A Conversation with Patrick Ogle
~by Saint Petrol
(photo courtesy/property of Projekt Records)

The following is an interview with Mr. Patrick Ogle of Thanatos and IllegalTeenageBikini. Mr. Ogle was born on a day in a year in a town. Since then, he's been living, which he continues to do to this day. Mr. Ogle also creates and participates in some rathe amazing music, which I encourage you to seek out and make your own, preferably from the Projekt webiste, which you can be magically transported to by clicking http://www.projekt.com/. Mr. Ogle and I hope you enjoy the interview. We did...
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Saint Petrol: Have you never been mellow?

Patrick: No.

SP: Have you ever heard a song about this little blue man who loves this lady, and the words say, " 'I love you, I love you,' said the little blue man, 'and scared me right out of my wits."  At the end, she won't love him, so he jumps off the top of a building and on the way down, he says, "I don't love you any mooooore."  It was recorded in the 1960s or something.  It's totally twisted. 'Ever heard it?

P: I think I heard that…oh wait…No.

SP: What are the lyrics to "Hebron"?

P: Ay yi yi! You want me to remember the lyrics to a song I haven’t heard or played or anything for 5 years…? I can tell you what it is about…a town in Israel where a Israeli settler of U.S. origin killed, I think, 39 Palestinians praying. There have also been murderous attacks on Jews there. In the 20s there was a massacre. I was taking those events and looking at them through the prism of Jesus walking the Via Dolorosa on the way to be crucified…All these religions, all this faith all these stupid senseless killings…over rocks and dust and ultimately nothing…Not many have heard that song. It is only on the limited edition Beast disc…We used to do it live a lot. My guess is it will never be played again.

SP: Are you aware that one of the fads sweeping state fairs and carnivals in the U.S. is deep-fried Twinkies?  I think Elvis would have really appreciated that.

P: Yeah surprisingly I have heard of that. You really need to make Twinkies a little LESS healthy by deep frying them. I bet the fucker who came up with that weighs about 400 pounds if they haven’t had a stroke already and died…Their next culinary creation will probably be carbonated bacon drippings.

 SP: I want lyrics, pictures, discography, musings.  Website, website,website, website.

P: That requires someone to design the site…I am also not fond of being photographed…I have a cleft palate and a hunch back….and those are my good features…But a website will be up soon. It will likely be some sort of blog in addition to trying to hawk my records…Contests are also likely. 

SP: What are some happy memories from your childhood?

P: I remember playing in the yard and my dad coming home from work and giving me a Eisenhower dollar…I loved coins and stuff like that. I still do actually. I still have that dollar somewhere. It was 1971….I actually have 2 because I got another one years later and I don’t know which is which so I kept both. I should try to find those. 

SP: What do you see when you look out your bedroom window?

P: An ill-kept back yard.

SP: What sorts of things are you usually thinking when you look out?

P: Shit, do I have to get up already…

SP: Do you believe there really is a distant singularity?

P: Well ! That is a matter of, close to, scientific fact. There is most likely a fairly distant singularity at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy…If that is too close to qualify for “distant” most spiral galaxies are supposed to have one at their center (or so I am told).

SP: What words do you enjoy?

P: Excrement, somnambulist and blow-job (although this is technically 2 words). 

SP: Why did you thank "spider monkeys everywhere" in the liner notes of "An Embassy To Gaius"?

P: At an old job of mine a fellow employee once commented that our somewhat crazy boss was going to come into the office with a bullwhip jammed up his ass screaming, “I’m a spider monkey.” It never in fact happened but the whole spider monkey thing had a life of its own…People who had no idea of its origins became wrapped up in it. It was sorta spooky. My business cards at Projekt had a spider monkey on them.

SP: Who do you miss?

P: A number of people but most of all my son, who lives too far from me. I miss other folks who’ve passed away too but I don’t want to get into that…

SP: Confess something.

P: I am an even worse musician now than 10 years ago because I took a hot sauce bottle thru my hand AND I never practice. Probably more the latter than the former. I am also way, way nicer than most people who’ve met me think.

SP: What's the last thing you remember dreaming?

P: OK I was trying to turn off the fucking TV but it kept coming back on. SO I look behind the damned thing and the prongs for the plug are kind of fucked and when I take the plug out one breaks off. Now this is my sister’s TV and I am thinking. Man I broke her TV she is going to be pissed.

SP: You have a lot of Biblical and Old Testament references in your lyrics.  At least "quite a few" if not a lot. Why?

P: Religion interests me. Don’t mistake that for being particularly religious. I am not really, or at least I avoid talking about what I believe on such matters cause it is no one’s business, might drive them insane and is difficult to articulate. The stories in the Bible are pretty universal; they deal with the randomness of living. Are we being punished when bad shit happens? The Book of Job would seem to indicate no…God might just be settling a bet with the Devil.  Read the Gospels sometime. Some of the stories in there seem simple but in fact are not. The Sermon on the Mount is one of those. I remember the Leonard Cohen song that has the lyric “The staggering account of the sermon on the mount, which I don’t pretend to understand at all.” I think “right on brother” every time I hear that. And anyway what should I write about? Satanism or Anton Lavey…yawn. 

SP: When's the last time something took your breath away, and what was it?

P: My son being born was one. Sometimes when I see his mother after long absences is another. Keep in mind we are not together! But she still has that effect on me. As far as things go, looking down into the Masaya Volcano in Nicaragua was pretty breathtaking. I had never seen a volcano before.

SP: Do you have any scars?  Where, and from what?

P: I have a shit load. I have one on my forehead and on my cheek where a skin cancer was removed. Folks of Irish descent should live in caves any only come out at night. I have an inch an a half scar above my right eyebrow from stage diving at an Adrenalin O.D. show something like 17 years ago…I have another one on my face from when I was a kid and I ran down the hallway and into a dresser. It is just like one Harrison Ford has but mine is on the other side of my mouth.

And those are just the ones on my face. I have a fishhook shaped scar on the palm of my right hand and another on my right elbow where they took nerves out to do a graft so I could get feeling back in my hand (it didn’t work but it did cost a lot of money).

SP: Are you afraid of spiders?  If so, why?  If not, why not?

P: Not really. I rescue daddy long legs all the time…I just rescued one tonight…I don’t like cockroaches but spiders are ok…But I am jinxing myself and now will be stung to death by spiders.
 

SP: I read in a previous interview you have a few songs already recorded for a possible new IllegalTeenageBikini album. Are you working on a new album right now?  If not, are you planning on releasing those songs anytime soon?

P: I have an album written and three songs recorded. I am thinking about releasing the three as a maxi-cd if I cannot get the full length finished. I need to figure out who I want to record with and beg their help…like Greg Lucas from mnpltr who did most of the real work on the current Illegalteenagebikini disc. It is all one word by the way!

SP: What book, record, or CD is in your house that most people would probably never guess is there?

P: I have tons of reggae discs and latin disc….hmm…most surprising? Probably all the Shakira discs I have. I love her. She’s brilliant…. 

SP: How do you dress when you're happy?  Sad?

P: Pretty much the same way. I pay little attention to such things. I do try to wear pants when I leave the house.

 SP: Have you ever seen a planet through a telescope? If so, which one was it, and how did it make you feel to see it?

P: Nope…never have oddly enough. I have tried but I never saw anything.

SP: Do you think Joan of Arc would have still heard the voices if she'd been on anti-psychotics?

P: She probably wouldn’t have heard the voices if she lightened up a bit or if the English had voluntarily left her country. Then she could have gone back to being a country girl instead of being burned at the stake. Prozac might’ve forestalled that I guess.

SP: What's your favorite Beatles album?

P: Not a big Beatles fan I must say but if forced to pick a CD it would be “Sgt. Peppers.”

SP: Where the heck did "Oklahoma City Ballroom" come from?

P: Deep in my scarred psyche. I was out on tour with Ween as their Merchandiser…t-shirt selling guy. I found a t-shit that said “property of Jesus Christ”…I used to wear it until people who didn’t sense I was wearing it with a sense of irony started chatting with me. We also stopped in Oklahoma City, which is a pretty God-forsaken place. I was out in the lobby and couldn’t see the show but there were all these nitwits out there talking about how they drove 100 miles to be there YET while the band was playing they stood in the lobby drinking warm Budweiser. The next day they no doubt told all their friends the show ROCKED. 100 miles for warm Bud. Well that got me thinking about transvestites….and a song was born.

SP: What do most people miss about your music that you wish they'd get?

P: No one seems to ever get what the fuck I am writing about but in their defense it is not always clear. I am not necessarily making a sharp point all the time. I USED to be. But then on records like “An Embassy  to Gaius” I don’t really expect people to get all the references which are pretty arcane in some cases. Actually people who GET it sometimes really surprise and cheer me up. 

IN other cases I am not sure what the hell I was writing about. Almost like I am Shirley McLaine channeling Ramtha and telling my friends to invest in a horse farm. I like talking about what they mean. Sometimes people understand them better than I do…

SP: How's your heart?

P: Beating so it is better than some people (you know dead people). It has been broken more times than a Nashville songwriter so it has gotten pretty tough. I don’t whine about that though. IN fact I hate people who do whine about it (excepting immediately after the fact). Whining about a break up over a year in the past should garner a beating.

SP: Do you respect Job?

P: I respect faith.  Even mindless faith but I am afraid of it. Job believed and that could not be shaken. Yet he was just being used as a guinea pig by God to show up Satan. But faith is a powerful thing. Even the power of God trying to undo him could not undo his faith. In a sense that made Job more powerful than the all powerful God. It is a book that is open to a number of interpretations. But one thing is certain Job was pragmatic and tough and that, even without faith is admirable.

SP: The cover of IllegalTeenageBikini; is that a massive, MASSIVE object?

P: Yes. That was the original title of the CD! But I changed it because I had a promotional idea that I never did…I was going to send out Job action figures to everyone. But it cost too much and most publications dealing with music are thick headed money grabbers and wouldn’t have gotten it anyway.

SP: Are you embarrassed of any bands you saw live in the 80s?

P: I am not embarrassed but some of the BANDS should be. Fuck I saw JOURNEY….that might have been in 1979 though. I saw Rush. My god were they horrible.  But I never saw any sort of Hair Metal shit…I hated that stuff. I was a punk rocker….

SP: What's one of the hardest things you ever lived through in your life? What did you do to make it through that?

P: I have had a few hard things to deal with. How to deal with them? I think the best way, and it takes awhile, is to deal with hardship like alcoholics deal with booze. Hand it over to some higher power and then go day to day. People can deal with anything if they have the right attitude. A shit attitude makes bad things worse. I know because I have spent a lot of my life with a shit attitude. Fortunately nothing really bad happened to me until that started to change.

SP: Have you seen the movie Donnie Darko?  If so, what'd you think of that rabbit?   Totally freaky.  "Why are you wearing that silly 'man suit'?"  That rabbit gave me nightmares.

P: Never saw it

SP: Do you have pets?  What are they?

P: Nope….I live with my sis and she has a goofy Blue Tick Hound….named, cleverly, “blue”.  She howls every day at about 5 am….She is also not actually blue in color.

SP: What was on your mind when you wrote "Drop The Dime"?

P: Not anything nice I assure you. Tucker had that music together and was playing it and I said. “man I have some  lyrics together that work for that” and we added them. That song was really unfinished when he died. It was a rough mix. Funny thing is it may be the best sounding track on the disc.

I am not avoiding the question. I just don’t remember writing it. It wasn’t anything too seriously dark tho! More angsty….

SP: What's your favorite old, weird, spooky, black and white movie?

P: OK there is this one with Dana Andrews about these demon worshipers…and this curse…I love that one…can’t remember the name. There is this demon thing chasing a train that looks really cool. It must have been an astounding special effect at the time. There is this creepy rich guy with a goatee that Dana pulls a switcheroo on and the demon gets him…Cool movie.

SP: Have you ever seen that one with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, where they both play some kind of Satanists or something, and Boris looks totally evil and elegant?  It's called "The Black Cat" or something like that, but not Poe's black cat.  It's such a twisted old movie.  I wonder if MST3K ever got ahold of it?

P: Yeah. That is a great one…Thing is it is a really good movie and MST3K tended to used really brutally bad movies like “Giant Gila Monster.” 

The Crawling Eye, now there's one for you. 

That shit gave me nightmares when I was a kid.

SP: What usually are your last thoughts as you're going to sleep?

P: Why the FUCK can’t I fall asleep or why the FUCK isn’t there a naked person in this bed with me.

SP: The first when you wake up?

P: The already mentions “shit do I have to get up now?” is one. Or maybe “Who IS this naked person next to me…oh…wait…its inflatable.”

SP: I'm getting tired of thinking up questions.  Thank you for your music and the parts of yourself you share with us through it.  Thank you for enduring.  Uh buh dee uh buh dee uh buh dee, that's all folks.
Thanks Patrick.  : )

2/10/03