MINNEAPOLIS — When the last original member of New York’s legendary punk band the Ramones died in 2014, Steve Almaas was the one who faced down the mortality within Minnesota’s first widely celebrated punk group, the Suicide Commandos.

“The Ramones are all dead, and we’re all still alive,” Almaas told his Commandos bandmates. “We should make another record while we’re all still here.”

The bassist and co-vocalist of the trio that literally taught Hüsker Dü, the Replacements and Soul Asylum their trade, Almaas died Friday at his home in Beacon, New York, while in hospice care for cancer. He was 69.

That impassioned message to bandmates Chris Osgood and Dave Ahl in 2014 is what prompted the Suicide Commandos to finally make “Time Bomb,” the follow-up to what’s considered one of the first punk-rock albums on a major record label, “Make a Record.” Almaas instigated a lot of other action within the pioneering group over the decades, well after he moved to New York City in 1979 and performed with other bands such as Beat Rodeo, Crackers and the Raybeats.

“Being in a band is so much more than just a friendship, it’s an ‘everything-ship,’ and you really have to get along,” said Osgood, who started playing with Almaas in 1975 when the Commandos first formed.

“We in the Commandos all got along so well and just shared the same sense of humor, and Steve was a big part of that. He made it special. And fun.”

Almaas planned to play one last gig with the Commandos at First Avenue in March, a 50th anniversary farewell show with guests including Hüsker Dü’s Bob Mould and the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn. However, in the weeks leading up to the show, the bad news arrived that the oral cancer he had been fighting since September had metastasized to his spine.

“I will be there in spirit,” Almaas wrote in a Facebook post in March after he bowed out of the final gig, where the Suburbs’ Steve Price filled in on bass.

He also wrote, “I wake up every day thankful for the love and support I’ve received from family and friends.”

Almaas experienced a couple of strong doses of newfound love in the year or two leading up to his death. He had moved in with his girlfriend, Brandy Burre, whom friends praised for taking care of him during his cancer and hospice treatments. Then just days before his passing, his daughter Solveig Almaas of Durham, North Carolina, went to visit him with her newborn daughter, Loa, in tow along with his first grandchild, Sully.

“Solveig was just the light of his life,” said Almaas’ sister, Janet Almaas Pickford of Hopkins. “He really loved being a grandpa, too.”

The oldest of three siblings, including middle sister Judy Almaas of Hopkins, Steve grew up in St. Louis Park and graduated from Hopkins Lindbergh High School in 1974. His dad, Egil, was a longtime worker for Northern States Power Company and was born in Norway, and his mother, Val, came from Danish parents. Janet said, “His stoic Norwegian roots really showed” as his cancer diagnosed worsened.

Steve often cited the same landmark moment pinpointed by many other musicians his age for what set him on a musical path: The Beatles’ 1964 appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” He played around with basement bands as a teen until auditioning to join Osgood and Ahl in the Commandos in 1975.

“His enthusiasm and his energy were just undeniable,” Ahl remembered in a joint interview Sunday with Osgood, recounting how Almaas was quickly recruited. “And he was just so easy to like and get along with, too.”

The Commandos helped launch the Twin Cities’ underground music scene that centered around Jay’s Longhorn Bar in downtown Minneapolis in the late 1970s, but they weren’t content on just being local scene-makers.

They hit the road soon after forming and wound up playing CBGB in New York alongside the Ramones and Talking Heads. They also landed national distribution for their debut album, “Make a Record,” via the Mercury subsidiary Blank Records in 1977, a few months before the Sex Pistols’ “Never Mind the Bollocks” came out and jump-started the punk rock movement.

With all three Commandos sharing singing and writing duties, Almaas delivered his share of the trio’s signature tunes, including “Attacking the Beat” and “I Need a Torch.”

“The Commandos paved the way for Hüsker Dü, the Replacements, Soul Asylum and countless other Twin Cities bands,” Mould of Hüsker Dü said.

The Suburbs’ bandleader Chan Poling concurred, saying, “The Suicide Commandos were the first, the founders, the godfathers of the alternative rock scene in the Twin Cities.”

Poling also became close friends with Almaas beyond the musical camaraderie: “You couldn’t meet a sweeter, more positive, sincere man,” he said. “I loved him.”

When the Commandos were pulling into the Big Apple for their first gig there, Osgood and Ahl remembered the bassist dramatically singing, “New York City! New York City!” as the skyline came into view.

“It was obvious he was going to end up moving there,” Osgood remembered. “He was instantly smitten.”

Almaas’ relocation to New York prompted the Commandos to call it quits in 1979. Once in New York, he fell in with several other bands, including one group with other Minnesota expats called Crackers, which also featured Karen Haglof, his first of four wives. Haglof later became an oncologist and helped him navigate his recent rounds of treatments.

Ahl said, “One of the things Steve was really known for in New York was bringing people together and making things happen there. Which is just how Steve was.”

The best known of his New York bands, Beat Rodeo — which Almaas fronted — is considered a pioneering act in the Americana/alt-country genre. The group recorded two albums in the early 1980s for I.R.S. Records, then the label for R.E.M. and the Go-Go’s. Their first LP was made with R.E.M.’s early producer Mitch Easter.

“There was always something up and catchy in Steve’s songs,” Easter said. “They connected to a kind of accessible American rock music with roots stretching back to 1950s folk scene and rockabilly, but the presentation was Steve’s own.”

Easter became a longtime collaborator who worked on some of Almaas’ solo albums, including: 1995’s “Bridge Songs;” his most recent one, 2021’s “Everywhere You’ve Been;” plus a new batch of tunes Almaas had been working on over the past year even after receiving his cancer diagnosis.

Easter said of what will now be Almaas’ posthumous record, “There is a summing up quality running through it that’s profound and now heartbreaking.”

Both Almaas’ sister and his Commandos bandmates weren’t at all surprised he kept making new music up until the end.

“Music really was what drove him, even going back to when he was a kid,” said Judy Almaas Pickford, who believes Steve also enjoyed his “day jobs” as a high school media teacher and as a librarian in Saugerties, N.Y.

Said Osgood, “He was working feverishly on this last batch of songs, and it’s a testament to his will power and his love for music he got them done.”

Suicide Commandos also just dropped a new album in March, “Highway 16 Revisited,” a live recording of a 2023 gig at Hopkins Center for the Arts that would be their final performance as the original trio.

Though all three band members were disappointed Almaas could not make the farewell show at First Avenue this spring, Almaas gave the other two his blessing to perform and “was a big part of it in every way,” Osgood said.

“Steve was a full-time member of the Suicide Commandos up until a few days ago,” Osgood firmly declared. “He’ll always be the best friend many of us ever had.”

Memorial plans are pending.

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