Pat MacDonald – Chords of fame
And he’s always writing. MacDonald figures he’s written a thousand songs. “These days I get better and better at rejecting songs that aren’t working,” he says, “which is good because lots of them are crappy.” He sips his juice and shoots a mischievous smile. “A miscarriage of poetic justice.”
Tonight he loads his one-man rock band into the side door of the Osthelder Saloon, a shotgun tavern in the heart of downtown Sheboygan Falls. Four clanging bingo machines line the wall opposite the long bar. Badger football highlights blare from above on twin TVs. Anna Nicole Smith highlights screech on another.
Live, MacDonald gets maximum sound with a minimalist setup. Troubadour Of Stomp is driven, and driven hard, by MacDonald’s left foot. Clad in a custom-made black Spanish boot, it stomps a quarter-inch piece of plywood with a kick-drum mike for a pick-up. When he first explained it to me, I thought of John Hartford’s kick board. But that’s like comparing a Ford Taurus to an Alpha Romeo.
“I always stomped anyway,” MacDonald says. “The stomp board turns something that once disturbed the downstairs neighbors into something that anchors and drives my music.”
He first experimented with it in Spain during his expatriate post-Austin years in the 1990s. He had broken up with Barbara K, his first wife and Timbuk3 partner. Browne loaned him the use of his Barcelona apartment.
“Aside from being one of the great lyricists in the English language, he is a totally unique voice,” Browne says by phone from Los Angeles. “I saw him play a little gig in a Spanish bar in the Pyrenees. These people had no way of knowing how good the lyrics were because they didn’t speak any English at all. He got going with his stomp board and playing his guitar and it was just so hip. It was so driving that they just turned on the strobe light and started dancing.”
Onstage at the Osthelder, MacDonald is ripping through his first and only set of nearly four hours of music. His words crack your heart. His stomp board thwacks your head. “I Never Will” pulls a rope of tension straight through the room; the small crowd looks slackjawed over their bottles of Miller Lite.
MacDonald says he wants his audience “to feel sexy and intelligent,” and he’s getting his wish tonight. Long past midnight he rages into a cover of “Ring Of Fire”, which he smashes like a highball glass against a wall of bricks. Then his friend and collaborator Anna Sacks takes the stage.
Sacks introduces the next song, a clever number they wrote together called “If You Only Knew (How to F…)”. I don’t fill in the last word because they never say it, using this absence to create comic and sexual tension.
But Sacks wants the audience to listen carefully to the words, and she says so. This causes one of America’s premier lyricists to chastise her playfully. “I pity you, my young friend,” MacDonald says. “You think people want to hear words! You must play to the groin! Not the brain!”
While he takes his explosive solo shows to clubs all over the country, it’s the paradox of Pat MacDonald that most of his post-Timbuk3 recordings remain unavailable in the United States. I had to obtain two relatively recent MacDonald discs from the artist himself. Both were produced by John Parish (yes, PJ Harvey’s collaborator) and recorded in Spain: 2001’s Degrees Of Gone, which features lush orchestral support from the Inchtabokatables, and 1999’s Begging Her Graces. (There’s also an entire album of Depeche Mode covers called Strange Love.)
Troubadour Of Stomp was produced and engineered in Portland, Oregon, by Pat Kearns at Studio 13, care of AudioCinema Records. MacDonald bought the master and is releasing the disc himself in January on his own Steel Bridge/Broken Halo label. In February, he’ll issue a compilation of music performed live at his annual Steel Bridge songwriting festival in Sturgeon Bay.
The festival is a fundraiser to try to save the old steel bridge that spans the harbor into downtown Sturgeon Bay. Songwriters gather for a week at the funky old Holiday Motel on the water’s edge, write new songs, and perform them at the end of the week. Browne played last year. This year’s festival begins June 9.
In the meantime, MacDonald will continue to play small clubs and write. He’ll also continue to turn away commercial offers for his music. Though “The Future” is now in the past, the raw nerve of MacDonald’s indifference to commercial success is still just below the surface for people such as Miles Copeland, who managed Timbuk3 in its heyday.
“I turned down almost $3 million on his wishes to not ‘sell out,’ even though I had the legal right to license the song,” Copeland told me. “Pat was always one of the nicest people I worked with and he did have integrity to match his talent. But he was an ‘art monster’ in the full meaning of the word, which would have been fine had we all been making a living from all our efforts.”
Even so, Copeland still carries deep respect for him. “I could always count on Pat to write great lyrics, and in fact I’m considering hiring him again to put English words to some great Arab melodies I have.”
Whether or not Copeland and MacDonald connect again, MacDonald’s present is plenty bright enough. Not long after the Sheboygan show, I asked him what his view of fame was.
“From what I’ve seen of it, it means people treat you special,” he says, “which means you get the kind of respect and consideration everyone deserves but so few get. Everybody wants to be known and loved in their community. Life is better that way. Anonymity is only a luxury to those who can afford to not give a shit.”