Article and pictures taken from SPIN Online
By Kate Sullivan
Filter frontman Richard Patrick walks into a Chicago bar at midnight, wearing a pair of $1,000 leather-and-anaconda hip-huggers. These are trousers to make Axl Rose cry, pants that fulfill a cliché so masterfully one can only sigh and surrender: Okay. Tonight you win.
Then our hero speaks.
"I really didn't want to go out tonight, but then I realized I could wear my leather pants. I never get to wear these! Aren't they totally dope?"
The former Nine Inch Nails guitarist is clearly enjoying the slide back into rock-star mode after a four-year break between Filter's debut, Short Bus, and their brave new manifesto, Title Of Record. But while Patrick lives for the rock, he isn't great at sustaining the pose. He'll tell you in a heartbeat that he's 30 years old; he suffers from allergies; he was brutally cuckolded; and he's getting laser surgery so he can stop wearing glasses. He loves his leather pants (check out the "Welcome To The Fold" video), but also believes they're "bullshit."
Patrick's candor also makes him a good sparring partner. Tonight he will hold forth on 1) Why The Guy Who Sings "Closing Time" Must Die 2) Why Jar Jar Binks Also Must Die 3) Why Rock Is Superior To Hip-Hop 4) Why It Is The Rocker's Job To Be An Overly Sensitive Weirdo 5) Why Neil Diamond Is A Rock God. ("My whole rock scream is modeled off of his," Patrick says.) Sometimes Patrick is right on, and sometimes he has no idea how tender and ridiculous he appears‹like when he busts out his spiffy "Chris Watkins" impression. ("You mean Christopher Walken?" I ask. "Yeah, Chris Watkins!") Patrick does understand, however, that "A lot of people don't really like me that much"‹and the feeling's mutual. (The cliquey L.A. rock scene reminds him of a "creepy" version of high school.)
Not everyone hates him, however: "Richie is a genuinely sweet guy," says Rob Cavallo, Filter's former A&R man. "But when it comes to his art he's really intense. He says heavy, deep stuff in his music." Patrick got his rock-star training on tour with Trent Reznor‹though he admits he can barely play guitar. Mostly, he smashed instruments and was inducted into the world of groupies. ("I had sex with this girl, then I went to the bathroom and I overhear her calling her friend, going, 'You're not gonna believe this. I just fucked the guitarist for Nine Inch Nails.'") He left NIN in 1994 to form Filter, gaining notoriety with the petulant howl of "Hey Man, Nice Shot." He says he wrote the song in 1991 about politician R. Budd Dwyer who committed suicide on live TV. Patrick probably shouldn't have released it, but confesses it was the best he had.
Not anymore. While Short Bus was a sludgy exercise in post-industrial peevishness, recorded solely by Patrick and programmer/multi-instrumentalist Brian Liesegang, Title Of Record presents a born-again band leaping ardently into the realm of romantic, hard guitar rock. Patrick's vocals are disarmingly aesthetic, his melodies shoot for sensual melodrama, and his lyrics seep pathos at times. ("When do you think I'll be okay?" he asks a lost lover at the album's close.) Bolstered by Geno Lenardo's effects-heavy guitar, the new songs assert a fierce vulnerability that owes more to Perry Farrell than to Reznor. "He's making really great modern rock'n'roll," Cavallo raves. "Just listen to the sound‹it's huge."
Patrick's obviously relieved to finally have a real band. "It feels so great to get rid of the stress of having to do everything," he says. "I never wanted to be in a band of hired guns. It's not the Richard Patrick E. Street Project." After touring behind Short Bus for two years, Patrick lost drummer Matt Walker to the Smashing Pumpkins, and Liesegang quit soon after. "The only person talking to me was [my girlfriend]," Patrick says. "I got so unbelievably depressed." Then his "first true love" broke his heart. ("I'm Not the Only One" was conceived while Patrick's broken hand was dripping blood from punching a wall.) It wasn't a total loss, though: Title Of Record is the proudly bared scar of that wound.
One afternoon in his Wicker Park loft-studio, Patrick is screening a rough edit of the "Welcome To The Fold" video. Sitting on the couch, wearing thick glasses and stroking his cat, Patrick watches himself onscreen. "Now that's some rock," he says, clearly satisfied with the Morrison-esque image he's constructed. The band perform inside a semi-permeable metal cube in the middle of the desert (don't ask); as fat tourists arrive in trailers to ogle the cube, their teenage kids are sucked inside. The incongruity between huggable Patrick-on-the-couch and his unctuous TV doppelgänger is remarkable‹except that they both look rather lonely.
And both are Patrick. Really. "I shitcan myself and say I was a geek, but I strongly believe in rock stardom and all that shit," he says quietly. "I'm 30 and I look like I'm 26 because I just refuse to grow up. I don't see myself as a man. I see myself more like a fucked-up 14-year-old."
