Patrick Longrie might not be an active part of the hardcore scene these days, but his contribution to the sound and movement cannot be denied. In the '80s, the drummer played in both Uniform Choice and Unity, the former considered one of the most important acts to ever come out of the hardcore scene. In addition to his work behind the trap kit, Patrick and his friend and bandmate, Patrick Dubar (also of Uniform Choice and Unity) also co-founded Wishingwell Records, a label that released seminal albums from such bands as Youth of Today, Insted, and B'LAST!
I was recently invited by Joe Foster (Unity, Ignite, LastLight) to hang out at Patrick's house in Orange County, CA to see Unity's first jam session in decades. I had a lot of fun seeing the guys work through "Positive Mental Attitude" and "Explanation for Action," and after the practice, I got to chat with Patrick a bit. We agreed to exchange phone numbers and get a proper interview in the books for No Echo.
Throughout the years, a lot has been written about both Uniform Choice and Unity, but I wanted to dig a bit deeper into the histories of each band, and the musicians behind the music. I hope you enjoy this Q&A as much as I had putting it together.
I know we briefly spoke about this when I first met you, but you aren’t from California originally, right?
That’s right. I was born in Superior, WI, and that’s where most of my family still lives. My family is still all diehard Wisconsin when it comes to sports and all of that stuff. I came to Orange County, CA when I was 11.
What brought you to Southern California?
My mom and dad went to high school together and got married right when they finished there. My dad wanted to be a doctor, so he went to the University of Wisconsin–Superior, and then got into medical school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We lived in Madison for a couple of years and then my dad decided he didn’t want to be a doctor, and then my mom and dad split up. So, he came out here, on a whim, with some buddies. One of them that had gone to the Marine Corps in El Toro, out here in Orange County. After that, he decided to stay. He called for me and then I came out to meet him and have been here ever since.
How tough was it for you to adjust to living in Southern California after living in Wisconsin all of your childhood?
The adjustment part wasn’t that bad, but the divorce stuff wasn’t easy, obviously. I was always hoping that my mom and sister were going to come out here, but it didn’t really end up working out. It was fun time living with my dad and uncle. My dad was 29 at the time. I guess you could say that we were lower middle class. Let’s see…we lived in a city called Tustin. But, yeah, we had a lot of fun back then.
When did music begin to take hold of you?
I played a lot of sports growing up, and I would say that it was a major focal point for me. So, I decided that I wanted to go to this school in Santa Ana called Mater Dei High School to play football and baseball. When I got there it was interesting because my hair wasn’t short but it also wasn’t super-long, but for football, you had to shave your head bald if you were on the team. It was kinda traumatic [laughs].
Anyway, in 1980, when I was a Freshman, there were guys on my football team that were Juniors and Seniors who had Black Flag and Sex Pistols records, and things of that nature. They would play them in our locker room and it was like nothing I had ever heard up to that point. That was huge for me. That’s also where I met [future Uniform Choice and Unity singer] Pat Dubar. Dan O’Mahony (No For An Answer, Carry Nation, Shiners Club) and John Mastropaolo (No For An Answer, Unity) also went to Mater Dei. We all got into that kind of music around the same time.
That’s interesting, especially since there’s the stereotype that jocks alienate, or even pick on, punk kids in high school.
Yeah, that happens a lot of with a lot of straight edge and hardcore kids when they get into that kind of music. It was the absolute opposite in my case. We introduced the music and opened it up to the other football players and athletes in our school. I remember when we started playing in bands when we were in high school, the guys from the football and baseball teams in our school would come out to the gigs and have a great time. Uniform Choice would be playing some house party and there would be 50 kids from Mater Dei High School there! The same thing happened once Unity started playing shows.
SEE ALSO: 2017 interview with Dan O’Mahony (No For An Answer, 411, Done Dying, Carry Nation, Workshed Records).
You bring up straight edge. I know you’re still straight edge, but did you ever go through a phase of drinking and smoking weed when you were a teenager?
No, I never drank or did any kind of drug when I was a kid. My dad and mom both drank. I can’t really put my finger on it, but I was never interested in doing it myself. I didn’t enjoy seeing my dad or uncle messed up. But, look, it wasn’t like I was searching for something, or I was scarred in some way. When I got into hardcore and punk, I thought it was something that spoke to me directly. I know everyone feels that way when they’re young. But when I heard some of the Dischord stuff coming out of DC, like Minor Threat, it was so exciting for me. The message in those songs spoke to me because it was stuff I had been thinking about on my own for a long time. It was so inspiring to know that there were all of these other people on the other side of the country who felt the same way I did. For me, personally speaking, bands like Minor Threat reinforced what and who I wanted to be.
When did you go from being merely a fan of punk and hardcore to playing drums in a band?
I want to think it was 1982. Pat [Dubar] and I were pretty inseparable at that point. We wanted to play in a band and have fun, together. Well, who will buy a P.A., and who is going to buy a drum set? Honest to god, it was as simple as us flipping a coin [laughs]. I wasn’t really keen on playing drums, but that’s what I flipped [laughs]. It obviously worked out because Pat was a lot more charismatic than I was. He was also a very good singer. It all worked out. We were just kids having fun at that point.
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Give me some background on those early gigging days. This was before it officially became Unity.
Right. Well, I met Joe Foster (Unity, Blood Days, Ignite, LastLight) at that time and he started playing guitar with Pat and I. We played with a few different bassists and played parties, and stuff like that. At that point, we were all just trying to learn our instruments. We didn’t do covers, but our original songs we’re pretty awful [laughs]. I remember we had a few different band names that we played under.
So, when did things begin to get a bit more serious?
Pat was asked to try out for Uniform Choice, but not the Uniform Choice that everyone knows. It was someone’s else’s band first. Some kids had played some shows under that name, but it was more poppy punk stuff at that point. Anyway, they liked Pat and then asked him to join, which he accepted but he wanted it to go into a different direction, with some different musicians. I don’t really remember the exact way it happened, but it wasn’t sinister or anything. Pat’s friend, Pat Dyson, was drumming in the band.
Let me interrupt you for a second. How the hell were there three different Pats involved in such a tiny circle of friends/musicians?
[Laughs] Actually, it was four, because Pat O’Mahony was the guitar player on the second Uniform Choice tour in 1989. So, when we did that US and Canada tour, we had Pat Dubar, Pat Longrie, Pat O’Mahony, and John Mastropaolo in the lineup. That was really funny.
OK, so what do you consider the first true lineup of Uniform Choice?
Before I was in the band, it was Pat Dyson, Dave Mello, Victor Maynez, and Pat Dubar. They played shows. They recorded the demo. They recorded most of the Screaming for Change album. I played on two tracks on that album: “Screaming for Change” and “Once I Cry.”
How did you become a member of Uniform Choice?
Pat Dyson was going to college, so they called me and said that they had a big show booked in Riverside and they didn’t want to cancel it, but Pat Dyson wasn’t going to do the show for whatever reason. It’s been so many years now that I’m not really sure what happened. Either way, I didn’t have anything to do with it, and I don’t really care. I told them that I didn’t even know their songs since the album wasn’t even out yet. But they had a demo out at that point and I had gone to their shows, obviously.
They told me they were going to come to my house to get my drums and we would get together to work out the arrangements of the demo songs, and some stuff that was going to be on the album. I’m sure there were a lot of fuck ups, but we played the show and had a lot of fun. I don’t even remember what venue we played. What I do remember is that Dan O’Mahony, Billy Rubin (Half Off, Haywire), and all of those guys were all there. That was in 1985.
What inspired you and Pat Dubar to start Wishingwell Records during that period?
There weren’t a lot of labels putting out hardcore at that point. I know that Pat had spoken with Ian MacKaye about the possibility of putting out Screaming for Change on Dischord Records as a half and half kind of thing, but for whatever reason, that fell through. Ian then urged Pat to put the record out on our own. That’s how Wishingwell was formed.
Before we put out Screaming for Change, we wanted to start off with a single so that we could get the process down. That ended up becoming the You Are One... EP from Unity. We had no idea how to put together a record at that point, so we were flying by the seats of our pants and figured everything out as we went.
How did you guys fund the label during that first run of records?
We did Uniform Choice shows and that was when the band had started to do well locally. By the time I had joined in 1985, the band had already done the groundwork, so we were getting decent guarantees when we played clubs in the area. So, that money from the Uniform Choice gigs, plus any money Pat and I had, we put it right back into Wishingwell.
I have to also say that Pat's little brother, Courtney, was also a huge part of that label. He was always an entrepreneur. Courtney ended up buying a 7-color press and he did all of our printing and screen work for the label and band. I remember he used to charge us 50 cents per shirt [laughs]. I'm not sure if you know, but Courtney is a really established entrepreneur today. He owns the Affliction clothing brand, and a number of other ventures, like buildings and real estate. He's done really well for himself.
SEE ALSO: 10 Newer Hardcore Bands Featuring Veteran Musicians
What is the significance of the name Wishingwell?
It's a name I just came up with it. There isn't some big story behind it. Wishingwell: One word, not two. It was a democratic process, like everything Pat and I did together. "How about this name?" "What do you think of this lyric?" He and I got along extremely well for most of our relationship.
I know both you and Dubar did whatever it took to get Wishingwell going, but was there a specific aspect of the label that you specialized in?
I was more in charge of the artwork and getting all of the materials from the artists we worked with. It's funny, but I was recently looking through some stuff at home, and I came across the original pictures that Youth of Today had sent us for the Break Down the Walls album. Anyway, Joe Foster is still friendly with [Youth of Today guitarist] John Porcell, so I got his address and sent everything back to him.
I'm sure he was shocked you still had that stuff!
Yeah, that only happened a couple of weeks ago [laughs]. But let me tell you about something else from back then. Pat and I hooked up with this really shady character named Tabb Rexx who had a big warehouse in Hollywood. He was this really shifty guy who got shit done. He had a line of credit at a record pressing plant in Hollywood, so we met with him and told him what we wanted to do with Wishingwell. He was familiar with punk and intrigued with the idea of making some money by helping us put out some records. So, we formed an agreement with him where Pat and I would make all of the decisions on the artistic side of things, but we would go through him and his contacts to get things pressed up.
The guy was a thief and we never saw any money, but we were smart enough to know that before going into everything. All we wanted to do was get the records out in a professional way. All of the stuff we wanted, like colored vinyl, got done. We would go to his warehouse and grab boxes of records and then send them to the bands we worked with. We knew he would never be honest about the accounting, but he helped us get things done. That was more important for us.
Thinking back to when you first got the copies of the Unity single from the pressing plant, what was going through your mind? It must have been such a satisfying feeling.
I remember my heart pounding because just a few months prior to that, Pat and I had no idea how to get the label going, and here I was holding our first record. There was one thing that did piss me off. I went to Tabb's warehouse and held the Unity record to his face and said, "You cut off the fucking name!" The bass player of Unity was John Lorey, well, on the record, his name is cut off right at the seam. So when you looked at it, it said "John Lo." For years, people thought that was his name! Anyway, we were still excited that we were able to get the record done, and then we knew we could do the same with Uniform Choice, and eventually Youth of Today, BL'AST!, Shades Apart, and everyone else we ended up working with.
I guess we skipped over Unity a bit. What's the origin story there?
I had played in Unity with Joe Foster and a singer by the name of Rob Lynch. As you know, we recently got together at my house to jam on some songs for the first time in 30-something years. Anyway, back then, Unity played a lot of shows at the same time as Uniform Choice was. With Rob, we played some great shows with bigger bands, including Marginal Man and Youth Brigade. Then there was some very unfortunate circumstances that happened. Rob and his brother, Pete, lived together in Laguna Hills, which isn't far from me. Well, Rob had an older stepbrother and he committed suicide. That was obviously very traumatic for those guys. That ended up leading to them moving away to Los Alamitos, which isn't far, but back then seemed like it was. Rob eventually moved to Arizona and lives there to this day.
Yeah, that puts things into perspective.
We figured Unity was done at that point, but Pat Dubar and I decided that since he knew all of our songs, why don't we record the songs and release them as the first Wishingwell record. So, we then got John Lorey on bass and started Unity up again. We recorded the You Are One... EP all live in the studio. Since we had so much fun doing that, we moved forward with it and booked some shows. We even had shows where Unity and Uniform Form choice played on the same bill.
Screaming for Change came out in 1986, the year after the Unity EP. You mentioned playing on two songs on that album. Tell me a bit about that.
Yeah, they had the album done, so we were going to put that out on Wishingwell. If I'm not mistaken, the album was going to be called Use Your Head, but we decided since I had been in the band at that point for a little bit of time already, I should be on the album. We had some songs written, so we went in and did two of them. One of those songs was "Screaming for Change," and then we decided to use that as the album title. Pat wrote lyrics, but he was always open to my ideas. I wrote the lyrics to "Screaming for Change" and "Once I Cry" because of that.
In the Uniform Choice discography, those are two songs that are definite favorites of mine, so kudos to you.
Thanks so much, Carlos. I appreciate it. Listen, there was animosity, undue, I thought, from Pat Dyson over the years. I felt bad about that because he's an incredible drummer, and he was part of the beginning of Uniform Choice. In the last few years, we connected again and everything seems to be OK between the two of us.
Really? I had no idea there was a rift between you and Pat Dyson?
I never had any animosity towards him, but he did have some for me. It was like he was saying, "Fuck you! I played on Screaming for Change and I was also in the band!" I understood how he felt, but it wasn't my fault that it happened. For whatever reason, he wasn't in the band, and then they asked me to be in it. It's happened with so many bands, especially in the hardcore and punk scenes. Youth of Today have had a thousand members through the years [laughs]. Dag Nasty the same thing. It happens all the time! But, yes, Pat Dyson was an integral part of Uniform Choice in the beginning.
How did Uniform Choice work out touring? I know you and Pat both went to college.
I wanna say that we went on tour in the summer of 1987, and what happened was we had a lot of stuff going on outside of the band. I was in college. Dubar was playing college baseball. Vic had a job as a heating and air conditioning guy. He didn't want to go on tour because he would lose his job if he missed that much time. So, what I did was get him a job with my dad at a sheet metal company so that he could go on tour [laughs]. The funny thing is he still works there to this day! He and my stepdad became fantastic friends for 30 years from working together all these years [laughs]. It's crazy. I've kept in touch with Vic. His daughter is a talented softball player in college. We also both love boxing, so we've stayed in touch that way as well.
I never got to see Uniform Choice play live. What regions of the country did the band do really well in?
For our first tour, we bought an extended Ford van with no windows. Courtney made 200 dozen t-shirts for that tour... I shit you not! The whole back of the van was t-shirts! The four members of the band, and Courtney, took off and the first show was in Chicago. We weren't booking agents. We had no fucking idea what we were doing [laughs]. One of most memorable shows for me was when we headlined CBGBs. Oh, my goodness! You couldn't get another human being into that show. It was oversold. The condensation on my drums from the heat coming off the people in the audience was shocking. We believed in the straight edge philosophy and there was a lot of buzz around the country for Uniform Choice at that point. That tour was electric.
We didn't headline every show, but the audiences were always great to us. We played Winnipeg with Verbal Assault and they headlined the show. So, for us, it was never a problem of who played when. I remember we played the show of our lives that night. We played a few nights later with them again in Montreal and they said, "No, you guys can play last tonight." Not because we were superior to them, but it was a respect thing on their part, which was very cool of them. Man, I remember playing City Gardens in New Jersey and the Goo Goo Dolls opened up [laughs]. Let's see, we played with Die Kreuzen at the 9:30 Club. You got your money's worth when you saw Uniform Choice live, especially in 1985. Outside of having children, those were the best times of my life.
This is just an observation, but something that occured to me when I came over your house with Joe Foster was how in a million years I would have never seen you somewhere and recognized you as the drummer of Uniform Choice and Unity.
That's happened to me half a dozen times when I've been out with my wife [laughs]. I've been out at a show somewhere and overhead people talking about Uniform Choice and I'm right next to them and they have no idea I was in the band. I've even been in conversations with people about either Uniform Choice, Unity, or Wishingwell, and one of them starts saying stuff that isn't true about the history of everything and I tell them, "You know, I'm going to have to disagree with you right there..." It's funny, in a good way [laughs].
SEE ALSO: 2017 interview with Isaac Golub (A Chorus of Disapproval, A18, Dear Furious).
When I posted a photo on No Echo's Instagram page announcing that I had an interview with you going up on the site, I used a photo of an ad for Uniform Choice's Staring Into the Sun album. Not surprisingly, there were some people who commented negatively to that album. So many people have called that the band's "rock album," or even more to the point, Uniform Choice's sellout record. There's also this idea out there that since you guys grew your hair out, that you were aiming to get away from hardcore and become a band like The Cult or Fields of the Nephilim. I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject.
I'll tell you exactly what it is. To this day, what I listen to most is stuff like the Descendents, Minor Threat, Circle Jerks, and Rites of Spring. I'll always be a fanatic of hardcore music. I'm 52-years-old and nothing has changed. But you just don't listen to one style of music all of the time. You don't just eat steak every day of your life either. My background in music was the Beatles. My father had a huge record collection with artists like Donovan and Crosby, Stills & Nash, so that's what I first listened to as a kid.
So, to go back to Staring Into the Sun, when we decided to make that album, it wasn't that we were trying to be rock stars. That's laughable. What it was, truly, was us progressing as musicians. We thought about it a lot, Carlos, we really did. We asked ourselves if we wanted to make another straight-up hardcore album, and it was, "Damned right we want to, but we're going to write hardcore songs." On that album, you have stuff like "Cut of a Different Cause," which isn't a pussy song. But you had Victor in the band who was more of the melodic guy, and Dave joined TSOL right after Uniform Choice, so he was a rock guy. They loved melodic rock. Pat and I wanted to do something that was challenging for all of us that combined the influences.
Are you happy with Staring Into the Sun?
I love some of it, and I don't like some of it. You know, just like everyone else, and I'm one of the people who actually made it. There are things that I would have changed back then. But I wouldn't change them now, because I'm proud of what we did. Whether people like something or don't like something, that's fine. I remember Pat really liked, as I did, The Cult's Love album, and the one after that [Electric]. That was new music at the time. It was different. But at that time, I still went out and bought all of the newer hardcore records that were coming out. When we made Staring Into the Sun, it wasn't like we were worried that people in the hardcore scene were going to hate us. But, it's not like we thought we were The Cult. We knew who we were.
Pat and I were struggling to make everything work. We were also going to college at Pepperdine. Dave and Vic were older than us and had their own stuff going on. So we wanted to come up with something that would invigorate us as musicians. We weren't trying to be Judas Priest. It was nothing like that. I grew my hair out because I had to cut it for school for so many years [laughs]. Either way, we weren't interested in making Screaming for Change: Part II.
So you chalk a lot of the resistance to that album to the hardcore scene being to close-minded?
Yeah, at that time, the straight edge hardcore scene had a lot of people that were very, "You better stay this way or you're not one of us anymore!" Well, if anyone ever knew or still knows Pat and I, it's probably not a good idea to tell us what to do. We would never cower behind anyone. I was like, "Fuck you! If you think it's about how long my hair is or not, then I don't care anyway." I'm only speaking for myself, but I have never smoked pot, and I've never been intrigued by it. I didn't drink back then, and I don't do it now. That's me. It's not because some straight edge police is looking over my shoulder at 52 [laughs]. I don't care. My children don't drink. My oldest son is a pitcher at the University of Southern California right now. He's got a million friends who drink, but he never has. It's OK. It takes a hell of a lot of balls to not give into peer pressure at that age. You know, to womanize, and all of that other stuff.
Did Staring Into the Sun sell well?
The fun part for me was putting together a gatefold for that album, which, by the way, we lost all of our fucking money doing [laughs]. I remember coming up with that cool silhouette photo of the band that we shot in Malibu. I also remember I almost fell off a fucking cliff while doing it! [Laughs] The record sold OK, but it's not like we made any money from it, not that it mattered to us.
If you had to pick your favorite song from Staring Into the Sun, which one would it be and why?
One that was really heartfelt, for me, because of the lyrics, was "Staring Into the Sun." I wrote a lot of the lyrics on that one. So, yeah, that one was a big deal for me. When Vic came up with this very cool melodic idea, that was special for me. "Cut of a Different Cause" was also cool because it was so hard. When we played that thing live, it was harder than anything we ever did beacuse it was blistering fast!
What was the touring like for Staring Into the Sun, and that whole era of the band?
We did one tour in 1989 for that album. It was all over the US and Canada. The shows were fantastic. But there were definitely people who showed up to the shows and went, "Well, where are all the bald guys?" [Laughs] So, that was OK. We figured that would happen. But, look, like I said before, we gave people their money's worth. It wasn't like we sat around in a circle with acoustic guitars playing "Kumbaya."
SEE ALSO: Introducing... Shiners Club (ex-No For An Answer, Mean Season, Outspoken)
Let's jump into Unity's sole album, 1989's Blood Days.
Blood Days was supposed to be a project that was done for the absolute fun of it. Pat had started his own label, Power House Records, and he wanted to put something out that would just hit people hard for his first offering. So he came up with the idea of reaching out to John [Lorey] and Joe [Foster] to help us write some new songs and have some fun. That's exactly what we did. We wanted to have fun again. It had been a number of years since we had played with Joe. Also, Joe is a completely different songwriter than Vic from Uniform Choice.
Joe aggravated me. John aggravated me. You know, it was like old times [laughs]. Pat and I wrote lyrics for the new material and they were every bit as heartfelt as anything we've ever done. I wouldn't say that we wanted to go back to the older straight edge stuff, but maybe something in between. The shape and feel of the songs are kind of like in the middle of Screaming for Change and Staring Into the Sun. I would say it was possibly in that Dag Nasty kind of feel. You know, medium tempo kind of stuff? We hadn't been able to do that kind of feel, Pat and I. That kind of feel is definitely Joe's thing. He's great at it. So it was fun to get together and do those songs and make the album.
What's the story with the silly band photo in the layout for Blood Days?
That was taken inside the room I was renting in a house out in Malibu. It was actually the actress Sally Field's house [laughs]. I was going to Pepperdine University at the time, which was right by the house. I remember almost breaking Joe Foster's jaw because we had the photo shoot planned for noon, but he and John Mastropaolo decided to go surfing first and got to my place around 2:30PM [laughs]. We laugh about that to this day. I think my girlfriend, Penny, took that band photo. We decided to just throw some shit in the corner of my room and have some fun with it. I've got cowboy boots on like a fucking dufus. I look back now and laugh at it, but there's people who were like, "Look at how dumb Dubar and Longrie look..." We really didn't think about it that much. It's crazy how much people look into this kind of stuff. It's silly.
At what point does Pat Dubar tell you he wants to stop doing Uniform Choice and Unity and move to the East Coast?
Uniform Choice played our last show in 1989. It was with Bad Religion and Toxic Reasons. I knew it was going to be our last show. Pat and I were both going to graduate from college and he wanted to try a different adventure that had nothing to do with punk. Our mutual friend, Mike Gitter, hooked Pat up with some other guys from some other bands to try and form something new to take that step into a rock direction. That was it. There was no bomb blast. There was no "Fuck you!" exchanged. We all decided to move on and it ended perfectly. There was nothing bad about it. We were simply done.
Why did you decide to continue on with the name Uniform Choice after that?
It really didn't continue, at least as a punk band it didn't. It was playing some shows years later, years. It was us trying to get some shows and using the Uniform Choice name to help us do that. We were doing it for fun. I don't really consider that band Uniform Choice, and I don't think those guys would either. The guys in that band were much younger than me and wanted to do much more than I did. When they approached me to play drums, they were like, "Come on, let's just use the old name to get this going..." We shouldn't have done that. Either way, it didn't last long. It was just a few shows and then the name was changed, because that was the right thing to do. The name then became Soul Ignition. I liked playing that stuff, but by that point I already had a family and responsibilities and moved on.
SEE ALSO: Burn’s Gavin Van Vlack on His Rough Teen Years, Graffiti, NYHC, Being Latino + More
Tell me about your life since then.
As you know, I live in Mission Viejo. I'm married with three children. I have a 21-year-old boy, another boy who is 17, and an 11-year-old daughter. So there's been a lot of Little League and Pop Warner football coaching for me [laughs]. I have a business where I do import/export of electronic goods. Before that, I owned a glass company for years. Let's see... I bought a bunch of homes and flipped them. So, basically, I've been able to get myself into a position where I'm able to work on my own. I've been very fortunate throughout the years to not miss anything in my kids' lives. I haven't done music in a long time, but I'll tell you, the Unity jam we recently had with Rob on vocals was a lot of fun.
Before I let you go, I wanted to ask you something related to Pat Dubar. Throughout the years, I've noticed that there seems to be an almost enigmatic kind of image built around him and his reputation. Even people who I know who grew up with him say that Pat always seemed to have a larger-than-life kind of presence about him. Since you guys had such a close relationship when you were younger, I wanted to get your take on that.
Well, I would say it's like anything... I know exactly who he is. That's a good and bad thing, like for all of us. It's interesting because I'm not part of the hardcore scene, and I haven't been for years and years now. But, yeah, I know what you're talking about, but his persona is his own, so it's not really right for me to comment on that. When we were kids, he was the big and strong, confident, powerful guy that anyone would want as the driving force and leader in their band. You couldn't draw up, or sculpt, a better person than Pat Dubar was as the frontman of a band.
Pat and I have been estranged for years. I don't mean that in a good or bad way, it's just the way it is. Let's put it this way: I know exactly who Pat Dubar is. That's a good thing. Whoever he is now, and whatever he's evolved into, is where he is now. Like I said, that's kind of the same for all of us.
Closing question: If you had to pick one Uniform Choice song that encapsulates the sound and spirit of what the band was about, what would it be and why?
"Screaming for Change" because we would usually end our shows with that song and people always connected to it.
***
The reissue for Screaming for Change is available via Southern Lord Records.
Tagged: uniform choice, unity hardcore band
