The Evolution of a Folk-Punk Hero
Patrick Schneeweis was never the voice of a generation, but perhaps he was the voice of a tendency. To a small but fervent and far-flung community of listeners, he was known as Pat the Bunny, an anarchist punk troubadour from Vermont whose desperate—and sometimes bleakly funny—folk songs were about young people who wanted to smash the system, although they often settled for getting smashed themselves. In one of them, “Fuck Cops,” he yawped about how everything was going to hell:
Starting in the early two-thousands, Schneeweis began to build an audience. His songs circulated on burned CDs and through primitive file-sharing sites; he played gigs at house shows and in parks, where dozens or even hundreds of fans would show up to sing along. Most of those fans surely knew, some from firsthand experience, that “spange” is a portmanteau of “spare” and “change,” and that “spangeing” is a way to survive without doing something as indefensible as getting a job. Schneeweis sang to and for the kind of young people you might see sitting in a park or on a sidewalk, with face tattoos and skinny dogs and bulging backpacks. This version of “punk” identity, like many others, combined idealism and cynicism, and Schneeweis knew how paradoxical the combination could be. “I’m not a nihilist / I just can’t pledge allegiance to shit,” he once sang.
In his lyrics, Schneeweis called for revolutionary change, but his musical output reflected a program of incremental reform. Many early songs, including “Fuck Cops,” were credited to Johnny Hobo and the Freight Trains, with Pat the Bunny listed as lead singer. When he decided to make music that was a bit less fatalistic, he became the leader of a band called Wingnut Dishwashers Union, and stopped singing the old songs, although his fans never stopped listening to them. By the end of the two-thousands, he was more popular than ever, but his life revolved around his debilitating addiction to alcohol and heroin. He found his way to Arizona, where he began to get sober; he retired Wingnut Dishwashers Union and, in 2011, started a clamorous band called Ramshackle Glory, which chronicled his struggle to get clean in exuberant and often excruciating detail. He released quieter “solo” songs, too, credited simply to Pat the Bunny, a nickname he’d had since high school. And then, in 2016, Schneeweis retired. “I am not really an anarchist or a punk anymore,” he wrote, on Facebook, explaining that his life and his perspective had shifted. He said that his music would remain freely available online, and added that he didn’t want fans to “feel tricked” when they learned that he no longer felt like the revolutionary he had once claimed to be. The statement was signed “Pat (no bunny, at last).” Not long before, he had sung, “Don’t you dare give up on us, or anarchy, before / You can name one government not rotten to its core.” Now he was giving up, or at least retreating into silence.
That silence ended this past January, when a new band called Friends in Real Life released a song called “Buckeye.” It was tuneful and upbeat, with Schneeweis’s characteristically reedy voice delivering lyrics that were uncharacteristically optimistic: “We’re all gonna die, I’ve known it since I was a kid / The thing I had to learn is: before that, we’re gonna live.” In the comment section on YouTube, people expressed shock and joy at this unexpected comeback. Some said they were crying; others told stories of their own experiences with drug addiction. One listener simply wrote, “I CANT BELIEVE FOLK PUNK JESUS CAME BACK.” Reactions like this help explain why Schneeweis retreated from public life in the first place: it made him uneasy to be treated as a hero, or a guru. For similar reasons, he never sought out media opportunities, although this reticence has only heightened his fans’ curiosity. (If you search online for interviews with him, what you will mainly find are interviews with other people about him.)
But, on a recent morning in Tucson, Schneeweis seemed less like a cult hero in hiding and more like a cheerful and unusually perceptive narrator of his journey through the netherworld. He met me in a parking lot downtown, next to the small room that serves as the Friends in Real Life headquarters. In February, he released a short but memorable new album, credited to Friends in Real Life, full of songs about surviving punk, and the people who don’t; since then, he has been fulfilling orders for T-shirts, CDs, records, and cassettes. Schneeweis is thirty-seven now, and he has been pleasantly surprised to discover that fans seem to support his ongoing evolution, perhaps because a number of them have evolved in similar ways. “Almost everyone I was getting drunk and getting high with, every day, is either dead or sober at this point,” he told me.
We had walked over to a loft that serves as the office of a radical community group; all around us were boxes full of tourniquets, ready to be assembled and shipped out to aid workers in Gaza. “I’m not, like, hostile to anarchism,” Schneeweis said. He is close with many activists in Tucson, and he still considers himself part of the struggle for freedom and justice. But he no longer feels like a revolutionary, and he no longer thinks of his songs as calls to action, if he ever did. In his newest incarnation, he is just a singer and songwriter, rather than a ringleader. “I admit it—I’m a musician,” he told me, chuckling. “Earlier, I would have tried to downplay that.”
Many young people discover radical politics through radical music, but for Schneeweis it was the other way around. He was outraged by stories of injustice and loved the idea of left-wing protest, but it wasn’t until he happened upon a local punk show, around the time he was in seventh grade, that he encountered a group of people who seemed determined to live outside the system. By high school, he was spending more and more time with a crew of local punks and freaks in Brattleboro, where he played in a few bands before discovering that he didn’t really need anything but an acoustic guitar. Back then, Schneeweis had no particular interest in folk music, and no taste for it—to him, Woody Guthrie was just some dead guy whose songs he had to sing at school. But he wanted people to be able to hear his lyrics, and he wanted to be able to tour light and play anywhere: squats, parks, parking lots. And so he wound up making a kind of punkish folk music—not realizing, he says, that punks around the country were doing something similar. In the early two-thousands, the term “folk-punk” was applied to a range of bands, including Defiance, Ohio, from Columbus; Mischief Brew, from Philadelphia; and Against Me!, from Gainesville, which soon left the folk-punk underground behind, earning mainstream acclaim and signing to a subsidiary of Warner Music. Schneeweis’s renown was more circumscribed, but plenty intense. His younger brother Michael is a fellow-musician who plays and sings on the Friends in Real Life album; they toured together in the old days. “At some point, he became, like, a rock star in that world,” Michael told me. After shows, there would be a long line of fans who wanted to meet Schneeweis, and often they shared stories as harrowing as the ones they heard in his lyrics. A few years after Schneeweis retired, Michael emerged to assure anxious fans that his big brother was doing well.
Schneeweis told me that he spent those quiet years focussed on sobriety, and on helping other people stay sober; he learned to meditate, and for a time did some computer programming. He knows he is hardly the first person to age out of the punk life style. “I think that the value of punk is that it’s so uncompromising,” he said. “But it’s always going to be predominantly for young people, if it retains that quality, because it’s very hard to be uncompromising forever.” In fact, it’s hard to be uncompromising at all, especially if you’re a working musician. Different iterations of punk are different attempts to solve this unsolvable puzzle, as successive generations find ways to reject the compromises of the ones that came before. (As a boy, Schneeweis didn’t think Green Day had anything to do with the punk scene he was part of.) The sound of Friends in Real Life is more “folk” than “punk,” with some electronic accents that reflect Schneeweis’s current affection for pop music and dance parties. Still, the album reflects his lifelong determination to sing only what he absolutely believes. This resolution can lead to awkward or ungainly lines, but it’s also what makes his best songs so affecting. “Down to the River” is an elegy that’s strikingly gentle, especially when compared with the reckless energy of his older songs: “Do you wanna go swimming? Do you wanna just cry? / I say it’ll be O.K., but that’s just two chords and a lie.”
As a boy in Vermont, Schneeweis was contemptuous of the wealthy ex-hippies who shopped at the local food co-op, a onetime grassroots enterprise that had evolved, since the seventies, into something that resembled a fancy supermarket, fully integrated into the local economy. The punks in Schneeweis’s scene sometimes framed their antisocial or self-destructive behavior as a way to resist the process of integration, to insist that their movement would never become respectable. But some of them probably discovered—as Schneeweis did, in the depths of his addiction—that there are worse things than respectability. “Unless you actually succeed in overturning the existing order, it’s going to ingest you, one way or the other,” he told me. He is thinking of returning to the stage later this year, playing for whoever is still interested in the troubadour formerly known as Pat the Bunny. And he says he will always relate to the wandering bands of tattooed punks who sometimes ask him for spare change, even though he knows that they might not relate to him. He says, “If I see some real fuckin’ street punks, somewhere in my mind it’s, like, Oh, man. They would think I suck.” ♦
