandmates want people to know about Steve?
“Great musician, really good songwriter,” Ahl reflected. “He didn’t write songs at first, and then he just jumped in and started writing simple little rock songs. And he became such a good songwriter with all of his later Americana stuff. Just really great songs with all these harmonies, and this great countryfied stuff.”
His fellow bandmate Osgood agreed: “Yeah, there’s always going to be one cool turnaround or a chord change that I didn’t anticipate in in all of his songs; no two songs of Steve’s were ever the same,” he said. “People ask me about it, and when you’re in a band with somebody, it’s not a friendship. The way I describe it is, it’s an ‘everything-ship.’ You’re on the same ship together, and you’re headed in the same direction. And Steve always was the one that set our goals. Besides getting a recording contract, you know, we all knew we wanted that, but it was Steve’s idea. It was his idea to do [the Commandos 2017 album] Time Bomb. After [Ramones drummer and producer] Tommy Erdelyi, the last of the Ramones, died, he goes, ‘We’re all still alive. Let’s make a record! You got any songs?’ I go, ‘No.’ He goes, ‘Okay, get busy.’ I’m like ‘Yeah, right!’ He already had a whole satchel full.”
There was a sweetness and innocence to Almaas, which added to the Commandos’ chemistry and helped set them apart from the angrier punk bands of the day.
“I’m going to tell this story at the memorial, too, of when Steve went camping for the first time with [longtime friend and Commandos cohort] Casey [MacPherson] and I,” said Osgood. “We got to the campground, up at the very top of the mountain, and we were unloading. It was Steve’s first time out there, we’re setting up camp, the tents are up, Casey’s chopping wood for the fire, and I’m making dinner. Steve goes, ‘Well, I guess I’m gonna have to sing for my supper.’
“From that day on, the division of labor was established for the balance of the camping trips: Steve would sing for his supper while Casey chopped the wood and I cooked dinner. He’d play ‘Pancho and Lefty’ and other covers, just everything from the great American songbook.”
“Campfire songs,” Ahl said.
“Yeah, we all had guitars, so after we were done doing the hard work, we joined him around the campfire at the end of the night, Osgood added.
New York was where Almaas made his home and where he made a name for himself amidst the burgeoning alt-pop-country scene of the Lower East Side. But he got his start in Minnesota, and as Ahl shared, the Minneapolis memorial “is necessary to do Steve respect, us respect, and Minneapolis respect.”
As Osgood supplements, “Bring him back home and have him with his family on their own turf and be able to feel that love.”
“It’s cool that [former The Crackers bandmates] Karen Hagloff and Jay Peck are coming back too, and [longtime friend] Jody Kurilla is going to say something, and [editor and publisher] Andy Schwartz is going to say something, so we really get to represent the Minnesota part of Steve’s life,” Osgood expresses. “Crackers was his first band out [here]. He had such a big life in New York. More than half of his life was there.”
Nebenzahl reiterated Almaas’ widespread impact.
“Steve really cut a wide swath. A lot of friends, a lot of history. But the same is true here, and it’s kind of like two sides to this, like two bookends,” Nebenzahl describes. “He’s a Minnesotan, he was proud of that, and in New York people talked about him being a Midwestern boy and all that, but I feel like it’s such a big bubble in New York, and we need to embrace him. Celebrate him as the homeboy who done good, because that’s really what he did, and not only with music.”
The foursome concluded last week’s session by talking about Steve as a beloved son, brother, husband, father and grandfather. They also talked about his latest work with The Steve Almaas Selection and tracks he recorded with famed alt-pop producer Mitch Easter that have yet to see the light of day.
“Steve for sure had a kind of sincerity and capacity for romance. He could write a love song and he wrote them often, to the very end,” said Osgood. “I didn’t get how much of a community organizer Steve was out of New York. Not only for the downtown scene early on, but after Beat Rodeo and all that up in the Hudson River Valley. He put a lot of stuff together and hooked a lot of people up.”
“Hence, three memorials,” said Nebenzahl. “Because they’re all flavored differently.”
Friday’s memorial at Hook & Ladder will include a performance by Osgood and Ahl’s acoustic duo The Warblers, who will honor their fallen friend with a version of Almaas’s Commandos hit “Attacking the Beat.”
“We hope this will make him happy,” said Osgood. “We hope to give him a good salute.”
Steve Almaas’s solo discography can be found here. His tracks are also prominent in The Minnesota Music Archive:
The Suicide Commandos, “Mark He’s A Terror” b/w “Match/Mismatch” (P.S. Records, 1977)
The Suicide Commandos, Make A Record (Blank Records, 1978)
The Suicide Commandos, The Legendary KQRS Concert, 1976 (Garage D’or Records, 2007)
The Suicide Commandos, Time Bomb (Twin/Tone Records, 2017)
Steve Almaas, Beat Rodeo (Coyote Records, 1982)
The Beat Rodeo, “What’s The Matter” b/w “Mimi” (Coyote, 1983)
Beat Rodeo, Staying Out Late w/ The Beat Rodeo (Zensor, 1984)
Subscribe to our newsletter for new columns every Wednesday, delivered directly to your inbox.
Jim Walsh is a veteran singer, songwriter, columnist, journalist, author, and historian from Minneapolis.
He can be reached at jim@demomn.org