WHAT A GOOD SHOT, MAN
AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD PATRICK OF FILTER
With the quiet release of their seventh album since 1995, Crazy Eyes has Filter sounding gritty, raw and aggressive as ever. Frontman Richard Patrick wanted to have complete control over the project, and with a little help from Pledge Music and his beloved fans, the product seems keenly in line with his vision. Crazy Eyes gets heavy, really heavy, but has enough industrial digital-machinery to keep it from sounding like anyone else. Every song is unique, which is a very rare format these days. It takes guts not to put out any sure things, not to use the cookie-cutter. Whether you like it or not, Patrick’s latest release is true to his past and true to himself.
I had the opportunity to talk to Richard Patrick over the phone just as he had launched the aptly named “Make America Hate Again” tour and was on the road in support of the freshly released album. The resulting conversation was humbling, informative and somewhat reassuring. Patrick is a man who is not shy to express himself, and no subject is beyond broach. Herein he speaks on the inspiration for the new album, the future of planet Earth, his relationship with his father, record company heydays and his early education with Trent Reznor in Nine Inch Nails.
Richard Patrick On Crazy Eyes:
“The gunman who shot everybody up at VT, he was like one of the first ones where clearly something was going on in his eyes. You’ve got Adam Lanza, you’ve got all these nuts who just pull out guns and start shooting people. The guy in Aurora, Colorado, you know… crazy eyes. My wife and I just started going “Hey there’s another crazy eyed killer out there.” Sandy Hook was so horrifying as a father, and it leads to this huge gun debate. In Australia a guy showed up with a bunch of guns, had this big shooting and they just banned all the big weapons. I think you can still have a hunting rifle but pretty much all the other weapons were taken away… and the country was fine with it. And in America it’s a huge issue. They have one of the biggest lobbyists in the world, the NRA. It just leads you to look past it and say why are they doing this stuff? Why is it so hard to take guns away from nuts? And it just leads to the hysteria of everything. We are instinctive. There’s a lot of stuff that’s hardwired into our DNA that hasn’t caught up with our intellectual side. It’s just that. Why are we so flawed? Why is this still happening? It’s too early for us to have these kinds of guns. We’re not a mature enough species to be running around with fuckin’ assault weapons.”
“I mean, I’m a little crazy. The hysteria that runs rampant in the world is because it’s so easy to see that shit. I have a pretty high threshold of what I can see; us punk rockers would go to a midnight viewing of Faces of Death IV and freak ourselves out. But our lives were so damn good we wanted to know about that dark side. For some reason there’s a morbid curiosity that goes along with being a young man. If my daughter wants to get on the internet and wants to see art that I think is okay, like Mapplethorpe, I can understand that, and I would be there. Hopefully when she’s a little older… but she can literally say “Hey Siri, give me images of gunshot wounds to the head,” and that’s what’s going on in the world.”
On Music Today:
“The only thing musicians want to talk about these days, they don’t want to talk about things that are dark or bad… they don’t want that. They want to hang out at the club and drink Cristal. I think it’s time for music to get back to what it was. It takes a whole lot for a record to get off the ground and happen, but with Pledge Music it really helps out. ‘Cause the fans told me that they wanted something like short bus. I’m not going to dig out my computer from 1995, but I will make a record that’s aggressive. I love screaming, and I love heavy. I got into it with producers who said I could sound so much more worldly if I tried this or that. “Take a Picture” was kind of a prank at the time. Everyone was releasing heavy stuff like Korn and Limp Bizkit and all that stuff. So I was like “I’m gonna do something that’s super sweet.” I wanted the music to sound the way drugs felt to me; and I would talk to you about my father and my drug problem in this bed of gorgeous music. I was a raging alcoholic and I was worried about what my dad would think. In the show, the “Make America Hate Again Tour,” there’s an amazing moment that I discovered. We put “Take a Picture” right next to “Take me to Heaven,” which are both about my father who passed away last year. I have this amazing musical moment that feels good for me. The audience looks pretty teary eyed when I’m done, but I have to do music for myself first right?”
“So I’m there singing and we get to “Take a Picture” and then I get to (the lyrics) I wonder what he’s thinking about now and it gets darker, then it resembles the feeling I had when my father died. Then we get into “Take me to Heaven,” and I’m pretty much an atheist at this point. I think religion has screwed everything up. I think people should start focusing on real issues and not praying to the sky every time they want to fix something. I’m glad it makes you feel good but why can’t gay people get married? Because religion’s all up in their business.”
JS: “Is there anything you hear now, that you think is groundbreaking or important?”
“It might be out there but I haven’t heard it. My shit is the Deftones, Pantera, U2. There is a lot of great music out there, and I need to discover it. I need to hang out with my younger bandmates and listen to what they listen to, but then I end up being like “That sounds like bullshit” and I don’t want to be that guy. I mean we broke down the doors… I was in Nine Inch Nails. Bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden, Jane’s Addiction, Rage Against the Machine, that was the shit.”
On The Environment:
“I’m outspoken. They say, ‘Yeah but a lot of your music is famous in the red states,’ but they have to be enlightened as well. They have to know the only one that’s going to fix this place for thousands of years is us. My kids are going to grow up and Los Angeles is going to be a dry barren land where people used to live. Because they burnt up too many carbons. Because they were squabbling about it. Because the oil companies wouldn’t listen. They were just sticking their fingers in their ears. They were saying climate change isn’t real. I want to go on the record as one of the guys that sat there and said we need to do something. Because when my kids are in their fifties and sixties, it’s going to be a really hard time for them. I recently saw the movie The Road, and there’s this old man, Robert Duvall, and he’s like “It’s all gone… it’s all gone” and I think what if that’s my daughter? I know how fast time flies. I’m 47 years old and in my mind I’m just getting started. Climatologists are saying that at the current rate of dumping out all this CO2, at the rate we’re polluting the world, it’s going to be very different in 50 years. It’s going to be a different place. You can erase the coast line and move those back 600 yards, which is just enough to destroy economies. New York city, Miami, all that stuff is going to be under water. But no one’s listening.”
“People don’t want to know about climate change, they don’t want to know. So for me that’s even more hysteria. It’s just all one big Crazy Eye. One big crazy-eyed fucking killer. Whether you’re driving around a big car and spewing out massive amounts of carbon-monoxide for 10 years, or you’re showing up with a fucking gun. It’s the same level of insanity. You know the gun thing is in your face, but the other attitude that the culture has on a massive level is, ‘Its all good! It’s all good, it’s OK!,’ and it’s not.”
“When they start doing things like they’re doing in Paris, in America, where it’s just two or three people. All of a sudden the chickens are coming home to roost. Americans don’t even realize that like 200,000 Iraqis got killed, and with every Iraqi, there’s 10 family members that are pissed. The Americans are like, ‘wow I can’t believe the Boston bombings’ and I’m like, ‘just wait.’ And it’s not right. It’s just coming. The hysteria is coming. It’s coming back.”
On U.S. Politics:
“It’s like Stephen Hawking says, we are all global citizens. You know, the democratic status quo is Hillary, and the outsider with the crazy ideas is Bernie Sanders. Bernie represents what I would like, Hillary is probably what we will have to go with. I mean you can’t make this kind of change overnight. The Coke brothers have bought way too much of congress.”
JS: “I know we are all frightened over here (Canada) that Trump is going to win.”
“Nah if he wins you’re going to have a mass exodus. And I’m either going to fight it, or I’m going to move to Canada and beg you to let me write songs for you. I’m going to be like “Escape pad launch sequence five-niner!”
On Singing:
“You have to do a combination of a few things. It’s like baseball pitching. He’s going to throw his arm out if we don’t pull him out now. So you pull him out. The scream, I have to be careful with it. I have to make sure that when I’m doing it, I’m not ripping it to shreds. So I sing where I need to, and be in tune, and then I scream at the end or two or three points in the song. Sometimes I open up my mouth and it’s just there. Every note is a raspy scream. It’s different every night. Chris Cornell once told me it’s like setting up a golf shot. You have to check in with yourself, “Okay, what’s going on today? Did I smoke too much? Do I need to stop talking for four hours?” It’s wild. It’s always tough at the beginning of a tour, and what do they do? They give me 10 shows in a row. I vape. I like that. It doesn’t seem to really hurt it. It kind of levels it out a bit. Because you know, you can get clear; I can rest my voice and do super high falsetto but I sound like a choir boy. That’s okay for “Take a Picture,” but for the rest of my stuff I need a little rasp. My vocal doctor says he can give me steroids forever, but I need a little inflammation. It’s just one of those things where you’ve got to keep an eye on it. You can’t drink. Thank god I got sober because that was really bad. And here’s the other thing: You have to warm up. You have to really, really warm up. You’ve got to start 45 minutes to an hour before. But sometimes you’ve got to just say to the audience, ‘Oh man my voice. Does it sound good to you guys? Can you help me sing some stuff?’ You use it in the show as a way to be a human being. I believe that a person’s eccentricities and strangeness are really important to singing. I kind of like a little challenge. I didn’t rehearse much for this tour. I have to handle it. You know what I mean? ‘Oh fuck I fucked that up!’ I have to handle that. It’s a little bit of Evel Knievel taking the jump. It gives me the sporting challenge to be charming. I’ve seen U2 like 10 or 15 times. Bono routinely misses lyrics and he’d just say “Ah its coming to me lads… sing it for me.” It’s beautiful. There’s one of the best, he’s up there with Chino, and Roger Waters and Neil Young, and I like that daredevil act. I like that I can get that. I want to sound as confident and rehearsed as possible too, so I might have just shot myself in the foot but the reality of it is I can just sit there and look good.”
“I had a meeting with my record company and I said please give me the conditions that I had with Warner Bros., and they said, ‘what’s that?,’ and I said they just let me sit at the computer and make a bunch of noise and I came up with “Hey Man Nice Shot” and “Short Bus.” I just need to be left to my own devices. And they were fine with that.”
On The Future:
“I finished the record and just had some massive back surgery, and then I got a movie score. That’s my future. At some point it’s going to become obvious with all that’s going on that I need a backup plan in the world. I haven’t quite mastered it (film scoring) and that’s what makes it exciting and fun to me. That brings you to a new level of concern as an artist, like ‘God I really have to make it up to them if I fuck this up.’ I’ve got to do this better and that better.”
“I’ve already had my morning constitution. That’s quite the challenge on the road, you know, you have to find a place to go to the bathroom. You wake up you crawl out of your bunk, there’s no pooping in here. You go in with a pack of baby wipes and a paper towel in the other hand, and it’s time for a shower. I mean I have babies, so I kind of know it’s possible that you can clean yourself up that way.”
On His Time With Nine Inch Nails:
“It was a very tumultuous, crazy, fun, exciting education on what to do and what not to do. We were ultimately extremely ethically punk in what we were all about after I joined the band. When I joined the band it was “Pretty Hate Machine.” There was a lot of stuff on the record where we were saying I hope you like it, because we’re going full industrial. When Trent played “Head Like a Hole” I was like that’s what I’m into. Like heavier, meaner. And when Trent released the broken EP, he said you know I really took to heart a lot of the attitude that we have together, and I listed you as an influence on the record. It said he was influenced by his “live band”.”
“I understand fully that it was Trent’s thing and he wanted to be the man, but when he said, ‘yeah man, if you want to write songs and stuff go for it,’ I thought that was awesome. So I tried to bring “Hey Man Nice Shot” to it. Trent said ‘This is really good, but if I do this I’m going to own it.’ That’s not sharing and being in a band, that’s like all of a sudden I’m not going to have anything. I want a future. So he told me ‘Well there’s a little pizzeria down there.’ It was so unbelievable that he was suggesting I go serve pizzas. Damn. There’s nothing. All I wanted was the standard stuff. So I took “Hey Man Nice Shot” to a record company and said “What do you think of this?” They said it was awesome. So I said “Hey listen, I’m really poor and I don’t have anything.” They said “but you’re in Nine Inch Nails. Trent lives in a mansion in Beverly Hills, what are you talking about?” “Yeah that’s just it. I want to have a future.” So they said, ‘Well this is just ridiculous. Shit dude. We’ll give you a (large sum of money). That’ll make up for it. This is great music. Let’s do it.’ That was Mike Austin.”
“Then I was drinking with my brother’s friend Joe Silver; he said, ‘Hey Richard’s cousin is a big movie producer and he loves “Hey Man Nice Shot.” Listens to it all the time.’ He says ‘what are you doing now?’ ‘I’m really scared, I’m here to work on the Nine Inch Nails record but… he doesn’t… want… anything… from me really. I have this huge offer from Warner Bros., and I’m a 26-year-old kid. And I was a late bloomer. I was a very young 26.”
“So I think well I have this manager friend that I met at Lollapalooza. That was Richard Bishop, and I called him up. He says, ‘Hey Richie, you know I really love “Hey Man Nice Shot.” It’s really great. Who are you talking to over at Warner Bros?’ ‘This guy Mike Austin.’ ‘That’s Moe Austin’s son, who started the label with Frank Sinatra. He’s kind of a big deal. Let me take this to some of my friends.’ Within two or three days I had five major labels that wanted to sign me. They said, ‘Do you want to start a bidding war, because that’s going to leave everyone kind of pissed.’ I said, ‘Dude I just want them to understand that I use an eight-track, and my Dad’s ‘Realistic’ speakers from Radio Shack. That’s the kind of shit I use. Are they OK with that? I don’t want to spend a bunch of money in a studio, I just want to be on my own in Cleveland.’ They said OK. We think we can make you huge. And it just unfolded in front of me. It was just this massive escape pod. Every time I play “Hey Man Nice Shot” I say, ‘This is my escape pod.’”
JS: “So you never get sick of it then?”
“I never get sick of “Hey Man Nice Shot.” Trent was really young too. Everybody was really young. Trent had been burned earlier on in his career and had issues with sharing and stuff. He’s his own boss and he needs to hire people that work for him. I understand that. I was the first guy that left and had massive success, and then Charlie Clouser, and then Sean Beavan, and then all these guys started realizing maybe we should strike out on our own and do our own thing.”
On Record Deals:
“I remember getting a parking ticket and being horrified. Going in to see Richard Bishop and being this nervous kid and they are like “Rich is everything all right?” I say I can’t afford it, it’s too much money, and they say “Well Rich, do you need to borrow some money buddy?” “I guess so” “We’re going to give you some cash. Just sign this paper.” “Why are you giving me 6,000 dollars?” “Because Richard we got a deal memo from warner bros today.” “I can’t fuckin believe this.”
“On Hollywood and Highland there was a little pizzeria that had an office space above. It’s where Henry Rollins had a book store, and they turned it into a little studio. It was very nuts and bolts, like I couldn’t turn the sink on or it would leak water into the unit below. So Mike Austin is on his way to a Bar Mitzvah, he gets up there and says “Let me get this straight. The demo that I’m listening to, you did with this stuff?” and I said “Yeah, this is my cat Tabitha that ate half the woofer.” It was just so humbling. He says, “Rich we know you have other offers, and this is not how we normally do this… but this is fucking awesome. This is so humble and so charming, I’m just going to sign you and we are just going to make everything work.”
“So then after everything was signed up I had to take the long drive back to Cleveland and I got another ticket. This one was 300 dollars. So I get home and I put my ticket on the table and in comes my Dad, who has been raising me forever, and he’s got this adult son who wants to come back home. He comes in and says “Goddammit Richard. What is this ticket right here?” I’m like “Oh shit yeah. I got that driving across the country on my way home.” He says “Well what am I supposed to do? You want me to pay for it?” and I’m like “Hey dad. Chill out. You’re talking to a Warner Brothers recording artist right here.“ and he goes “Hmph. What kind a money is in that?” “You know they’re giving me a big advance. I am sorry about the ticket, I’ll fix it… but I don’t have to worry about that stuff anymore.” And he goes “REALLY? What do you mean they’re giving you money?” “They’re giving me like 40 grand to get me through renting my own place and setting up a little studio… but the advance is like (Large sum of money).” Dad was like “(Large sum of money)?! And then what do you do?” “Well I have to finish the record and I have to get it mixed. Then Dad, I have to get a publishing deal.” “What’s that?” “It’s when they know the song is good so they advance you all this money so they can own a percentage and administrate it.” I’ve never seen him so happy. “My son is going to pay his parking ticket!“ He was so proud. I thought to myself I better make sure this record fucking good.”
“The song came out and there was no radio promotion at all. It was on the Demon Knight soundtrack. Song number 11. There was a DJ in Colorado Springs; he heard it and started playing it and all these people started calling in. Next thing you know it was a massive hit and we hadn’t even mixed the rest of the record.”
“There’s a dark side that happens, that’s why I call it “new fame.” Once you have an addiction, with booze and drugs, then suddenly it gets ugly. So “Amalgamut” (Filter’s fourth release c.2002) was an ugly time for me, but it was still a great record. But I had to clean up. I couldn’t take being sick. Then I had to work my way back, and I had to figure out what my audience wanted. I like to release records fast. I can’t stress this enough… Pledge Music. After the internet’s rampant destruction of the industry, Pledge Music is actually a really cool spot for artists to do quick research and find the funding they need. I’m sure Taylor Swift has a really cool studio in her house, but bands that are speaking out, and saying what’s wrong with the world, I don’t think it’s ever easy for them. The political thing is part of who I am.”
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