from here to utopia
So here’s the thing about writing about Pat the Bunny: I’m not really sure how to do it without this piece becoming willfully autobiographical and self-indulgent, in that way that always makes it hard for me to reread my own shit because even a month later it already comes off as gauche. I also lack the ability to painstakingly paint the details of Pat’s career for you since, well, those details are often pretty hard to come by and pretty much everyone already knows the major beats of the musical endeavors listed on his Wikipedia page.
The constructed idea of Pat the Bunny has always presented something of a paradox— ruthlessly DIY, always uncomfortably honest in his lyrics, and extraordinarily humble and approachable, but at the same time many of the major details of his life before and, really, even during his musical career are kept private as can be (which, for the record, I deeply respect), he rarely gave interviews, and as of today his whereabout are mostly unknown. (Last I heard— which is only what I’ve heard from the Hotelier’s Christian Holden— is that Pat answers phones at a Buddhist temple and is doing well, but I can’t 100% verify that, and I sure don’t think Pat would want me to try.)
I started getting really into folk-punk around 2005 and 2006. I’ll save a deep-dive on that genre as a whole and its legacy for September’s Patreon post, but suffice to say that I was really obsessed with the genre around this time; I’m gonna put it all on the line and reveal that I might have been the biggest Ghost Mice fan in the American Southwest. (Don’t worry, I’ve since repented my many sins.) Though it would still be several years before folk-punk’s popularity really reached fever pitch, Pat was already something of a “big name” (relatively speaking) within the field due to his work with Johnny Hobo & the Freight Trains, a semi-solo-project/semi-musical-collective that he started writing music for at the age of thirteen. To put it into context, I first heard about Johnny Hobo one or two years before the release of AJJ’s sophomore album People Who Can Eat People Are the Luckiest People In the World, which I would personally describe as the beginning of the breakthrough for both that band and the genre/scene as a whole. It might have been a vanishingly small pond, but Pat was a big fish.
The reasons for that are clear, upon revisiting: unlike the vast, vast, vast majority of folk-punk artists, Pat could write a fuckin’ song. I don’t just mean in the simple sense that he could write verse-chorus-verse ditties with catchy hooks— I mean that he could actually write compelling, memorable lyrics and deliver them in compelling, memorable vocal patterns. Have all of his lyrics aged well? Absolutely not; my friend Ivan DMed me recently to say that they heard a Pat the Bunny song come up on shuffle and thought it was the literal worst song they’d ever heard in their life, and my only reply was “Well, you’re not in middle school anymore, so that’s to be expected.” I once showed a few Pat songs to a couple friends in college and their response was basically “What the fuck is this?” (Those same friends also made fun of “Sugar Bear” by the Bananas though, so they’re perhaps not to be trusted.) But if you, like me, spent a lot of your time between the ages of 10 to 13 obsessively reading Mitch Clem’s Nothing Nice to Say, Pat the Bunny fell snugly into a lineage of punk songwriters who wrote about punk in ways both incisive and communal, exciting and exhausting. (In this way I would almost say that he was a direct descendant of Lance Hahn of J Church—RIP— but that might not be fair since Lance was one of the most talented songwriters of his generation.)
But enough beating around the bush. Let’s talk about Pat the Bunny’s actual music, starting with Johnny Hobo & the Freight Trains. The earliest Johnny Hobo material, collected on a few self-released (or released on such small labels that it might as well have been self-released) demos with titles like Anarchy Means I Hate You, sound appropriately primordial for a teenager from Brattleboro, Vermont, all acoustic guitars, squeaky vocals, and lame drum machines. But by 2005— and remember, Pat would have been about 17 to 18 while writing and recording these songs— Johnny Hobo released two split records on DIY Bandits, Live at Bandit HQ and Love Songs for the Apocalypse. While the flip sides of those records (Captain Chaos and Mantits, respectively) have mostly been forgotten by time, it was these songs, especially the songs from the latter, that kickstarted Pat’s legacy and created an image of him in the minds of fans that would persist for years to come (much to Pat’s chagrin, given that as early as five years later he had grown and evolved to the point where he resented playing these songs live).
Johnny Hobo’s side of Live at Bandit HQ featured five songs, four of which would proceed to be recorded in much more definitive fashion on Love Songs for the Apocalypse, so we’ll save most of that discussion for that record. However, I would like to draw special attention to HQ’s closer, “The Politics of ‘Holy Shit I Just Cut My Hand On A Broken Bottle’”, which is, I think, one of the earliest signs of Pat’s coming greatness. At this point in his career, most of his songs hovered around the two-to-three minute mark, but “Holy Shit” was a five-minute dirge with long verses and a long chorus, creating ample time for Pat to begin shaping his signature lyrical style— a blend of one-liners (“the only card game I know is strip solitaire”) and storytelling that toed the line between excruciatingly detailed and frustratingly abstract, creating an air that was believably relatable. He sang about getting drunk and throwing up, vaguely gestured towards Marx and Kropotkin, and admitted that he’d let himself bleed after accidentally cutting himself “because maybe the blood loss will add to my high.” This is all delivered over sparse, defiantly amateurish (even by folk-punk standards) acoustic guitar, and in his immediately recognizable, cigarette-burned yelps and howls.
Pat’s voice was really his secret weapon; it’s abrasive and nasally in the great folk-punk tradition, but he has just enough of a hint of melodic sensibility that it’s still listenable. Although he was certainly capable of long, crackling screams, which he usually used to punctuate his points, he more often than not sang in a rhythmic fashion that accentuated the hip-hop influence in his lyrics (I know this sounds like a joke, but if you listen to his music with that influence in mind it’s impossible to un-hear, and if you’ve ever listened to the Playtime Posse album— the rap project he put together with a few of his friends in 2010— even though he’s not exactly Nas he’s still by far the most accomplished rapper on the project), and complemented the way that he played guitar— again, more rhythmic than melodic, strummed hard and fast with occasional bursts of dead air to emphasize what he was yelling.
However, for as much as I love that song, it’s pretty difficult to deny that Love Songs for the Apocalypse is the definitive recording of the Johnny Hobo era. For one thing, it’s clean and crisp, and even though you can literally hear other people in the room singing along with him, Pat’s voice is recorded well enough that he completely owns the space (and I say that even though there are many occasions on this record where he screams so loud into the red that listening on good headphones can give you a headache). Love Songs is, like I said, where you get what many consider to be the best versions of most of the best Johnny Hobo songs: “Church Hymn for the Condemned,” which features some of his best one-liners and a simultaneously cringe-inducing and exuberant cry of “God isn’t dead, but I’ll get that bastard someday!”; “Whiskey Is My Kind of Lullaby”; “DIY Orgasms,” which many consider to be one of Johnny Hobo’s calling cards. Leading the pack at track one is what is often considered to be (and I’m incline to agree) the best Johnny Hobo song, “New Mexico Song.” Lyrically it’s still a bit unformed and unfocused, but it paints a rather evocative picture of youth making an attempt at being in revolt and utterly failing in the face of drugs, drinks, and lost love. “New Mexico Song” is so named because of the famous cry, “That was before everyone moved to New Mexico!”— as we’ll cover later with Ramshackle Glory, that line becomes significantly more concerning in hindsight.
I know I’m tipping my hand here, but I want to emphasize that so much of what appealed to me and many others about Pat’s lyrics wasn’t just his brutal honesty— it was the fact that he was so close to being wise beyond his years, and he knew it, but he couldn’t quite figure it out, and he knew that too. On “Whiskey Is My Kind of Lullaby,” he sings about how everyone’s quit smoking ‘til you offer them a cigarette, and how before someone offered him drugs, “you know, I was straight edge.” Again, with the benefit of hindsight, these songs are quite literally about the process of a middle-class kid discovering the world outside of his quiet suburb, and of trying to bring that world to the shitty parking lots he called home. Many nowadays (and even at the time) referred to Pat as a “crust-fund kid,” and while he’s aware of that— “Class traitor? What fucking ever! I’m just another middle class kid too/But if I’m not good at changing, I’m good at self-loathing, so I’ll class-hate myself with you”— a listen to the lyrics of “Acid Song” reveals how rapidly Pat discovered that he loved being self-destructive:
I took two tabs of acid yesterday afternoon
And woke up this morning with a torn pair of shoes
Found I’d ruined my life and everyone else’s too
I guess this is what my teachers warned me drugs would do
But they forgot to mention the way
The morphine makes the pain go away
And how I’ll always remember the good times in my spine
And the holes I burned in my brain with this next line
In a lot of ways, Johnny Hobo & the Freight Trains was a concept project about becoming a drug addict, similar to Dirt by Alice In Chains. The difference between the two is that while Layne Staley seemed to not want to be this way, Pat was actively choosing it with a smile on his face, embracing the misery with the full knowledge that more pain was on the way.
Johnny Hobo was also a concept project about identifying as an anarchist— not about anarchism, not even propagating the ideas behind anarchism, but about the act of calling yourself an anarchist. “Election Song” is one of the great protest songs of the George W. Bush era not because it actually made a difference but because it emphasized that even the kids who knew something was deeply wrong would rather cut off a toe to avoid getting drafted so that they could keep getting fucked up. It was about so-called “lifestyle anarchism”— in a way, you could compare it to the Camus quote about fashioning your very existence into its own form of rebellion, but I doubt Pat and his friends were thinking that far ahead.
This is perhaps best demonstrated in another EP released during this period, Easter Sunday Hangover, which features one of the most underrated Johnny Hobo songs, “Not My Revolution.” Pat clearly knew enough about theory to namecheck authors, but outright references were mostly used to scoff at those who spent more time talking than doing (“Who can talk feminism the best to get into girls’ pants/and who can quote Emma Goldman the most without having to dance”), despite the fact that he also didn’t really seem to be doing much of anything. In fact, Pat’s future disillusionment with anarchy was already being telegraphed with lines like “Just because I’m an anarchist doesn’t mean that I won’t burn a black flag” and sentiments like “You’re fighting for a world covered again in fields and forests/I’m thinking of a world without bricks and it just seems so boring.” While he would go on to develop a more cohesive worldview in later projects, his approach here is indicative of many weekend-warriors’ thoughts about revolution: the revolution itself was more of a goal than anything that came afterward, and even then, they weren’t really sure what a “revolution” entailed beyond doing what they want. As Pat would remark later, “Well, don’t I gotta want something?”
I’m not exactly sure why Johnny Hobo disbanded— Pat was the principal songwriter and performer and already often toured solo anyway, so he easily could have just continued under the same name. But if I had to guess, I’d say it was because he was slowly becoming all too aware of what I’m noticing here, and his priorities were ever-more rapidly shifting. Johnny Hobo ended in 2007 and was immediately replaced by Wingnut Dishwashers Union, which was… well, another project where Pat strummed an acoustic guitar and screamed his heart out. There’s several splits and EPs from this era that Reddit completionists frequently gathered into sloppily-organized Mediafire files, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who disagrees that their 2009 full-length, Burn the Earth! Leave It Behind! is their magnum opus, and many would argue that it might be Pat’s best work (though I humbly disagree).
Burn the Earth! Leave It Behind! is notable in part because A. it’s rather well-recorded and B. actually features a full-band performance, with the usual acoustic guitar and harmonica being joined by drums and electric guitar and bass for the most energetic and fully-fleshed-out Pat material yet. It’s not just a full-throated roar of purpose from a songwriter finally starting to fulfill his potential— it’s also a virulent critique of himself and the scene, and an attempt to map out his life moving forward. Pat’s beginning to become more lucid and open about his own issues, even if it is still wrapped up in an insecurity blanket of immature revolt— Pat dreams of a day when “not doing heroin will be easy as piss” in a song with a chorus that talks about pissing on the heads of BART policemen and prison wardens.
Wingnut Dishwashers Union is honestly probably most interesting in that it’s one of the few musical projects that feels like an open reaction to the artists’ previous efforts; of particular note is that this record features the best rendition of a classic Pat song, “Never Trust A Man Who Plays Guitar,” in which Pat basically says that everything he sang about in Johnny Hobo now makes him feel like a hypocrite. “The day I rob a bank’s the first day I’m not lying to you or me about what I believe… the day I go to jail trying to rob a bank’s the day I finally get what I deserve.” There’s a palpable sense of regret in Pat’s voice that makes his already-ragged tones feel even more immediate and emotive.
In a lot of ways, Wingnut Dishwashers Union is almost an apology for Johnny Hobo. On na-na-na whoa-oh-oh crowd-pleaser “Fuck Shit Up!” the rousing chorus declares “A punk rock song won’t ever change the world, but I can tell you about a couple that changed me,” and it represents almost the exact moment in Pat’s trajectory in which he finally realizes that the personal is political is personal is political. It’s the other side of the “lifestyle anarchism” coin; you can’t just live like you are the revolution, you have to live in the way that you want to see. On “Jesus Does the Dishes,” Pat balances the banal defiance of “We do our own dishes now, we’ll do our own dishes then” with the popular leftist reading of Jesus as “a dirty homeless hippie peace activist.”
But in my opinion, the best moment in the Wingnut Dishwashers Union discography comes at the end of Burn the Earth! Leave It Behind! with the achingly simple six-minute manifesto “My Idea of Fun,” a song that, much as it might seem corny to admit, still gives me chills sometimes. “If you don’t want to work, then that becomes your job/there’s a lot of overtime, there’s not many days off,” Pat howls, reckoning with the truth that “free time” can stop feeling so free when it’s all your time; it’s a refrain that many of the aforementioned “crust-fund kids” realize after they get sick of choosing to be homeless. (I can’t believe I have to say this, but I’m explicitly referring to kids who actively left a supportive home in order to be homeless as a political statement, not the vast majority of people who were forced into homelessness or the kids who willed up the courage to escape from toxic, abusive situations.)
He memorably refers to himself and other heroin addicts as “work-at-home archaeologists” in one of his most tragically incisive one-liners, goes on to describe at least some elements of what his actual perfect world might look like (a far cry from what many folk-punk artists at the time were even capable of articulating), and openly declares that he and all his friends are “building a new world.” For someone as brutally cynical as Pat often was, the optimism and idealism present in this song wasn’t just refreshing; it was invigorating and inspiring.
One of the few things we do know about Pat’s personal life is that in 2009 he checked himself into rehab, and moved to Tucson, Arizona after getting out. There are some stories from Pat and others about how bad his addiction had gotten (I believe that at one point he stole money from his record label), but nothing cuts to the core of his experiences as an addict and during the process of getting clean as his own songwriting. In 2010, he emerged with yet another new primary project, Ramshackle Glory, and this represents a much cleaner break from the legacy of Johnny Hobo than Wingnut Dishwashers Union. Ramshackle Glory, for good reason, is his most popular and well-known project. It polishes and expands upon many of the themes of Burn the Earth! Leave It Behind!, but with the weight of all of his experiences on his back, all the miles Pat had put on his soul finally caught up to the razor-sharp intelligence he’d always hidden beneath the drugs, agitprop, and self-loathing in his lyrics.
Ramshackle Glory is also Pat’s most musically accomplished project by far. Finally fusing his folkish inclinations with his full-band ambitions, Ramshackle’s music is replete with lush instrumentation, flourishes of bluegrass picking, melodic ingenuity, and creative song structures. He’d come such a long way from the verse-chorus-verse simplicity of his earlier ventures, and his ever-increasing lyrical ability shined brightly, complemented nicely by his newfound ear for even stickier hooks.
Though Ramshackle Glory produced three full-length records and a split with Ghost Mice (the songs from which, for reasons I’ll assuredly get into during my Patreon essay, Ramshackle Glory later released independently from the Ghost Mice side), my personal favorite will always be their first LP, Live the Dream, which came out during the summer of 2011. At this point, I had completely left the folk-punk scene behind (for lack of a better phrase, it had gotten way too “punky-punk” for my tastes and I was knee-deep in hardcore and emo), but a new Pat the Bunny release proved far too tantalizing for me to ignore, and when I listened, I rapidly realized it was the best material Pat had ever produced to that point.
I promised you I wouldn’t talk too much about myself in this piece, but I’d be lying if I said that Live the Dream isn’t an album that impacts me on an emotional level to this day. Pat’s discography has a way of being most enjoyable for me in cycles—if I feel the urge to listen to Johnny Hobo, I know that I’m starting to get self-destructive, and Wingnut Dishwashers Union helps to ward off those impulses— but Live the Dream is a record I can always return to and feel exactly the way I did the first time I listened to it: bowled over by its courageous honesty, and deeply invested in the emotional journey Pat took while writing the album. In my sophomore year of college I even wrote a short film inspired by the album (though for obvious reasons I don’t think I’ll share it here). It’s emotionally mature and yet bracingly earnest in a way that few artists are capable of.
Live the Dream is a comforting album, but it’s an uncomfortable listen. It’s comforting because its emotional wavelength is so unique that anyone who connects with it will cherish it, but it’s uncomfortable because of the lengths Pat goes to in order to sketch exactly what he was going through. It’s an album with song titles like “More About Alcoholism,” and it’s an album that features a frantically-paced six-and-a-half-minute jam, “From Here to Utopia,” during which Pat spends an inordinate amount of time describing in stark detail his shooting-up routine. It features lines like “I’m lying down, I’ve been nodding out since I don’t know when/the lights are on, you’re standing up screaming at a ghost again” and “I woke up today and I wasn’t in prison/But I can’t promise that I’m far from it/I’d still kill a man for a cigarette.” It’s got “Your Heart Is A Muscle the Size of Your Fist,” an uplifting song that’s inspired countless tattoos but also refuses to mince words about the pain he sees in so many of his friends:
Our friend Chuck came over to our house
He said he needed somebody to take care of his pets
Cause he was going out of town
I asked him where and he said “New Mexico”
I asked if I could get a ride
He said, “No, you don’t want to follow me where it is I’m going”
He backed out of the driveway
It was the last time we saw him
Cause he drove straight to his parents’ cabin
And put a bullet in his head
(You might notice that this partially reveals what the metaphor of “moving to New Mexico” meant all the way back in “New Mexico Song”; it’s a euphemism for suicide.)
Live the Dream feels like the sum total of Pat’s career up to that point; he puts the nail in the coffin of his past faux-activism with the acidic remark that “vampirism is for poseurs in junior high,” and on closer “First Song, Pt. 2” he skillfully intertwines his struggles with getting clean with his experiences meeting people in rehab and how that’s impacted his approach towards politics. On the album’s epic centerpiece, the aforementioned “From Here to Utopia” (my favorite Pat song, if you couldn’t tell), he delivers the album’s thesis statement (cleverly framing it through the words of another person):
My friend William came to me with a message of hope
It went, “Fuck you and everything that you think you know
If you don’t step outside the things that you believe they’re gonna kill you”
He said, “Nothing’s gonna stop you
From dying young and miserable and right
If you want something better, you gotta put that shit aside”
I thought about how for thousands of years
There’ve been people who told us that things can’t go on like this
From Jesus Christ to the Diggers, from Malthus to Zerzan
From Karl Marx to Huey Newton
But the shit goes on and on
And on and on and on and on and on and on
And on and on and on and on and on and on and on
Now I’m not saying that we can’t change the world
Cause everybody does at least a little bit of that
But I won’t shit myself
The way I’m living is a temper tantrum and I
Need something else, need something else, need something else to stay alive
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to that song at the exact right moment to make me realize that I’m full of shit. In the world of DIY— of punk and emo and all this shit— it’s easy for the way that conversations are framed on the Internet to make us forget that sometimes, being permanently ironically detached is a bad thing, that earnestness has a place no matter how embarrassing it can feel to be enthusiastic and passionate in the face of so much cynicism. It might embarrass me even now to admit that Pat is the person who first made me realize that, but he’s also the person that makes me realize how fucking stupid it is to be embarrassed about being earnest in the first place.
I’ll talk about it more in my Patreon piece, but I really do think the way that earnestness can invoke an instinctive response of cringe and repulsion is what ended up essentially killing the folk-punk scene (ironically after it helped give birth to the emo revival, a style that struggled with the disconnect between earnestness and cynical ironic detachment so badly that it’s ended up completely fucking with the way our community engages with itself). DIY needs earnestness; by dint of participating in a grassroots movement, a lack of earnestness will end up causing the whole thing to collapse in on itself.
Along with the next few Ramshackle Glory albums, Pat also earmarked this period with some solo work and a few collaborations with alt-rapper Ceschi. While there’s no shortage of good tracks from these releases (I’m particularly partial to “I’m Not A Good Person” and “The Club Hits of Today Will Be the Showtunes of Tomorrow”), none of them ever really captured the transformative power and energy of Live the Dream. Pat’s career effectively ended in 2016 with a since-deleted Facebook post in which he, in so many words, decided that punk and anarchism no longer feel like the medium through which he can make a difference either in the world or within himself. Aside from a brief live performance in 2019, he hasn’t returned.
And that’s completely fine, too. If there’s anything else Pat’s taught me, it’s that even the relatively tiny public eye that he was in can feel like too much scrutiny. The older I get, the more I completely see why he found the scene suffocating and had to completely disengage from it for his own health. None of that takes away from the incredible impact both he and his music have had, both on the scene as a whole as well as on individuals like me who found something in his unwavering authenticity that spoke to us on a visceral level.
I think that, going hand-in-hand with the unguarded emotional intensity of earnestness, it’s equally important to balance it with a healthy degree of distance. I can’t necessarily speak for anyone else, but for me, the process of taking care of myself involved making sure that I could define my own identity as being distinct from the community at large. It’s still a bit too stuck in my head for me to completely go into here, but that’s a big part of the reason I’ve made myself take a step back over the last several months (if you follow me on Twitter, you’ve almost certainly noticed this).
There’s a lot of IRL factors that I don’t even really know how to get into, but I was starting to feel so overwhelmed by “the DIY scene” that I briefly forgot who I was outside of it. I’ve been getting into a bunch of other shit (including metal, video games, and anime/manga— cringe, I know) as well as re-immersing myself in horror (something I loved growing up and am now kicking myself for allowing myself to drift away from it) in order to remind myself that I have other interests and am my own person outside of the constant overstimulation of Being Online. And one day during this identity crisis, when I was feeling some degree of existential dread and worrying that a radically-diminished online presence would cause people to forget that I existed, I listened to Live the Dream again, and reminded myself that this was the right thing to do, and it was all gonna be okay.
Last weekend I celebrated my 25th birthday. Me and Deanna went to an aquarium and a snake farm to feed sharks and pet baby alligators, she got me socks with my close personal friend the Loch Ness Monster on them, and then we played through a murder mystery box. It’s the most fun I’ve had on my birthday since I was a little kid.
In the wake of all this self-discovery bullshit, I’ve realized I may want to explore other avenues of creative expression; keep your eyes peeled for a possible (?) Graveyard Etiquette YouTube channel. But please, don’t worry; I definitely don’t foresee myself completely disengaging from DIY, partially because I doubt I’d even be capable of that, and I sure as hell have no plans to discontinue this newsletter. But I hope you can be happy for me that I’m rediscovering the person I am, rather than trying to be the person I thought I was. And that means probably nothing, but possibly everything.
-xoxo, Ellie
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