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from RIP magazine, November 1993
[I had a little too much fun doing the interview for this feature — after spending a day and an evening with the Mindfunk guys, wandering around the Bay Area, hanging out, partying and tape recording our conversations along the way — and drinking Shawn Johnson's deadly whiskey and coke concoction — I was quite loaded. So much so that when we went out to a club that evening, I tried to set a barstool on fire. (It had something to do with being pissed off at the new, tacky decor of what used to be the I-Beam.) To thank me for my company at the end of the night, singer Pat Dubar handed me a couple of tabs of acid on the way home. (I actually hung onto them because I had too much work to do for a few days to waste time tripping. With me, deadlines always came before drugs.) Funny thing about Jason Everman — he had actually played in both Nirvana and Soundgarden, but was loathe to talk about it. The Seattle community was very tight and closed-mouthed, and you just didn't discuss such things, especially not with journalists — you were supposed to be above all that. So, being someone who not only understood reverse snobbery, but also practiced it myself, I never even brought up the topic. Later on, Jason left music and joined the Army's Special Forces. There's a photo of him in uniform on the Mind Over Four album Empty Hands. Spike Xavier thought it would be fun to just throw it on there with a bogus credit. I'll let you track it down.]
"Ask him about that line in 'Goddess,' the one about the octopi's eye!"
Spike Xavier's own eyes take on a mischievous glint when he finds out that I'm flying to San Francisco in a matter of hours to interview his good friend Pat Dubar, singer for Mindfunk. Spike has been brought to the RIP offices on a goodwill mission for his own band, Mind Over Four, and he's delighted to hear that Mindfunk's getting a feature.
"He'll tell you that the octopus becomes what it thinks," he continues. "Trust me, that's what he'll say — but don't let him know I told you!"
So I add yet another item to my list of queries for Pat and the other guys in Mindfunk. As young as this band is, it's already been through quite a lot. After its first, highly touted album, the group changed members, letting go of Jason Coppola and Reed St. Mark and acquiring guitarist Jason Everman and drummer Shawn Johnson. Then, just as they were about to start album number two, the guys were dropped by their label, Epic. They made the record anyway, gave it the self-deprecating title, Dropped, and got picked up by Megaforce. It hasn't been an easy year and a half for this quintet — to put it mildly! — and Dropped is really a musical reflection of that time. The moody, primal rhythms of "Goddess," the strangling grooves of "In the Way Eye," the throbbing sadness of "11 Ton Butterfly" — it all comes across as a purging of profound depression. The velvet darkness of "Drowning" could very well be a funeral dirge for a society of tortured beings. Dropped is a grim slice of life that blows the doors off Mindfunk's 1991 debut.
When Pat, Jason and Shawn show up at my hotel in San Francisco, however, I'm not met by a trio of dour faces. The worst is behind them — for now, at least — and we have a fun day ahead of us. Before meeting up with guitarist Louis Svitek and bassist John Monte for rehearsal, we head off to a Joel-Peter Witkin photo exhibit. Witkin is famous for his still lifes of severed body parts, and the prints whet our appetites for our next stop, a gun show at the Cow Palace. On the way there we yak about various things. First on the agenda is, why did these three guys move to San Francisco, leaving Louis and Monte behind in New Jersey?
"A change of atmosphere," Jason shrugs.
"I wanted to move back to the West Coast, basically," says Southern California native Pat. "I was getting really depressed, and I figured out it was mainly the result of my environment."
"Jersey's really weird," Jason elaborates, "because it's everything that's regressive and stupid about the East Coast mixed with everything that's stupid and regressive about the Midwest."
"Every time you go to the store, you gotta worry about some guido wanting to beat your ass because you have long hair," Pat adds. "There are bars there that you know should be called, 'Beat Up the Longhaired Guy If He Goes Inside.' That's the mentality. I thought guidos only existed in movies. I didn't think those kind of people were actually alive and breathing!"
"It was an even greater culture shock for Shawn," Jason says. "He grew up where I grew up, the Puget Sound area." He emphasizes the words Puget Sound, as if that might somehow erase the name of the area's most famous hamlet, Seattle. "It's a pretty amazing place to live and to grow up in. And then BOOM! He's right in the middle of fuckin' Cretinville, New Jersey."
Jason and Shawn were both unlikely entries into the Mindfunk camp. But then, so was Pat. "We were recording together, and we never even knew each other," Pat says of the original lineup. "I supposed that works when the musicianship is excellent and everyone has a clue, but that wasn't the case in our band at all!" Pat suggested Jason when the member change happened. "I'd seen Jason play," he shrugs. "I can watch someone and tell what they're like, tell if they're a good musician who has somewhat of an idea what the fuck's going on. We just called him and asked if he was into it. He didn't actually know Shawn, but—"
"I was a Shawn fan," Jason interjects.
"Me and Shawn, we're pretty close now, but when I first talked to him, we didn't connect at all!" Pat recalls. "The first time I heard his tape, I was like, 'Do you know the band All?' Apparently in the town he's from they have statues erected to this band! It's like everyone's in a constant state of All-dom. I had no idea! I go, 'That's what you're tape reminded me of, loosely.' He got really offended! I come to find out, of course, that the drummer of All's like his favorite drummer — or one of them, at least."
Shawn, on the other hand, says, "Pat sent me a tape of the first Mindfunk record. I heard it and didn't really know what to think! It was pretty metal. I looked at the cover, and from front to back it didn't go together. Nothing made sense at all. I talked to Jason a few times, and we seemed to agree on a lot of things, so I decided to try it out. I went to New Jersey. Right when I walked in the door, I met Pat and he thought I was some heavy metal fucking geek."
"I didn't think you were a heavy-metal geek," Pat protests. "he walks into the house, and he's smoking a cigarette and carrying a twelve-pack under his arm. I just was, like, 'Rocker!' But it couldn't have been farther from the truth. The fact is, the guy has a heart condition that could kill him at any moment. He's not supposed to smoke or drink or eat shitty food, and the fact that he does all of that makes him—"
"What kind of heart condition?" I interject.
"It's an arrhythmia problem, where my heart beats too fast," Shawn explains.
"He's got a broken heart!" the other guys say.
"Actually, he's doing much better than when we were in New Jersey," Pat reassures me.
"Oh, it was terrible!" Shawn chuckles. "You could open up my cupboard in the kitchen, and you'd get a box of Ho-Hos, some potato chips, some cereal, peanut butter and some bread. These guys, ,they've got the refrigerator packed full of fruits and vegetables. I was pretty bad."
At this point we arrive at the gun show and mill about unnoticed among the beer-bellied masses, staring at T-shirts that read "Impeach Clinton — and get rid of her husband too," photo boxes that disguise your gun stash, homemade pot holders, and guns, thousands of them, every make, model and size. Since we're all broke, however, our only purchases are teriyaki turkey jerky, and Jason buys a stack of Petri dishes — he's planning a small scientific experiment better left unmentioned.
Finally we arrive at the rehearsal studio and hook up with Louis and Monte. As Shawn fiddles with his drums, Pat rails against the hype that surrounded the group's first record.
"I think hype's ridiculous," he says. "I think that shit's really damaging. The first time everyone was like, 'That's great! Don't change a thing!' So we didn't and it wasn't great." With the songs for Dropped Mindfunk kept the hype-meisters at bay and did their own thing. "We were able to do something and step back from it and go, 'Fuck, does that suck!' A lot of times we did it over and made it better."
None of this seemed to matter to their old label, however. After the guys run through their songs we stop at a park and I get the whole story of how being dropped became Dropped. The nightmare began at Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, New York.
"We decided, like, three days before we were going to move up to the studio that we were gonna move out of our house," Pat relates. "So we had to move our entire house and tear down the rehearsal room inside it. We drove up to Bearsville Monday night. I had strep throat, so the next morning I got up and went to the hospital. When I came back, they'd just gotten everything out of the truck, everything was set up, and then Jonny [Z., the band's manager] called and said, 'You guys got dropped.' We were like, 'Fuck!" We had no place to live, we had no money, we had no label, we had dick! I think at that point, more than anything, things that don't kill you make you stronger."
"Things that don't kill me make me laugh," Jason wryly comments. "It was twisted, that week in Woodstock. It was this weird transitional period."
"The only positive thing," Pat relates, "was that the people who owned the studio were like, 'You guys can stay here for a week.'"
"I essentially stayed in a room for an entire week and watched TV, 'cause there was nothing else to do," says Jason. "Just waitin' out the storm, you know. In this room there was a fireplace, this old leather couch, a television and this wall hanging, a macramé wall hanging — this total white-trash, art-for-retarded-people kind of thing — of a koala bear. I should have stolen it — that's how attached I became to it. I decided when and if I have a daughter, I'm gonna call her Koala Macramé."
The man who saved the day, and the band, was producer Terry Date. "He's one of the few needles in the haystack of the rock world," Jason crows. "He's a genuine human being. He's a really good guy."
"The only person who really believed in our music at that point was Terry, and he said, 'I still want to do it,'" Pat explains. "He could have bailed. He still would have gotten his money, because Epic was supposed to pay him." Instead, at the end of that tortuous week in Woodstock, he settled into Seattle's Bad Animals Studios with the band to make a label-less album.
"We totally took a different approach to this record," says Louis. "We started doing everything, basically, ourselves."
"We didn't have the financial means to do bass, drums, guitars, blah-blah-blah," Pat continues. "We just recorded it live and did very few overdubs. In that sense we got a lot more out of it. I mean, it's not the cleanest, most mistake-free record, but, honestly, I'd rather have something like that than something slicked down."
So were they signed the moment they finished? Well... not exactly.
"The thing is that I don't think our name's very good, number one," Pat points out, "and number two, I think people tie that in with us being dropped. Like, 'Oh, here's a band that tried to do that funk-metal thing,' which we really had nothing to do with!" He shrugs philosophically and continues: "Through the eyes of an A&R person who's going to sign this, well, here's this band, and they didn't make it on that bandwagon, and now they're doing something different, and they've been dropped, and it's all negative. But to us it's fucking funny. That's why we named our record what we did."
"I still know people who work at Epic," Monte grins. "I run into them at clubs, and they love the name!"
After all the hassle, they went with the management's label, Megaforce.
"We decided, 'Fuck it, let's just put it out with people we already know,'" says Pat. "I mean, whatever. At the end of the day it's just a label on the back of your record. It doesn't really matter, and you have more control of your life."
After the interview Louis and Monte take off, and the rest of us stop at Pat, Jason and Shawn's apartment before heading out to a club. Shawn whips up a jug of whiskey and coke while I examine a Barney the Dinosaur poster that's been doctored to read, "I hate you, you hate me, we're a hateful family." I also check out Pat and Jason's Tibetan skulls. The two of them plan, at some point, to climb the Himalayas and, once they reach a mountain peak, ritualistically shave their heads.
"Know what would happen if you did that?" I suggest. "You'd come back and everybody would go, 'They shaved their heads? They're just following a trend!'"
Pat snorts and says, "If they'd really think that us shaving our heads on the top of a mountain on our way to Tibet after we'd been walking for two and a half weeks had anything to do with something that happened in Seattle once.... The last thing we'd be thinking about would be rock music!"
By the time we hit the club we're already well on our way to becoming victims of too much of a good time — Shawn makes a strong whiskey and coke. At the end of the night we're all drunk, high, whatever, but before the guys take me back to my hotel, I remember I have one unfinished bit of business. I turn on the tape recorder and ask Pat about the octopus line in "Goddess."
"I don't even know what it means, really," Pat says. "It's just about the octopi's eyes, and how they contort their bodies and become what they think. 'When I become God in the octopi's eye' — that's the highest... well, it depends on what you believe in."
Yep, there it is, in almost the exact words Spike used! Pat has no idea he's just been pranked, but it doesn't matter, really. It's probably the only predictable moment in a day that's been full of the unexpected.
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