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

Popshifter: How did you decide to start Gastatanka Records?

Pat Fear: Nobody was going to sign us at that point. El Fee’s sister was dating a guy who had a lot of money. He lived in Denver, CO. His sister was quite a bit older and but we knew her. So this guy was going to put out a record for Tyrant and I thought, “I could probably get this guy to put out a White Flag record.” I convinced him that putting out a record for us would make a bigger impact. He wanted to impress his girlfriend and since El Fee was in both White Flag AND Tyrant, I kind of cajoled him saying I knew all these people in the music business and I could get the records into stores.

Which I did! I got Miles Copeland from IRS Records to distribute it. So this guy financed it. He actually financed the first record—R Is For Rocket—by accident. We had sent him a crappy demo tape of that and he knew nothing about making records. He ended up making that into the record without our permission. The communication was so poor because we’d never done it either.

He sent us back records and we explained to him that it sounded terrible! In retrospect it was cool, but then it was not what we wanted. He said, “I can’t put you into a recording studio because I spent all this money pressing it.” I said, “Well, we’ll record it on our own.”

I had a four track reel-to-reel and we had Don Bolles’ [The Germs] drum set, the mixing board from the Masque [punk club in Hollywood started by Brendan Mullen]. We made a better version of the album and that’s what ended up going on the record.

We destroyed the first record. The guy kinda felt bad about what happened and agreed to still press the record. We made tons of money off the album when it came out because it sold! It sold out. It was gone like a week after I gave it to the distributor. This was Faulty Products, the distribution arm of IRS Records. They were calling us up and saying, “We need more,” and I was like, “Uh, there are no more.” And they said, “There better be. . . in a week!” So I had to talk the guy into pressing more.

The best part about the whole story is that it was pressed—and this was unbeknownst to us because we didn’t know the first record [from the demo tape] was going to be pressed at all—at a place that specialized in homemade Christian records. The kind you see in thrift stores, like His Royal Rangers Sing Gospel Hits.

Popshifter: (laughing)

Pat Fear: We had taken on an anti-drug, pro-Reagan, anti-communist Christian stance as our faux image. Because it made no sense. We had a song called “Go To God” on the album, which was a joke about giving up drugs and punk rock and going to God, but it was a hardcore song.

So anyway this company that pressed it saw that song listed on the cover and said, “Let’s put some of this in our store” and distributed it to other Christian, Mom and Pop stores. That first record was only distributed through Christian book and record stores in out of the way places.

Popshifter: (laughs)

Pat Fear: Because we destroyed the rest of them! We pressed 500 and we got like, 478 back, so there were like, 22 copies out in the world that may still be sitting on the shelves of some Christian store.

I found one person who said they had it and I didn’t believe them but they gave me the appropriate track listing. This was pre-Internet. Someone in Europe wrote me and said, “I’ve got your record” and I wrote back saying, “I don’t believe you.” And they gave me the track listing in the right order.

Popshifter: How did it even get over there?

Pat Fear: I don’t know, I don’t know! And he never wrote back when I asked him! It was someone from Slovakia? Or back then, it must have been Czechoslovakia. That’s the world of those underground collectors, especially in Communist countries.

I found out years later after playing Croatia, that was the way things worked. Things were smuggled, things were copied on tapes. One guy said they would put a cassette with no case and the J-card from a professional cassette and put on extra large shoes and put the tapes in the bottoms of their shoes. They said their feet were never searched. That was pretty eye opening.

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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