PAT BEERS of SCHIZOPHONICS: The Teachings of Love and Music
An interview by Sarah Kidd.
The Schizophonics are heading to New Zealand armed with brand new music and a desire to tear up the stage; their live performances infamous for their sheer intensity.
Founded in San Diego they are the perfect mix of psychedelic rock mixed with nasty funk, their live shows energetic and unpredictable. Pat Beers himself often described as a cross between Jimi Hendrix and James Brown.
Those in the know, know. Their first show at Auckland’s Whammy Bar has already sold out, the second won’t be far behind.
I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Pat Beers in an in depth conversation about the bands origin, some of his early New Zealand influences and just what The Schizophonics have in store for New Zealand…
I have to say, you and Lety are like the rock and roll love story that we all wish we had.
“Awwww”
There’s serious history there, you met in high school then lost touch, right? Before once again running into each other?
“We barely knew each other, we jammed together a couple of times back then. We didn’t see each other for a long time after that and I was about to move out to California and I had a going away party and I ended up running into her again and we ended up hitting it off. We talked on the phone everyday and then she moved out to California eventually.
So, we had been living out there for maybe about a year or less than that and I had started a band that wasn’t really workin out too well. We lost the drummer and she [Lety] would always hang out and just jump on the drum set and she would always keep a really good beat. So we’d always jam with her anyway and so when the drummer left we were just like ‘Well why don’t you play drums?’ And she said ‘But I can’t play drums’ and we were like ‘It doesn’t matter, just keep a beat’ And so she kinda learned how to play on stage!
We would play long gigs at dive bars for nobody, but it was great that there wasn’t anyone there cause we could just kinda learn how to play and figure out how to write songs. We would play a song for twenty minutes just to keep a beat for that long. Lety could just naturally keep really good time without speeding up or slowing down, always just in the pocket.
We were living together for about a year before that and then we had the band and then we ended up getting married a few years later and I mean that was in like 2011 so we’re coming up on … what is that…” [laughs]
[laughs] Your eight-year anniversary?
[mutual laughter]
[still laughing] “Eight-year anniversary, yeah, yeah!”
It sounds like your relationship grew from how close you guys were and the creative ties between you.
“Yeah, we were best friends; she was a musician when I met her, she played guitar, she told me who the Ramones were back in high school when I didn’t know who the Ramones were. So, she was already ahead of the curve back then.
We both like the same stuff and have the same sense of humour and yeah, I just feel really lucky that I get to share this adventure with her and that we’re able to do it together. I feel very lucky.”
The fact that you both have so much passion for what you do and that you can share that love together as well as the love that you have for each other; like I said you guys are the rock n roll love story that everybody wants!
“People would always tell me that ‘Nah! It never works!’ you know?
Because they always think about bands like Fleetwood Mac, but I think that is so stupid. You look at The Cramps or Dead Moon or something like that. Lux and Ivy were always my favourite rock n roll couple, they were like the coolest ever. I actually know a lot of bands with couples and it works really well.”
Obviously both you and Lety are the two permanent members of The Schizophonics; and you have session musicians that come in and out to cover the bass sections?
“Yeah, our bass player has been playing with us for the last year, he’s a hired gun, he’s played with a lot of different bands. But I mean we really like playing with him and he does a great job, his name is Blake (Lindquist).
We – over the years – played with a bunch of people and I do like getting different personalities and different sounds in. and every time. Everyone has their own kind of thing they bring to the band, but I’m really excited to have this guy on tour cause he does such a good job and he holds it down so that I can be crazy and not think about it.”
[laughs] I think one of the things that really struck me was not only the fact that you have had different bass players but that both you and Lety have worked with other musicians as well. Like it’s real musical comradery. Would you say that is a particular feature of the San Diego scene as a whole?
“Yeah, I mean there is a lot of like cross pollination in music in San Diego. We have a lot of different versions of the band as well; there’s like a soul version which is eleven people. We have a horn section and back-up singers and I don’t even play guitar! It’s sort of like a James Brown themed band. We have people that play with that group that will kinda sit in with us sometimes, like we’ll do a show and we’ll have a sax player or you know a keyboard player.
We collaborate with bands like The Loons and Lety has a band with Anja [Stax] from The Loons called The Rosalyns which is kind of a 60’s girl group band. So yeah, we try to collaborate as much as we can. We do a lot with El Vez as well [The Mexican Elvis] and we’ve played together with him.”
That’s such a great name!
“Robert Lopez was in a punk band called The Zeros in the 70’s in LA, and then he became El Vez later on and he’s been doing that act for years. He’s probably more my favourite if not my favourite live performer I’ve ever seen and we’re lucky enough to be friends with him and put on shows and collaborations.
So that kinda developed in San Diego cause all the bands played with each other and would jump in each other’s bands. But now when we’re on the road it’s kinda like become a thing where sometimes we’ve got really close with the person we’re touring with from some other country or state and every night we try to do a song where we get everyone on stage.
Like recently we were in France and we became friends with this band who was on the road with us for about eight shows called Howlin Jaws; by the third show we were just getting both bands on stage and it was great. So, we try to do that with all of our favourite musicians, we just try to kind of expand the band. I like to think that our band has forty members you know. Like me and Lety at the core and then [laughs] we’ll tour as a three piece to make money [laughs] and then when we’re at home, we’ll just get as many people as we can to play with us!”
[laughs] I love it because it’s very much like the music scene here in Auckland as well, you’ll find musicians are often in several different bands and guest spots are a regular feature of local shows.
“Well that’s awesome to hear because it’s not like that in every city, and when you can get that going it’s something that just kind of grows and grows. A city that has that is really lucky I think, and it’s funny you tour random places and you never know. Some cities just – I don’t know how music scenes form – seem to start really small and it’s usually something where all the bands start going to each others shows and supporting each other and then all of a sudden you will see one guy from one band on stage with another band and then it becomes this really vital scene.
I noticed when we went to the UK; I remember Leeds having this really great music scene that had that feel. Of all the places that we played I felt like Leeds had this really cool scene of all these different characters.
But yeah there’s different places like that, and I always I love it. That’s one of my favourite parts about touring is just getting to see and meet all these other bands from different places.”
Well you will get to see some cool local acts as you travel around New Zealand, and you will notice the difference in both style and sound as you move about the different cities. It really is cool.
“Yeah, yeah that’s one of the great things too. It’s such a weird thing music scenes, I think of them like little ponds, and each pond has a different creature that’s evolved you know [laughs] and I think it’s the separation that makes it more interesting.
Chants R&B [One of Pats favourite bands], they developed this great sound because their influence was so small, because back in the 60’s apparently it was so hard to get records in New Zealand. They had like James Brown live at the Apollo and I believe they had like The Pretty Things because The Pretty Things had this notorious … uh, infamous I should say tour of New Zealand in the 60’s [August 1965]; they were pretty much chased out of the country with pitchforks!”
[laughs] We as a country were still a little bit reserved back then…
“Chants R&B, I think when they made that record – I don’t know if this is all completely you know correct [laughs] – but the thing that I remember hearing is that they didn’t have a tonne of influences at the time. It was like The Pretty Things and James Brown and they all did such a very specific style of rock n roll it ended up sounding like the MC5 meets The Pretty Things. It was just so good!”
The Schizophonics formed around 2009, so you have been going for roughly a decade; but your debut ‘Land of the Living’ was only released a couple of years ago…
[chuckles] “Yeah…”
Why so long? I know you were releasing 45’s before that but…
“It took us a long time just to learn how to be a band. Like I was saying earlier, Lety started playing drums on stage and I mean it’s funny because we never thought we’d be playing ten years from now. When we started it, like I didn’t know how to write songs, and my voice was really bad. It took me a long time to like kind of develop into a singer that you could listen to for more than thirty minutes without throwing the record out the window.”
[mutual laughter]
“We basically played for three years starting out, just developing; you know the funny thing is now I see bands and they are very smart about it. They’re like ‘Well I don’t wanna go out and play if we don’t have our thing together yet’.
When we started we did not care at all, we were just doing it for fun! About three years in we were starting to get the hang of it and that’s when we met El Vez and he took us on tour and kinda put us under his wing. We were his opening and his backing band for this tour and his set was so difficult for us at the time to play and he was such a great performer and so professional that it really turned us into a real band.
I think that was 2012 or 2013 and that’s when we learned how to do all these covers and stuff like that, he showed us stage tricks and how to put a set together, how to put on a show, down to that you have to go and talk to people after the show and make a personal connection and not put two songs in the same key back to back!
Every little trick, he showed us and when we came back from that tour we felt like a real band. On that record [Land of the Living] there’s maybe only like one or two songs from the early days on there, a lot of those songs we wrote just before the album came out; which is kinda funny because we’d been playing a bunch of our own songs for years and then when the record came out I was kinda like ‘Ohhh, these weren’t that great’. So, I just kinda hustled to put something out that I was really happy with.
We just finished another record, the final recording session was a few days ago…”
I was just about to ask about that as I knew there was another album in the works…
“Yeah, we just finished recording it and it’s off to be mixed, I think it’s going to be mixed while we’re in New Zealand. Which is probably a good idea because I kinda become a backstreet driver on that kind of stuff so…”
[mutual laughter]
“They decided to get me out of their way for a little while. Maybe it was all by design…”
[laughs] I was just about to say, not just out of the way, out of the country!
[laughs] “Yeah, yeah, if we can get him on the other side of the planet and not bugging us…”
So, what is the anticipated release date for the new album?
“Originally we were just going to do Halloween – but so we can actually get the show at The Casbah in San Diego which is our favourite place to play, middle of October is going to be the record release which I think is quite doable with how long it takes to press it and then turn around.”
And has it got a confirmed title yet?
“Yeah, it’s going to be called People in the Sky. The only thing we need is an album cover which I am working on; I have literal writers block for designs, that’s what I have right now. But hopefully I come up with something!
But I’m really excited for the record, like I would tell everyone it’s going to be half angry political album and half party album. That’s kinda the vibe of it and sometimes within the same song! But it’s something that you can put on to have fun to but also addressing some of the insanity going on as well. How can you not right!?”
Yeah, well you described your first album as rock n roll escapism, so it certainly ties in with that. Without delving into the depressing political state of affairs going on in America…
[laughs] “Yeah, he who shall not be named…”
[laughs] but yes, your country is in a lot of turmoil and division at the moment so it would almost be strange if this did not permeate some facet of your music
“That’s kinda the theme of the album; the first one was escapism and finding a place to kinda just live away from all the craziness going on and just enjoy life; this one is all about looking at it dead in the eye. So, it’s sort of about the opposite of that I guess.
But I’m excited about this one and I’m really happy with the way everything came out with the recording. We’ll be super excited to play all the new songs on this tour as well. We’ve finally been changing up the set and getting all these new songs in there.”
That’s cool, I was going to ask if your kiwi fans will be getting to hear any of this soon to be released material…
“Yeah, we’ll probably be playing a good chunk of these songs at the shows. You know I’ll play the same set for a year or two, I just get really comfortable. Like before a show I get nervous and I’m like ‘Just play the stuff that we know, the stuff that we can nail’.
But the last tour I made myself get out of the comfort zone, I was like ‘Let’s just do all new songs!’ I was really glad we did because some of them I would never have tried before, and they ended up being really, really fun to play. I think we’re also going to try and pull out some songs that we’ve never played live that we recorded.”
My last question for you revolves around one of the biggest reputations that you guys have and that is for your live performances which are legendary; people using everything from ‘explosive’ to ‘astounding’ to ‘mind-blowing’ to ‘a once in a lifetime experience’ with which to describe The Schizophonics live.
“I’ve got some bad stuff as well, like I can add in some really bad things people have said too to kind of even it out?”
[mutual laughter]
Yeah there’s always going to be a critic, but trust me when I say the positive reviews far outweigh the negative…
It sounds a little loaded to ask you this, but is that just a natural thing? You were saying before that you get really nervous before getting up on stage, so is it a way of working out the nerves to have this explosive live experience?
Or does the music just fill you with this energy that just has to get out?
“It’s kinda like that, I feel like I have to. I don’t know why people aren’t freaking out all the time [chuckles] with the way the world is it’s like why not right? [laughs] It’s just a feeling of every show is the last show… you know it could be and so why not?
It’s just what I do, I was joking earlier about the negative feedback, I’ve had a lot of people say ‘It’s a little much’ like I’m aiming for people’s admiration or something.
For some reason I just get very nervous talking to people one on one, like if I had to have a conversation in the grocery store or something I would get way more nervous than playing in front of a group of people. I don’t know why, it’s like I just kinda shut it off.
But I like to have fun on stage. I would rather it be fun and energetic and have passion then be perfect and get all the notes perfectly and sing perfectly and sound great. I just like to try to get out of my shell as much as I can. I always feel like that if I act stupid then people in the crowd will feel like it’s ok for them to let loose.
You know when you’re in a room and one person starts dancing and then the next person is like ‘Ok, well I guess that I can dance too’ and then three people are dancing and then all of a sudden everyone is…”
[chuckles] Yeah
“Sometimes you gotta be the first person to do something ridiculous and completely have no inhibitions and self-consciousness whatsoever” [laughs]
And I hear you have a bit of a reputation for being a dancer too…
“Like you said, you kinda gotta get it out too, and I always feel after the show like a normal person. If I don’t play for a long period of time I get really antsy. I don’t know how most people don’t have some sort of extreme outlet.
Maybe that’s why things are the way they are sometimes, maybe people do need some kind of outlet like that to de-stress themselves or get out …”
all the bad stuff of the daily grind. Yeah, I agree.
“And it’s like [chuckles] I have to enjoy the show too! I’m amazed at people when they carry a giant bass in to a gig, or like set up a little drum set. The amount of stuff you have to do, just to play a show these days, you know like drop the gear out in front, and then go and find parking and all that.
When you go on stage, why just stand there? Have a great time! It’s like you have an hour you might as well. Even if no one else in the venue has fun, I’m gonna have fun!”
The Schizophonics are performing eight shows around New Zealand over the next few weeks. You can check out their schedule and ticket availability at Under The Radar.
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