Musical from a childhood, Patrick Porter discovered serious literature in his teens. At a point when many of the people in Bailey, Colorado were falling into criminal activities and addiction out of desperation, boredom, and lack of options, Porter graduated from high school two years early and had his first stories published soon after. At 18, he recorded the basic tracks that would end up on his current CD Reverb Saved My Life. Originally released on the cassette Lullabies For Bleeding, the songs have been re-engineered for CD release and some new instrumental parts have been added.
A first book of poetry The Intrusive Ache of Morning was published in 2000. A second collection Nervous Halo, in which the poems are ingeniously mapped out as numbered streets in an urban grid, came out in 2001. Porter's poetry successfully melds highly personal and universal perspectives in well-observed images of the worn surroundings and inner emptiness of down and out American life. The words are bracing and sometimes confrontational but tempered with a maturity that filters out random shock value and verbal destruction in favor of presenting the details and the emotions without self-conscious editorial content.
Under the band name Phineas Gage, Patrick Porter and Josh Wambeke recorded the subtle, spacey album Reconsidered, put out by Camera Obscura in April 2000. The duo also performed with additional musicians as The Wilhites, and briefly worked as Raining On Vivian Street, before Patrick got back to recording solo. Reverb Saved My Life was released in March 2002. The songs on the CD are characterized by Patrick's murmured vocals woven into a lattice of multi-tracked, slightly varying guitar parts. Occasional outbursts of distortion and dissonance give the album the sense of a still night broken by sirens and distant shouting. Comparisons could be made to The Boo Radleys, Nick Drake, Galaxy 500, and Spiritualized, but something particular about the soft-spoken intensity of Reverb Saved My Life recalls Outrageous Cherry, Yo La Tengo, or even early REM. Avoiding the possible embarrassing results of crossing over from one art form to another, Patrick Porter is convincing and authentic whether his medium is poetry or music.
Interview
Nick Bensen:
What were your early influences both as a musician and as a writer?
Patrick Porter: My earliest musical influence was Keith Moon. I started playing drums when I was around 10 or 11, after my dad played me his vinyl copy of 'Live at Leeds' by the Who. As soon as I heard that machine-gun tom-tom intro on 'Young Man Blues,' I knew wanted to be a drummer, and Moon's flamboyantly manic style just kind of cohered with my own youthfully overexcited view of the world. I used to just sit in my room every day after school, mimicking the drum parts on all my Dad's old, scratched Who albums- my real education, I suppose. So Moon was definitely my first real 'hero', or whatever you want to call it.
My first songwriting influences came later on, in high school, when I decided that I really wanted to create articulate songs as opposed to just pounding on drums as hard as I could. Nirvana was the first band to really shape me in that sense, which I guess is pretty typical of most kids who grew up in the mid-90s. Kurt Cobain was the reason I actually went out and bought a guitar. From there my influences were pretty schizophrenically extreme; on one hand I was very influenced by hardcore punk bands like Flipper, The Crucifucks, JFA, Minor Threat, Black Flag, The Stupids, etc, but I also spent a lot of time listening to the shoegazer bands of the period, like The Boo Radleys, Swervedriver, Tindersticks, The Charlatans UK, and stuff like that. The quieter stuff was probably more of a lasting influence on my own songs, to the extent that 'Everything's Alright Forever' by the Boo Radleys is still far and away my favorite record of all time. I've always thought that the influences you cultivate around the high school age are the most potently persuasive, because those years are so tender and close to the nerves. Anything you wind up associating with that specific time period will always pack a certain bite that later years can't quite muster up. So all of those bands still stimulate me more than the majority of recent music. (I catch a lot of flak for still listening to The Pale Saints or whatever, but what the hell…)
As a writer, my earliest influences were strictly the Russians. I pretty much just plowed through Dostoyevski, Chekhov, Gorky, Tolstoy, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and all those guys. I was obsessed with them, especially Dostoyevski. Toward the end of high school I became more interested in American writers- Hemingway and Steinbeck and Faulkner, although I prefer Faulkner to the other guys because I enjoy a little bit more vulnerability or humor in literature than Hemingway was predisposed to offer up in those long stories about war and bullfighting and all that. So, by the time I actually started writing seriously, Faulkner was my man. My early stories and novellas are such 'Light In August' rip-offs that I can't even look at 'em anymore; I get embarrassed.
Nick: What do you like to listen to now?
Patrick: I really like newer bands like The Clientele, Clairvoyance, My Morning Jacket, American Analog Set, and The National Trust. I've also been listening to a lot of Theolonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, Townes Van Zandt, the new Wilco album, and, weirdly enough, when Layne Staley died a few weeks ago, I fished out all my old Alice in Chains CDs, which I hadn't listened to in years, and I'm really surprised at what great albums they are. Just today I was tooling down the highway blasting 'Junkhead' in my car. It sounded really good.
Nick: What do you like to read now?
Patrick: Clichéd as it is, I'm deeply into Kerouac. I think the guy gets a bad rap, because his name is so synonymous with annoying coffeehouse types piously spouting lines from 'On The Road.' For years, I avoided Kerouac because I associated him with so many morons that I know, but now, after reading most of the Dulouz Legend, I find his work to be very admirable for its integrity and sentimental vulnerability alone. Some of those long, trying passages in 'Visions of Cody' are among the most beautiful things I've ever read, and 'Visions of Gerard' is just an amazingly honest book. 'Maggie Cassidy', too. He does get a bit sentimentally mushy sometimes, but I just chalk it up to an overt love of the world that sometimes manifests itself in a kind of Baudelaire-like drunkenness of spirit. I myself am somewhat of a clinical, black-humor laden, detached writer, so it's been a lesson to me to pore over the work of a man who so unabashedly scrawled his feelings down in print, unafraid of any snickering consequences.
I've also been reading a lot of Thomas Wolfe, Emile Zola, Celene, Langston Hughes, and the Bible. Just finished the Book of Job today. It's comforting to read things like the Bible, because, even if you're not entertaining any religious ambitions, the lessons contained within it award you a certain sense of foundation that you can't get from most of the media-driven crap that's touted as so unbelievably important. You begin to understand, at least to some degree, what really matters.
Nick: Your poetry and lyrics both touch on the decay and numbing ordinariness of American life but your poetry seems more vivid and unflinching. Many of your songs have a sense of hushed late-night tension with something weird is happening in the distance. Do you see writing lyrics as a completely separate art from writing poems?
Patrick: I think lyrics and poems originate from the same place, but they're manipulated in different ways. With songs, you're often either restricted or buttressed by the fact that lyrics, for the most part, sound better when written in rhymes. Depending on your dedication or patience, you can whittle lyrics down from a large plume of writing into a kind of conscious bullet that is particularly piercing through its curtness. But lyrics also have more of a propensity for awfulness because you have to be able to work within a limited syllabic framework, and this causes a lot of people to write, you know, the usual crappy lyrics about 'my heart is dark and full of sorrow, maybe I will change tomorrow', or some totally contrived bullshit like that. I usually work pretty hard on lyrics, editing them severely, because I don't ever want to look back on my lyrics with embarrassment, but I've written some pretty corny stuff before, nonetheless. Even some of the lyrics in 'Reverb Saved' I don't like much anymore, but I have somewhat of a justification in that I was seventeen years old when I wrote that album. If that doesn't absolve me, I don't know what will, heh.
With poetry, it's more uninhibited. I usually just scrawl observations down in notebooks for months, and then, when the time comes to write a book, I just peer through all of my thoughts and consolidate them into something that is hopefully cohesive. I believe in the inherent honesty of stream of consciousness writing, though only to the extent that it should be utilized in the first draft. I don't like free-form material when it's presented as finished product, because the majority of that stuff seems so uselessly haphazard, incoherent, and self-involved. I think the true test of any writer is their ability to take the screaming truthfulness of stream-of-consciousness but then have the ability go back to it later and to mold it into something articulate, not just to the overtly literate sort but also to the average guy on the street. One time I was walking down East Colfax after a reading, and this bum asked me for money, which, of course, I didn't have, so I gave him a book instead, just for the hell of it. He opened it up and read a little bit and said, 'Good stuff, man. I'm feelin' ya," or something like that, and that was one of the best compliments I've ever gotten.
Nick: Nervous Halo is the first book of poetry I've read that has the poems assigned a street number for a title (1st Street to 26th Street). Are those streets in Denver? Is this an artist conceit or did you actually go to the streets one by one for inspiration?
Patrick: Well, when I wrote that book, I was living downtown, on Broadway, and I spent a lot of time just walking around the city, absorbing the collective mood of the people and places. The city has always been a bit obtuse to me, since I grew up way the hell out in the mountains in a very small town, so it was interesting to just observe the inhabitants of these cramped apartment complexes and bellowing skyscrapers, trying to gauge how they felt about everything. I became very interested in anything having to do with the city, to the point where I spent hours walking around all night long, exploring the streets and alleyways, meticulously recording anything that I saw or felt or heard. Minute details have always held great value to me, like a burned out light bulb in a motel sign or an old paper cup laying in a gutter alongside the sidewalk- these things are so basically true and they say so much about the people inhabiting the surrounding areas. Details don't have to try to achieve an emotional purpose; they just exist. A lot of writers I know try too hard to realize something specific with details- say, if they're writing about urban decay or whatever, they always go to a picture of a hooker, sitting in the rain, being spat on by passersby, drinking out of an old whiskey bottle- and I look at that and it is so damn obvious that they are trying to make me feel a certain pre-determined emotion that it turns me off of the poem. You can say more just by describing an old newspaper in front of Argonaut Liquors or something. So, I always just try to show things exactly as they are, and you can draw your conclusions from that. Some people tell me that they found poems in 'Nervous HaIo' really sad when I found 'em to be funny, and vice-versa. Like, the poem in halo where I say 'sad' 55 times or whatever, it isn't meant to be sad. I was just sitting there thinking about all of the people around me in these tiny ass apartments, where all you can see of them is this little light in the window, a TV flickering or something, but you know nothing of them- and I looked around the city and realized that there must be a billion of us all living here crammed together on top of each other, yet I only know like 3 or 4 people in this whole damned place, and everyone is too scared to talk to each other…anyway I didn't write that as a sad poem at all- it was more a feeling of exasperation and shrugging, what-can-I-do-about-it humor. Laughing to keep from crying I guess. But then everyone says that they found that poem 'so sad'. Which is falling into the trap in a way…
So, I didn't exactly write each poem to pertain to a particular city street, but the streets of Denver certainly granted me the material with which I constructed the poems.
Nick: The longing to recapture (and improve on) the absolute comfort of early childhood attachments is a recurring theme in your poetry. How does that reflect your own life experience?
Patrick: I have always been interested in the idea of the womb as an alternative to reality. Reversion to the womb seems to be something that everybody grapples toward, whether it be through the avenues of drugs, alcohol, music, overwork, or the accumulation of possessions. Everyone seems to be searching for a certain security that used to be so obligatorily apparent during the throes of childhood. As far as my life experiences go, I just find that I'm not far removed enough from childhood to completely relinquish its mannerisms, and as I move farther into adulthood I find that the majority of things that maturity entails are far beyond me. So, when I'm writing or creating music, I always think of a statement made by Schopenhauer- at least I think that's who said it- that goes, 'Creation is the ability to capture the feelings of childhood utilizing the abilities of maturity'. Or something like that. And I firmly believe that that is true.
Nick: What are you working in terms of prose fiction? Is there a novel in the drawer?
Patrick: Yeah, I've finished two novels, both of which were a bit too youthfully naive for publication, I guess. I'm pretty close to finishing a third one now, and a bunch of the usual agents and publishers are poring over it as we speak, so we'll see what happens. I try not to worry much about publication because I think when you're too focused on other people's reaction to your work it can taint the work itself, which is, after all, completely solitary. But, at the same time, I find myself to be pretty unemployable, so I wouldn't mind being able to create 'for a living', as the saying contends. Between selling books and CDs, I can make the rent, so I guess I can't complain too much.
Anyway, the third novel is way better than the other two, and a lot more publishers are perking their ears at this one, so I have high hopes. Lately I've been reading a lot of biographies of writers I respect, and their life stories give me a sense of measurement, in that I can see how long it took them to bring their artistic inspiration to any kind of tangible fruition. It cheers me up, in some strange way, to think that Steinbeck didn't really publish a successful novel until his mid-30's, or that Faulkner, until he won the Nobel, was thought of as just another small-town eccentric. It definitely helps to give me the resiliency I need to go through all of the usual rejections of trying to forge your name as an 'artist'. So, again, we'll see what happens. Who knows?
Nick: What was it that gave you the inspiration and focus to begin writing and playing music on a fully mature level so young?
Patrick: I've just always had this intense impetus toward creation, even as a kid. Art is work, I suppose, just like any other type of work, so I just look at writing and music as the jobs I'm best suited to do, and nothing more. If I were good at building houses, I'd go do that. If I was a good burger flipper, I'd go do that too.
The music side of things originated mostly under my dad's influence, because he was a disc jockey for a number of years, and he also played in a lot of bar bands, so through hanging out with him all the time, I was pretty thoroughly educated- even at 7 or 8 years old- about rock n' roll. He used to work the all-night shift at KBPI, a local rock station, and while he was on the air I would slip into the radio station's backrooms, where they kept all the extra, promotional records, and I'd just listen to anything I saw that looked interesting. That was a real schooling in music. There were always a lot of older musicians around, as well, working with my dad in these bands, so they'd kind of tutor me and let me mess around with their guitars or whatever. So when I got older, playing just came naturally to me.
With writing, I really don't know where it came from, because I grew up extremely barricaded from any outside literary influences. My friends in high school were more interested in drinking and breaking into houses than sitting around discussing 'Howl' by Ginsberg or something. Writing was just something that arrived of its own accord, and because of this ghostly kind of impulsion, I've always thought of it as my main duty in life. I like music and everything, but it's kind of little-brother ornamentation to the writing. Thankfully, I've had some early luck getting publishers and labels interested in some of my work, so I just went from there.
Nick: Colorado is an odd place since it feels relatively urban and competitive for a rectangular state. Another interesting thing I've noticed about it is that two towns next to each other can seem like totally different worlds - ski resorts near mining centers, prairie gas fields near pristine mountains, new suburbs near ghost towns. Do you have any inside observations to share about the Colorado vibe?
Patrick: Colorado has changed over the years. I've lived here since I was about 4 years old, and it used to be a pretty cow-town type of place; a lot of ranchers and anti-social mountain men. I guess people gradually began noticing the attractively virginal characteristics of the state, and a lot of them began congregating here from other places around the country. All kinds of housing developments and boringly corporate business ventures have been sprouting up unmercifully, depleting the vacant fields and mountainsides that I used to explore as a kid. Because of this strange courtship between the old and the new, the whole place can seem disarmingly incongruent. I see it in my own neighborhood- old, rickety gold-mining shacks mixing with crystalline dream homes built by upper-class newcomers. It all feels strange to me, so I just try to ignore it as best I can…
Nick: How has the enormous Hayman fire disrupted life in Bailey, CO? What's it like to live there in general?
Patrick: It's disrupted things to the degree that I wake up every morning with ashes blanketing the ground outside my house, and that if I light a cigarette or incense or something I keep two ashtrays handy- one of them full of water so that I don't start yet another blaze. Luckily, the fire hasn't come too close to my place, although at night I can see an eerie, orange glow frothing up from the mountainside. I think recent developments in Arizona have given everybody a kind of assuaging, misery-loves-company consolation, but for the most part, things are pretty strained here. It's not much fun to constantly live on the edge of evacuation.
This is a tiny, cowboy town. I live about 15 miles outside of town, on a dirt road that leads up toward Mt. Rosalie. I like it here because it lends me a certain humility and solitude. Nobody here really cares about literature or art; they just discuss TV or football or the latest DUI convictions. In the midst of all this boring regularity, I feel all the more creative, because I'm not around the endless cycle of hopefuls that would crowd around me if I was in, say, Manhattan or something. I've lived in big cities like New York and Chicago, and while I was there I felt somewhat suffocated by all of the people grasping for the same tiny millimeter of opportunity that I was trying to attain. Here, in some tiny town where there's not much more than a gas station and a bar, I feel more liberated. I'm just another small-town guy, and so my inner ambitions are more deliciously secretive.
Nick: Your
recordings with Josh Wambeke on Phineas Gage's Reconsidered
seem to be within the same general style as your solo recordings
but there are certainly many subtle differences. How do the creative
and recording processes of working alone vary from collaborating
with Josh? What would you say are some elements of what Josh contributes
to the music?
Patrick: I think Josh brought in a much deeper understanding of
the technological aspects of music. For one thing, he's really
talented at creating and utilizing effects- he spent a ton of
time while we were recording 'Reconsidered' twiddling with effects
processors and keyboards while I sat around goofing off. I take
a very simple approach to recording, and I'm very visceral as
opposed to technical, so anything beyond twisting a 'Reverb' or
'Vibrato' button on an amp confounds me. But Josh was really good
at that stuff, so he pretty much took care of it. He'd screw around
with a RP-7 for a half an hour and then say 'Okay, you're ready
to go,' and I would just plug my guitar in, play my part, and
waddle away. So that was cool. Also, I was at a point in my songwriting
where I was very minimalist- I hardly even wrote choruses or bridges
into my songs; I just kind of went for a feel, and so hearing
songs like 'Kite' and 'The Side' that Josh brought in- which were
more mathematical in their approach- was an influence on me.
The process of recording with other people was, and is, difficult for me to handle, though. I much prefer writing and recording alone, because when you're in solitude you're much more likely to come up with honest, uncompromising art- after all, when you're alone in a recording studio, it's just you facing yourself in a mirror, in a sense. With other people around, there are always more vain considerations; a lot of competition and things like that. Anyway, it was fun sometimes to have someone else in the studio, but I have to admit that recording alone is more pleasurable for me, or at least it seems to produce a more honest finished product.
Nick: What happened at a recent show to break up the Wilhites?
Patrick: The Wilhites just kind of fizzled out. Nothing particularly dramatic happened at our last show, but the whole thing had the feeling of a frustrated fist pounding out the last vestiges of an overused toothpaste tube. I always secretly thought of the Wilhites as one of those 'Cellmate' bands- 'Cellmate' in the sense that, outside of the group, none of the members would have ever chosen to be in one another's company- we were just obligated to be around each other for the sake of the music. I always felt like the odd man out in that band, anyway, which was strange because I was the bringing in a good portion of the material, but there was just too much rancid pretence surrounding the group, and I particularly disliked a number of weird, sycophantic types that had attached themselves to us, making things all the more frustrating. Our bass player seemed more interested in envisioning himself bounding across the stage of Carnegie Hall than actually practicing his instrument, and in the end all of the pointless 'rock star' talk just got on my nerves. I wasn't interested in being a darling of the indie scene; I just wanted to play music. So, I quit, and that was that. I won't go into details, but the whole thing was pretty Spinal Tap-ish.
Nick: How have
the songs that ended up on your solo CD Reverb Saved My Life
changed since you first put them out on the cassette Lullabies
For Bleeding? What made you decide to rename the collection
with a more optimistic title?
Patrick: When 'Lullabies For Bleeding' came out on cassette, the
song list was much longer. I had recorded this weird EP called
'Car Graveyard'- actually the first thing I ever recorded in my
life- and those four songs (Tax Shelter, Uphill Slowly, Cardboard
Babies, and Car Graveyard) were included on the tape. There was
also a song called 'Employee Lounge' that was probably the best
tune that I recorded from those sessions, but later on, when I
was re-recording some of the drums for the CD, I realized that
the song was way off tempo (when I originally recorded it I hadn't
yet figured out the usefulness of a metronome), so I had to bag
it. There were also a couple of songs (called 'You Don't Owe Me'
and 'Anthill'), that were pretty boring, really. So 'Lullabies'
was much longer than 'Reverb', but there was also much more dead
weight, and the drums were of a crappy drum-machine variety that
I was more than glad to obliterate a with real acoustic set.
As far as the name goes, Lullabies was an okay title at the time, but in retrospect it sounds a bit too Jesus and Mary Chain-ish to me, and besides, I did so much re-mixing and tweaking on the album that I thought it would be inaccurate to put it out under the old name. I originally wanted to print 'Reverb Saved My Life' on the backs of some Wilhites T-Shirts, but we never got around to making any, so I just used it for my own album. Now that I think about it, though, the name is pertinent in that when I was recording that album, things in my life were so weird that recording in that little basement kind of did help to keep me somewhat sane. I don't know if it saved my life, but it didn't hurt it any…
Nick: What was in your mind when you came up with the moving, all-involving instrumental "Tinsel"? What's up with the short jarring piece "Humble Siren" that follows?
Patrick: 'Tinsel' was just entirely made up on the spot. After recording 'Adopt a Highway', which ends on this thick, deep E chord, I just kept strumming the chord over and over again, kind of hypnotized by it. Later that night, I dubbed a weird little arpeggio over the E chord, then dubbed a couple of other guitars playing dissimilar chords, creating this cacophonous foundation that somehow merges into cohesion. I had this big, hollow bodied jazz guitar in the studio that some other guy had left behind, so I just went crazy with this booming, growing chord sound- I think I dubbed the same chords 4 or 5 times over. Then I put this weird distorted guitar over the whole thing, and ended the song with total racket. I fell asleep that night in the studio, in this old, rickety chair, cradling that bulbous jazz guitar in my hands, and when I woke up the next day, the song was just sitting there. I rewound the tape and played it forward and this long, crazy instrumental was sitting at the end of 'Adopt A Highway,' which is a pretty subdued song for the most part. I liked it, so I just left it on there.
'Humble Siren' is just a secret-track afterthought, although its title is actually on the CD so I guess it's not technically 'secret'. I was re-mixing the album in this little studio way out in the mountains of Pine Junction, Colorado, and while I was recording I kept hearing this coyote howling out in the woods. I convinced the engineer (who thought I was a weirdo anyway for reasons we won't go into here) to drag this hellishly expensive vocal microphone way out into the forest; as far as the extension cord would go. I just waited for the coyote to howl, and recorded it over and over. I thought that since the album is so hushed and solitary anyway, a howling animal way out in the woods would be kind of an epitomizing end to the CD. So, anyway, I just tacked it on for the hell of it.
Nick: Which songs from your two CDs still evoke strong reactions in you when you hear them? Which are your own favorites?
Patrick: I still really like 'Last Song From A Booth' because it was recorded so simply, with almost no overdubs, and without any real bridge or anything, just going on and on with the same chord progression. I just find it an appealingly innocent, nice little tune. I like 'Saturn', too, because it reminds me of my first girlfriend (and I like the late-night, first-take lead decorating the end of the song). 'Scratch Paper' and 'St. Louis' came out pretty well, too, and 'Moths On the Dashboard' is probably my favorite off of the whole album. You can tell I was trying to copy Low, but I still love that song.
I'm not a huge 'Reconsidered' fan these days, though it might be because that album was absolutely no fun to record, so when I hear it, I just associate the songs with all the unpleasant crap that was going on while we were making it. I still really like 'Insect Stars', though- I think it's the best song on there, although I might re-record it eventually because I think the production on that song didn't do it much justice. 'Fall All Around Me' is good. 'The Side' is really good, too.
Nick: Are you working on any new music?
Patrick: Right now I'm working on an album called 'As Sure As Sparks Fly Upward'. At least that's the working title. It might take a while to record, because I want to utilize a much wider range of instruments than I used on 'Reverb' or 'Reconsidered'. I have a really good pianist coming in, as well as a violinist and a cellist, so I hope to write some arrangements for them. I'm also interested in using some vibes and xylophones, because I've always liked the childishness of those instruments.
I've been writing in a lot of really weird tunings, tracking 3 or 4 guitars over each other, and I'm really interested in getting a very crystalline, spider-webbish arpeggio sound on the guitar. Overall, I just want to create an album that mixes some very lush, involved tracks with some sparse, finger picking songs. I'm hoping Camera Obscura will release it when I get it finished.
Besides that, I've been recording around town in some other projects, and playing drums in a hardcore punk band called the fire drills, which is a lot of fun. Brings me back to my Keith Moon roots.
Nick: Patrick - thanks so much for taking the time to answer these questions so thoughtfully. I wish you all success with your literary and musical pursuits.
For more information on Patrick Porter's recordings, go to www.cameraobscura.com.au. The books The Intrusive Ache Of Morning and Nervous Halo can be ordered directly from Patrick by e-mail (syrupbaby@hotmail.com) for $10 each.
Interview (c) 2002 Patrick Porter & Nick Bensen.