It’s White Flag’s World, We Just Live In It: An Interview With Pat Fear

Popshifter: Oh! So that’s where it came from!

Pat Fear: My sister, who wasn’t even a music fan to any degree, knew that I liked music because I already had Beatles records. And she brought back the only rock record she could find in Brazil not knowing that it was going to start this cavalcade of insanity for the next 40 years. . . which ended up with me in the band’s living room in São Paulo watching them rehearse! It was the most improbable thing in the world, even more improbable than discovering the Ramones!

So that’s how it started. After that, there was a little bookstore at the university in Riverside, that also had Melody Maker, Sounds, and New Music Express and I would buy those and read about all these things. I couldn’t get Creem—the closest we got to music magazines was Super Teen and things like that and Tiger Beat.

I started seeing pictures of the Sex Pistols and the Buzzcocks and I thought, “These people look really weird and they look nothing like The Ramones!” The Ramones literally looked like people I went to high school with; they didn’t look like punks to me, although the Sex Pistols and Generation X looked like they were from outer space.

We ended up getting a Licorice Pizza in Riverside that had a whole section of Punk Rock; it was intermixed with AC/DC and Cheap Trick and the first Tom Petty record because they were considered punk rock. That’s how it started.

Nobody liked it and eventually I had to force people into liking it. Nobody in White Flag liked it AT ALL! But they knew that when I came up with the idea that it would be troublesome for people [This was reason number 2 for starting White Flag.—Ed.]. They were all in a band that played covers of Led Zeppelin. They all pretty much had the same sense of humor, but weren’t quite as adventurous, musically, as I was.

So when I came up with the concept. . . they barely even knew who BLACK Flag was; I mean, this was 1982. But they knew that the idea of being in a punk rock band, performing in front of their normal, backyard, beer-drinking audience, would be funny.

It was basically to cause trouble, but it was a double-edged sword because it was about me being able to cause trouble in the punk rock scene that I was already disillusioned by.

Click to read more from Pat Fear on. . .

Dr. Demento & The Ramones
Causing trouble
The Malcolm McLaren Handbook
Battle of the Bands
White Flag Goes to Greenland
Those missing 22 copies. . .
Os Mutantes
The Shaggs
Motel Spaghetti
Gasatanka

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