Within the early days of Southern California’s hardcore punk explosion, John Albert went to Arizona along with his buddies within the Orange County band the Adolescents. Being a roadie in these days meant driving at the back of the truck with the amps and the tools. After they drove throughout the desert for eight hours, a brawl broke out on the gig. Albert locked himself within the dressing room, gathered up all of the deli platters and booze, and climbed out the window. The present could have been a bust, however because of Albert’s fast considering, they’d sandwiches and beer for the lengthy journey dwelling.
As a young person, Albert threw himself into the L.A. punk scene, the place he made a lot of his lifelong buddies. In an essay about seeing Black Flag for the primary time, he wrote concerning the suffocation of suburban ennui. “I’ve minimize my hair brief and might’t cease smashing home windows.”
Musician Ben Harper, who grew up subsequent door to Albert and was 4 years his junior, witnessed the transformation: “I’ll always remember the primary time I noticed his Mohawk spiked to the moon. It was as if he had landed from outer house.”
A beloved participant in and observer of the L.A. underground, Albert died of a coronary heart assault Could 3. He was 58. His loss of life was confirmed by his brother, Jesse.
Albert grew up in Claremont, the youngest of two kids. His father, Robert S. Albert, was a professor of kid psychology at Pitzer Faculty and his mom, Julie Maehling Albert, was a social employee at Loma Linda College. From an early age, John Albert was drawn to a aspect of L.A. that others didn’t respect or might even see. Wherever he went, others adopted.
As a musician, he performed an necessary function in L.A.’s punk rock scene as a co-founder of the influential Goth-punk band Christian Dying, which he shaped with Roger Alan Painter, a.okay.a. Rozz Williams, in late 1979. “Christian Dying began in our storage,” mentioned Jesse.
“Jay Albert and his squad launched Southern California to punk rock,” Harper mentioned, “particularly within the 909 and the Inland Empire, the place he and I grew up.”
Later, Albert signed on because the drummer for the San Fernando Valley punk rock band Bad Religion although his good friend, founding member Brett Gurewitz, wasn’t enjoying within the group on the time. Albert additionally jammed with different L.A. bands, together with the New Romantics with Jack Grisham of T.S.O.L. and DFL with Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys. Albert’s stint in Dangerous Faith got here to an finish within the mid-’80s when he checked himself into rehab to get assist for his hardcore heroin dependancy.
After he emerged 18 months later, Albert reinvented himself as a author. He wrote concerning the metropolis he liked and displayed a knack for dissecting L.A. on the intersection of glitz and dirt. He had a temperament completely fitted to documenting the incongruities of town on the flip of the century.
John Albert’s “Wrecking Crew” is a nonfiction account of a staff of addicts, ex-cons and semi-reformed dirtbags whose members recapture a chunk of their innocence on the baseball diamond.
(Winnie Kessler)
Albert wrote for different weeklies and magazines, together with LA Weekly throughout its heyday, and the influential literary journal Slake, based by Laurie Ochoa (now basic supervisor of Meals at The Instances) and Joe Donnelly. Albert was a eager observer and an intuitive critic. It didn’t matter if his topics had been on the rise or previous their prime in response to Hollywood’s ruthless calculus of cool — Albert was capable of dismiss the hype and get on the essence.
In an LA Weekly cowl story concerning the Pink Scorching Chili Peppers, Albert thought-about the band’s legacy — warts and all: “David Bowie acknowledged that the American public actually solely remembers the three largest issues any artist has carried out. Sadly, for the Chili Peppers this might include nudity, drug dependancy and funk rock.”
“He had a method and he had a approach of understanding the important elements of the story,” mentioned Donnelly. “He was unencumbered by prejudice or snobbery when it got here to seeing what the guts of the story was. If it was a narrative with soul and that means, he didn’t care if it was cool or not.”
Maybe his biggest and impossible literary achievement was his 2005 memoir about baseball and dependancy, “Wrecking Crew: The Really Bad News Griffith Park Pirates.” The e book is a nonfiction account of a staff of addicts, ex-cons and semi-reformed dirtbags whose members recapture a chunk of their innocence on the baseball diamond.
Taking part in baseball with damaged individuals, Albert was capable of reconnect along with his youth. “After I look again on these two seasons of Little League,” he wrote in “Wrecking Crew,” “they appear just like the relative calm earlier than the storm, a lingering second of true childhood earlier than I used to be swept up in a wave of teenage nihilism, petty crime, and punk music.”
For Albert, the sport stuffed a gap he didn’t know he had. “For somebody like me,” he admitted in a profile in The Instances, “an anti-social mental who had spent his life sneering at any type of middle-class normalcy, becoming a member of a baseball staff felt oddly subversive.”
“Wrecking Crew” started as a narrative that ran in LA Weekly and developed right into a book-length memoir of brutal honesty and gallows humor. Albert’s longtime good friend Jerry Stahl calls it “one of many nice unsung books about Los Angeles — specifically, the East Aspect.”
The e book was twice optioned by Paramount. Then, Philip Seymour Hoffman acquired the choice, which ended with the actor’s loss of life by unintended overdose in 2014. Such cosmic irony would unravel some writers, however Albert took it in stride.
“He was extremely unimpressed with fame,” Donnelly mentioned. “He had well-known buddies, buddies of nice renown. He had infamous buddies. He had buddies with legendary and epic lives. None of that mattered. What mattered to John was having a soulful relationship with individuals.”
Albert wasn’t an actor however possessed the arrogance of somebody at dwelling in his personal pores and skin. Though he just lately accomplished a biography of nightclub impresario and conservationist Eric Goode and “Wrecking Crew” is being developed for tv, his buddies recalled that he seldom talked about what he was engaged on or what he was as much as.
“John had a present for being all for different individuals,” Gurewitz mentioned. “At a cocktail party, you would seat him subsequent to essentially the most awkward individual as a result of John might discuss to anyone.”
The riff that runs by way of all of Albert’s writing and relationships was his nice humorousness, which ranged from the scatological to the acerbic. “John was one of many funniest individuals I ever met,” mentioned Stahl. “His humor was so dry you may not know to chortle immediately, however the chortle at all times arrived.”
Albert by no means overpassed what he went by way of to have the type of regular life that many individuals take without any consideration, and he helped many Angelenos of their struggles with substance abuse. Harper recalled how Albert supported him within the early phases of his sobriety: “He helped pave the best way for me to not drink. He was a touchstone after I was white-knuckling it.” Albert inspired him to think about what the day after could be like if he relapsed. “Instantly, I’d be again in my physique,” Harper mentioned.
“He was a rock star of a human being,” Gurewitz mentioned.
Albert is survived by his 9-year-old son, Ravi, and his brother, Jesse.