ANDY PATTERSON: BEARDS GROW BACK

As it was printed in Slug Magazine ....





202 Oct 2005: Andy Patterson: Beards Grow Back
_POSTEDON Sep 30, 2005 - 11:10 AM by publisher

BY CURTIS JENSEN

Andy Patterson has been an active fixture in the Salt Lake music scene for 17 years. As a drummer, his pedigree is extensive and includes stints with a representative cross-section of SLC’s most relevant and influential bands: Lumberjack, Iceburn, Polestar, State of the Nation, Red Bennies, Ether, Stella Brass, Hello Amsterdam, Longarm, and more. His touring experience includes supporting Fugazi and Lifetime across Europe with State of the Nation, as well as North American tours drumming for Shelter, Blue Tip and Inside Out. You read that right, Inside mother-fucking Out. Currently he splits his drumming time between popsters Hudson River School, and reincarnated doom-rockers Hammergun.



After two years in Los Angeles interning and working in recording studios on projects ranging from Rage Against the Machine’s live performance on MTV’s T.R.L., to a collaboration between DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist, Andy returned to Salt Lake in 2000 to set up his own studio. Like his drumming credentials, Andy’s recording resume reads as a laundry list of SLC’s finest: Clear, The Kill, The New Transit Direction, The Wolfs, Furious Fire, Endless Struggle, The Numbs, The Dirty Birds, Le Force, Spanky Van Dyke, Starmy, Aftermath of a Train Wreck, Tolchock Trio, All Systems Fail, Day of Less, Gaza, Stiletto, Rifle Street Music, Contingency Plan, Thunderfist, Walken, Victrola, Iodina, Cub Country, and Utah Slim.

I bummed a smoke from Andy for the first time outside of the old KRCL building in 2001, while taking a break from laying down basic tracks during Form of Rocket’s Se Puede Despidir a Todos sessions. Now he invites me to his annual 24th of July barbeques.

SLUG: Why recording? How did recording come about?
AP: I am a drummer and, on the totem pole of priority and hierarchy in the band scheme, the drummer is the lowest on the rung. I was sick of being at the mercy of the songwriter, so I bought a sampler, and I was like, “I’m going to make my own music.’ Not fuck being a drummer, just separate; I needed to have some sort of voice. I needed to do something that I could take control of.

SLUG: Was this a response to a person, or just in general?
AP: Just in general, not out of spite. If I wanted to be able to say, “Maybe we should try this or try that,” I kind of needed to have something to back it up, and no one would take me seriously because I was the drummer. Like, “What do you know about chords? You don’t even know what note that is!” I bought a sampler, and shortly after that I bought a computer. I pirated some recording software and recorded little things here and there, but the biggest catalyst was moving to California.

SLUG: Why’d you go to California?
AP: I went to California because, well, I was actually going to go to New York. Most of the friends that I was playing with at the time, Jim (Kimball), Jeff (Johnson), Jamison (Wilkins), Matt (Matteus), Jeremy (Chatelain), Cache (Tolman), all those guys moved to New York. I was going to go out there, but everyone kept warning me about how hard it was to live in New York.

SLUG: Did you feel a competitive thing from them?
AP: I just felt like ... (pause), yeah, there was a bit of competition. Like, “Oh shit, moved to New York and he joined Handsome and those guys are on tour with Silverchair right now and everyone’s blowing up and all they had to do is move to the big city!” That was my and everyone else’s motivation: get out of small town, move to big city. That’s were the success is, where the action is. I actually had a U-Haul booked for New York, to go east, and I got a call from John Bunch from Sense Field, and they were looking for a drummer. They were having auditions, so I switched my U-Haul and I went to California instead. I had like a hundred bucks, and it was your basic cliché story; I had no money, and I ate ramen for a month. I put an ad in The Recycler and this girl responded to my ad, and she wanted me to play in her band. The first night that I met her, we went back to her place, and her roommate is this guy Critter, Jeff Knewel, he’s a producer. He’s from Chicago and did all the old Ministry stuff. He was working on the Guns n’ Roses record out there.

SLUG: The, the ...
AP: The infamous one, Chinese Democracy. The one that still hasn’t come out (giggles). But he had a Pro Tools rig in his living room. I mean, when we walked in, I was like, “Oh my god, this is what I want, I want my life to look like this.” I asked him, “Ok, I’ve got a couple thousand dollars, what recording school should I go to?” He said, “ Don’t. Don’t go to school. Buy a rig and just start recording.” So I did that, I bought a Pro Tools rig, he hooked me up with all his plug-ins, and then he taught me how to use the interface. Shortly after that I moved back here.

SLUG: That seems to be a pretty common theme for Salt Lake, leaving and coming back.
AP: It’s funny because Salt Lake’s a vortex, you go out, and then you realize, and then you come back. For me, I just had to get out of Salt Lake; I just had to do something. I feel good that I lived in California for 2 years and I got along just fine. I paid my bills, I traveled, I didn’t get my ass kicked, and I didn’t have to suck dick for coke or anything. When I would come back, I’d see all my friends and I just realized, you know, this is a really beautiful place to live in, its not gross, its not spread out, its not expensive, and all my friends live here. Like, what am I doing? By the second year I was in L.A., it was just basically work, home, work, home. It was like, “Fuck it, I’m going to go back to Salt Lake. I like that place, it’s cool,” and still, to this day, I love Utah. I don’t have any plans on moving anytime soon.

SLUG: What is your role in the recording process?
AP: To be the extra guy in the band that knows about this stuff. I just happen to know how to use this stuff (waves his hand around the control room) better than you guys, so it makes sense for me to run this stuff and for me to be sitting in this chair and doing the edits and stuff like that. When I make records, especially with people I like, I really try to have the vibe be that we are in our bedroom, making this with a ghetto four- track, and have it be fun on that level. I’m the extra band member, and my job is geeky tech stuff. You know, there’s a drummer, there’s a guitarist, there’s a bassist, there’s a keyboard guy. I’m just a degree off from the keyboard guy.

SLUG: So for you, there’s a personal, an interior, link to all of this?
AP: Absolutely. I think that’s what makes me different from a lot of other studio engineers. I’m really more romantic about it. I want to have a friendship with the bands that I record. I went to a memorial the other day for Blake [Donner] from Parallax, and I got up and spoke, which is weird because I don’t do that. I don’t do any of that stuff, but I had to just get up and reflect a little bit upon how personally special it is to me to be part of something like that. To take his art and his voice and immortalize it, to help bring his art to fruition, I think that’s a really special thing.

SLUG: What do you think is the role that digital recording technology plays in the democratization of music distribution? As somebody who works in the digital format, do you see similarities?
AP: Yeah, absolutely. The fact that I have this equipment at my disposal is amazing to me. Sometimes I feel like an asshole because I listen to Sgt. Peppers or old Zeppelin records or Marley records that were recorded on 1, 2, 4 tracks tops. I have gear that would make them lose their minds. I can’t make those records yet, but back 20 years ago, I wouldn’t be able to have a studio unless I had $50,000 to start it with. For me to be able to quit my day job and do this for a living is amazing, especially considering the investment that I’ve put in has been very minimal. Compared to like, Counterpoint, where they have actual rooms and tape machines and big ass boards and huge monitors, that stuff’s not necessary now. For all intents and purposes, most of the best records are made with meager means.

SLUG: Did Clive Davis [American Idol producer] make you shave your beard?
AP: No, he didn’t make me shave my beard. Our (Hudson River School) pimps suggested that if I had the beard, I would look a lot older than I am, and that Clive is very youth driven. Even with me shaving the beard, they said that we were too old. I wouldn’t have cut my hair. I already feel bad about it. I felt like a fucking monkey, jumping around (claps his hands together), “I’ll cut my beard for you, anything you say! Thank you sir, may I have another!”