CLEAR AS FOLK

The evolution of a punk troubadour.

- KELEFA SANNEH

Patrick Schneeweis was never the voice of a generation, but perhaps he was the voice of a tendency. To a small but fervent and far-flung community of listeners, he was known as Pat the Bunny, an anarchist punk troubadour from Vermont whose desperate—and sometimes bleakly funny—folk songs were about young people who wanted to smash the system, although they often settled for getting smashed themselves. In one of them, “Fuck Cops,” he yawped about how everything was going to hell:

When I dream of the future, I see an arm full of holes

Empty pockets, and a bleeding nose Hacking up a lung filled with blood and tar

On a sidewalk next to my spangeing jar

Starting in the early two-thousands, Schneeweis began to build an audience. His songs circulated on burned CDs and through primitive file-sharing sites; he played gigs at house shows and in parks, where dozens or even hundreds of fans would show up to sing along. Most of those fans surely knew, some from firsthand experience, that “spange” is a portmanteau of “spare” and “change,” and that “spangeing” is a way to survive without doing something as indefensible as getting a job.

Schneeweis sang to and for the kind of young people you might see sitting in a park or on a sidewalk, with face tattoos and skinny dogs and bulging backpacks. This version of “punk” identity, like many others, combined idealism and cynicism, and Schneeweis knew how paradoxical the combination could be. “I’m not a nihilist/I just can’t pledge allegiance to shit,” he once sang.