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Recently, notoriously outspoken Filter frontman Richard Patrick, always a man of many words and interesting stories, took a break from his decidedly hectic schedule to speak with us regarding, among many other things, politics, pollution, suicide, Kurt Cobain and, most importantly, the group’s latest thought-provoking opus Anthems For The Damned…
Todd: What can you tell us about Anthems For The Damned? It has, after all, been quite some time…
Richard Patrick: “I just think we suck as a species. I think were fuckin’ up and I don’t think we’re doin’ anything good. We’re like a cancerous cell…a cancerous growth on the planet, ya know? What does cancer do? It kills its host. …It kills its host, essentially killing itself. I think that’s what human’s are doin’…we don’t have the capacity to get it right. …Human’s suck. Nine times out of ten, humans will do the wrong thing. There’s a lot of humans that are amazing, but I think there’s enough bad ones. …I woke up today and had some bacon, which killed a pig somewhere, ya know? I turned on a light switch which created a bunch of carbon, I got into a car which polluted the air the whole way down the street, ya know? I’m not, by any means, trying to intentionally hurt my planet, but every day that I’m on it, I am, ya know? We’d rather fight with Russia to secure our energy needs and attack (the Republic of) Georgia…rather than invent our way out of this oil crisis that we’ve been having for years. We’ve been suckin’ the balls of Arab countries and OPEC for years. Since the ‘70’s, we’ve realized how much we really need from them as far as oil, ya know? So what have we done? Nothin’. We’ve all sat back and bought a bunch of SUV’s and drove ‘em around like a bunch of crazy people throughout the ‘90’s. …Then, as soon as we can…we use 9/11 as a fear card to go out and start this war with Iraq. That’s how bad we are. And that’s just the Americans. That’s just what we did. We didn’t go out and invent solar cars. That’s the gift we’ve been given by nature. We’re smart enough to invent our way out of thing, but we’re still animalistic and dumb enough to fight and kill, be greedy and be stupid. …So instead of inventing out way out of it, we spent a trillion dollars and five thousand lives on the Iraq war… So we know better, but we’re just dumb enough to keep making the same mistakes over and over again. …And the message on Anthems For The Damned is very simple. It’s ‘Give Peace A Chance’. It’s all the stuff you’ve heard from everyone from John Lennon to (acclaimed Ministry frontman) Al Jourgensen. It’s not that it’s a new message; it’s just that I don’t think this generation has heard a message like that. …When you’ve got bands that talk about how much they love bein’ Rock stars and they keep talkin’ about their bling and their money… Anthems For The Damned is just a pessimistic view on society…”
Todd: With so much of the material on Anthems Of The Damned being lyrically and thematically focused on the woes of society as a whole, do you consider the album to be politically or socially-motivated?
Richard: “Well, I wanted to have a tribute to some of my friends that had been killed in Iraq, so I put an inverted rifle display on the cover. …All of a sudden, it’s all about the war. There are two or three songs that sorta attack the Bush administration while at the same time support the troops. …So really, only a small part, two or three songs, are about the war and politics. The rest of it is about us failing to recognize good and evil in life as a species, ya know? …Hatred is contagious. …It’s about pointing out that once again, instead of doing the right thing, we’re doin’ the wrong thing and we’re goin’ to war. …And it’s the same thing with the Islamic fundamentalists and fascists that attacked us on 9/11. It’s the same thing. You suck. Find a better way, learn how to communicate and learn how to use your words. It’s like talkin’ to a four year old. Why did you have to blow things up? To get our attention? Why did you have to throw a little temper tantrum? …See what I’m sayin’? …This is bigger than countries. It’s a world view. It’s a human view. Again, it all comes down to John Lennon. ‘Give Peace a Chance’. It’s as simple as that. Stop killing each other. Can you stop killing each other for just a minute and think about what you’re doing? That’s the basic gist.”
Todd: Economically and politically speaking, do you think the country would be in such disarray if President Bush hadn’t been re-elected? Depending on who you ask, it seems as if a lot of this could have been avoided…
Richard: “Re-elected? No. …At this point, the Iraq war is a humanitarian effort. If you left the Iraqis to fend for themselves, you’d have a fuckin’ civil war. Everything would fall apart. If you’re going to occupy a country, you need millions of troops, ya know? In Germany, after World War II, they had a million GIs, and that was after they were beaten, by the way. They we’re fuckin’ done. …We liberated these guys. We freed them from Saddam, but then we fired everybody. We fired the armed forces, we fired the Iraqi army. We took their infrastructure and just threw it all away because we wanted to build a nation. We wanted to create a Democracy. We wanted to spreads freedom, ya know? It’s just like that Team America: World Police movie. Freedom: it’s the only way, ya know? The Iraq war was a huge mistake because President Bush just wanted to secure oil. He’s an oil man. Bush and Dick Cheney are oil men from Texas. That’s what they do and that’s what they know. …For forty years, they’ve been told ‘Solar Power? Oh, that ain’t gonna work. You can’t use a windmill to create energy. You have to burn Fossil Fuels’. That’s the way they live, ya know? That’s the way they were raised. They’re oil men, ya know? They’re Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. That’s who they are…so this is what we get. …It’s just like (comedian/political analyst) Bill Maher said. ‘This is what happens when you let a bunch of shit kickers twice vote in a retarded President…’ This is what happens. This is what happens when a bunch of shit kickers vote in a retard… This is exactly what happens. …You can’t just leave the Iraqis to fend for themselves. You have to stay there until they get their shit together. Look at (hurricane) Katrina. When the cops fell apart, the whole city fell apart. And that’s when we had roving gangs of looters and people…tryin’ to rip off Best Buy and grab a TV. People get retarded. If you don’t have any structure, authority or security, you’re just going to have Somalia all over again. The warlords and the guys with the biggest gun collections are going to be in charge. You can’t just leave the Iraqi’s to fend for themselves. It’s a humanitarian disaster if you do. They’ll go into Civil war and, not to mention, they have the second largest oil reserve in the world. …Life is not black and white. It’s gray. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, ya know?”
Todd: What musicians did you work with while recording Anthems For The Damned? Have you always intended for the group’s line-up to be consistently fluid and ever-evolving or have the repeated personnel changes been a simple consequence of the creative process?
Richard: “I worked with a guy named John 5. He played guitar and wrote two songs with me. I also had (former Limp Bizkit guitarist/Black Light Burns frontman) Wes Borland play on the record. I worked with (A Perfect Circle/Nine Inch Nails alumni) Josh Freese, who played the drums. (Bassist) Josh Abraham was the big collaboration, though. He was great. …The reality of it is that singers typically have all the power in a band. But singers who can write hits have incredible power. So as opposed to being in a band where all four of us are real important like Led Zeppelin… …I never thought that way because (1995’s) Short Bus was probably the most successful record that I ever did and literally, that was me, an engineer and a drum machine. …Title Of Record is actually the most successful, but the whole thing with my history is that you can do whatever you want. I would much rather be liquid. For this next record, I’ve invited my whole band, but that’s because they really are the most talented people I’ve been in a band with next to (former Army Of Anyone bandmates) Robert and Dean (DeLeo). They really are super talented. …The basic format of this is that it’s kinda like my solo project. It’s an ever-changing thing. Short Bus was me and a computer and then (veteran The Mix Room Producer) Ben Grosse (Disturbed, Megadeth and Sevendust, to name only a few) mixed it. The next record was a bunch of guys…and The Amalgamut was similar to that, but I really wanted to change things up. You can get kinda stagnant if you have the same line-up. And people can get incredibly complicated with money and all this stuff. You end up feeling like it’s almost more beneficial to the music to have young, hungry musicians who really want to set themselves apart from everyone else. So by using John and (former He Is Legend rhythm guitarist) Mitch Marlow and (drummer) Mika Fineo on this next record, you’re going to have their passion. Plus, they’ve got a lot to prove.”
Todd: What ultimately led to the demise of Army Of Anyone? In hindsight, did the group run its course creatively or were there the additional contributing factors that led the group’s disbandment?
Richard: “Army Of Anyone was great. We had a lot of success. We sold a hundred thousand records and in a lot of ways, it ended up being bigger than I ever thought it would. But you know what, dude? …It just kinda felt like people were sayin’ ‘Oh, look…another Supergroup’, ya know? I read this one review where the guy was like ‘You might be the hottest waitress at Denny’s, but you’re still a waitress at Denny’s’. And I kinda agree. I see Robert and Dean being with (Stone Temple Pilots frontman) Scott (Weiland) and (Stone Temple Pilots drummer) Eric (Kretz) and when I see Slash, I think I should see Axl stranding next to him. …When I see Chris Cornell, I think he should be fronting Soundgarden. I kinda see where they’re comin’ from, but at the same time, it was a really amazing experience to play with Robert and Dean. But I get what the audience wants. They want what they grew up with, ya know? Can you imagine if Bono from U2 did some solo project? It would probably piss some people off at this point…after like thirty five years, ya know? He couldn’t go off and do a solo record. He’s too much of a staple with U2. I don’t know. It was an amazing experience and I learned a lot. Robert and Dean are amazing people, but Filter is my baby and I can do whatever I want. It’s a huge freedom, so when I went to make another record, I just decided it was going to be another Filter record instead of an Army Of Anyone record.”
Todd: When you released Short Bus in 1995, Filter was almost immediately, or so it seemed, labeled as an Industrial act. Did you initially find that classification to be creatively stifling, particularly considering the group’s arguably ‘…less than Industrial…’ musical approach?
Richard: “I really hated that. I had just left Nine Inch Nails and wanted to distance myself from that, but the reality of it was what it was. Short Bus was an Industrial sounding record. …I didn’t wanna go all Goth or Industrial, I didn’t wear all black… I went completely the other way. But the thing is, that’s so fuckin’ bold because it would have been so easy to latch onto a genre and stay there forever and not do anything different. A lot of the guys I know that I talk to now are like ‘Why would you ever change once you found your mold…the thing that worked. Why would you ever change?’ and I’m like ‘God, that is so fucking boring’, ya know? Can you imagine a world where there’s no “Take A Picture”? …For me, that would just be the kiss of death. I love Radiohead and I also love Pantera. There’s gotta be a happy world in there somewhere for me, ya know? …I look back on those days fondly because it was just ‘Fuck it! Let’s just make something loud and abrasive’. I miss that in music today, ya know? Everyone is tryin’ so hard to get on the radio…”
Todd: Looking back, what was the main lyrical inspiration behind the song “Hey Man, Nice Shot”? It’s almost as if the controversy that’s seemingly always surrounded the song has clouded its original creative focus…
Richard: “(Politician) Budd Dwyer killed himself during a press conference in 1987. It was a very, very bizarre thing to see when I was in my teens. I just remember thinkin’ to myself ‘What was that all about’, ya know? …I got the raw footage from a bookstore and I can remember watching it a couple of times with my buddies while we were drinking. …I just kept thinking ‘Hey, man. Nice shot’. …I started thinking about the act of suicide. Ya know, when a person suffers from Emphysema…to the point where they’re a piss and shit machine, sitting in a hospital costing a hundred thousand dollars a day, being a burden on everyone, suffocating a little more every day…if you want to kill yourself, to me, that’s like okay. …I completely think a person should have that right. I totally absolutely believe in that. In Asia, suicide is looked at as an almost proud way to end your life. Like if you make a huge mistake and then kill yourself, that’s honor, ya know? That’s very honorable. In America, it’s looked at as cowardly. It’s the cowardly way out. So, ya know, it’s a very, very bizarre phenomenon. It’s obviously horribly tragic for everyone that’s there. …It can cause a lot of fear, but sometimes, fear is almost inspirational. Like if you knew you were going to die, wouldn’t you do a ‘Bucket List’ type thing and go ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna go out and do everything that I can because I know I’m going to die soon’? Wouldn’t it spark something inside of you? Inspire might be the wrong word, but wouldn’t it make you want to live a little bit more? …Suicide has that effect on people, ya know? When Kurt Cobain blew his head off, I was like ‘What the fuck was that all about?’, ya know? I was like ‘He had it all’. …I wrote “Hey Man, Nice Shot” in 1991, so this has nothing to do with “Hey Man, Nice Shot”. Now were just talkin’ about suicide. I wrote “Hey, Man Nice Shot” in 1991 and I have the copyrights to prove it. …But looking at suicide the phenomenon…and looking at Kurt Cobain, you’re like ‘Wow, this really happened. He had everything’. But he didn’t have everything. He didn’t have his health. He was a complete junkie. He suffered. When I was getting sober, when I was dealing with my own addition problems, I remember thinking to myself ‘I get it. I get why people kill themselves’. It’s hard and sometimes it’s too hard, ya know? When you’re a drug addict and you think the only thing that will help you is another pill, another joint, another swallow of liquor or another line… I get it. I understand addiction. I get why Kurt killed himself and I get why other people kill themselves. Sometimes, it’s too tough, ya know? …I sing that song every night and it never gets old. I’m so proud of that song. It’s so intellectually challenging. I was like twenty two or twenty three years old when I wrote that song, ya know? It still holds up to this day. I remember thinking ‘God, is heavy music going to be around later?’ Heavy music has been around a lot longer than Grunge or anything else, so I’m actually looking forward to returning to my Industrial roots on this next record.”
Todd: What was the main motivation behind your departure from Reprise/Warner Brothers Records? From an ‘…outsider’s…’ perspective, it seemed as if your relationship would have been mutually beneficial…
Richard: “…Who wants to go down on a sinking fuckin’ ship and have them fuckin’…eventually be owned by a bank? …It’s a flawed system made to sell pieces of plastic that you call a CD or a record. When you remove the plastic and people are left to their own devices to get it wherever they want, you’re completely physically destroying their ability to make money. So their industry, the CD industry…is basically the end of the music industry as a whole. Why go down with a sinking ship? You have a better chance on your own at this point. It’s kinda wild. I can put music on a website and say ‘Hey everyone, I’m gonna release a record’. You can go out on MySpace and alert like two hundred thousand friends or something. You can say ‘Hey everyone, we’re gonna release a record digitally on iTunes’ and then like everyone knows about it as opposed to the old formula where you had to have a hit on the radio, and you had to put an ad in every single paper and magazine across the country, and fuckin’ go on tour… …I’ve only sold thirty thousand copies of this record and I’ve literally paid for everything that I’ve done. I’ve got no debt to anyone. I don’t owe anyone anything. It’s fuckin’ great because that’s what kills all the other bands out there. All these bands owe their record companies so much money that it gets to a point of diminishing returns. If a record company has spent a million dollars on you and you’ve only sold a hundred thousand records, you’re going to get dropped. …Every time a record company goes down, three hundred fuckin’ bands are getting displaced. There are bands out there that are amazing that are struggling because they have all of this debt. When a record company says ‘Okay, we want you to work with this producer, and we want you to work at this studio, you’re gonna do this and you've gotta have a fuckin’ hit’…you make people fuckin’ crazy that way. …Eventually, you’re just gonna end up with this mediocre shit. I wrote “Hey Man, Nice Shot” because I loved it. I didn’t write “Hey Man, Nice Shot” because I thought I’d get on the radio. I was just like ‘Fuck it, that rocks!’, ya know? I feel that with this label situation, I can do that again. I can make music purely because I wanna fuckin’ rock. I wanna blow my mind. I don’t wanna get on the radio. I don’t care, ya know? If I keep my expenses down, I can do whatever I want.”
Todd: When touring in support of Anthems For The Damned, what size venues has the group been frequenting? Does the capacity of the venue, and thus the size and reactions of the crowd(s) themselves, have an overall impact on what type of set list you work with?
Richard: “…We like playin’ small, intimate places. At the same time, I like changin’ it up. I like goin’ on tour with people. …Right now, we’re tryin’ to work out a package with someone else and get on their tour or have them join us or something. …We play absolutely everything. We play everything we can. I cut the show off at about a hundred and twenty or thirty minuets. I think really long concerts are boring. I think after like an hour and forty minutes, people are just fatigued. They’ve been standin’ there for three bands, ya know? So we like to play for about an hour and twenty minutes and I like to change the set. Some nights, I just yell into the mic ‘Who wants to hear heavy stuff?’ and then I get a response and I yell ‘Okay, who wants to hear soft stuff?’ and then I get a response. If it’s louder in either direction, I only play that type of stuff from there on, ya know? I always play the staples, but I love to change up the set a lot. It’s never the same set. It’s always different. I’ll look at the audience and if I feel they need something, I’ll play them what they need to get them riled up and get them happy, ya know? And we add songs all the time. …I think I’m going to have the band learn “Under” (from Short Bus) because I think “Under” was a great song to play back in the day. Fuck yeah, man. I can do that. My guys are so smart. We can just play something once or twice at a sound check and we’re good. We don’t need rehearsals, we don’t need shit. We just get in there and do it.”
Todd: Realistically, what can the proverbial die-hard Filter fan expect when partaking in The Pulse Sessions and Remixes For The Damned? Considering the group’s extended period of inactivity, is there a conscious collective effort to release new and remixed material on at least a semi-regular basis?
Richard: “ Absolutely. …It’s important that we let our audience know that we like to put new material out. I want them to know there’s always going to be new stuff comin’ out from Filter, whether it be live records or remix CDs. Now that we’re moving into an almost digital world, it’s easy to do those records. The Pulse Sessions are just great. I went in there with the band, we set up all of our equipment and we just played. We recorded it inside (Orlando, Florida-based) Pulse (HD Studios), where we did the last record, Anthems For The Damned. It’s really cool. I enjoy my time with my guys and we’ve gotten really great on the road, so The Pulse Sessions is just this great live Rock record. …I don’t think we’ll be doing any overdubs at all. We might overdub some farts (laughs). Ya know, when you hang out on a bus with ten other guys, it almost becomes a sport, unfortunately. We are still a rowdy Rock band, after all.”
Select Richard Patrick Discography
Remixes For The Damned (2008) **
The Pulse Sessions (2008) **
Anthems For The Damned (2008) **
Army Of Anyone (2006) ***
The Amalgamut (2002) **
Title Of EP (EP) (2000) **
Title Of Record (1999) **
Short Bus (1995) **
Erkenntnis Theorie (EP) (1994) **
Pretty Hate Machine (1989) *
* as a member of Nine Inch Nails
** as a member of Filter
*** as a member of Army Of Anyone