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:
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.
In his lyrics, Schneeweis called for revolutionary change, but his musical output reflected a program of incremental reform. Many early songs, including “Fuck Cops,” were credited to Johnny Hobo and the Freight Trains, with Pat the Bunny listed as lead singer. When he decided to make music that was a bit less fatalistic, he became the leader of a band called Wingnut Dishwashers Union, and stopped singing the old songs, although his fans never stopped listening to them. By the end of the two-thousands, he was more popular than ever, but his life revolved around his debilitating addiction to alcohol and heroin. He found his way to Arizona, where he began to get sober; he retired Wingnut Dishwashers Union and, in 2011, started a clamorous band called Ramshackle Glory, which chronicled his struggle to get clean in exuberant and often excruciating detail. He released quieter “solo” songs, too, credited simply to Pat the Bunny, a nickname he’d had since high school. And then, in 2016, Schneeweis retired. “I am not really an anarchist or a punk anymore,” he wrote, on Facebook, explaining that his life and his perspective had shifted. He said that his music would remain freely available online, and added that he didn’t want fans to “feel tricked” when they learned that he no longer felt like the revolutionary he had once claimed to be. The statement was signed “Pat (no bunny, at last).” Not long before, he had sung, “Don’t you dare give up on us, or anarchy, before / You can name one government not rotten to its core.” Now he was giving up, or at least retreating into silence.
That silence ended this past January, when a new band called Friends in Real Life released a song called “Buckeye.” It was tuneful and upbeat, with Schneeweis’s characteristically reedy voice delivering lyrics that were uncharacteristically optimistic: “We’re all gonna die, I’ve known it since I was a kid / The thing I had to learn is: before that, we’re gonna live.” In the comment section on YouTube, people expressed shock and joy at this unexpected comeback. Some said they were crying; others told stories of their own experiences with drug addiction. One listener simply wrote, “I CANT BELIEVE FOLK PUNK JESUS CAME BACK.” Reactions like this help explain why Schneeweis retreated from public life in the first place: it made him uneasy to be treated as a hero, or a guru. For similar reasons, he never sought out media opportunities, although this reticence has only heightened his fans’ curiosity. (If you search online for interviews with him, what you will mainly find are interviews with other people about him.
But, on a recent morning in Tucson, Schneeweis seemed less like a cult hero in hiding and more like a cheerful and unusually perceptive narrator of his journey through the netherworld. He met me in a parking lot downtown, next to the small room that serves as the Friends in Real Life headquarters. In February, he released a short but memorable new album, credited to Friends in Real Life, full of songs about surviving punk, and the people who don’t; since then, he has been fulfilling orders for T-shirts, CDs, records, and cassettes. Schneeweis is thirty-seven now, and he has been pleasantly surprised to discover that fans seem to support his ongoing evolution, perhaps because a number of them have evolved in similar ways. “Almost everyone I was getting drunk and getting high with, every day, is either dead or sober at this point,” he told me.
We had walked over to a loft that serves as the office of a radical community group; all around us were boxes full of tourniquets, ready to be assembled and shipped out to aid workers in Gaza. “I’m not, like, hostile to anarchism,” Schneeweis said. He is close with many activists in Tucson, and he still considers himself part of the struggle for freedom and justice. But he no longer feels like a revolutionary, and he no longer thinks of his songs as calls to action, if he ever did. In his newest incarnation, he is just a singer and songwriter, rather than a ringleader. “I admit it—I’m a musician,” he told me, chuckling. “Earlier, I would have tried to downplay that.”
Many young people discover radical politics through radical music, but for Schneeweis it was the other way around. He was outraged by stories of injustice and loved the idea of left-wing protest, but it wasn’t until he happened upon a local punk show, around the time he was in seventh grade, that he encountered a group of people who seemed determined to live outside the system. By high school, he was spending more and more time with a crew of local punks and freaks in Brattleboro, where he played in a few bands before discovering that he didn’t really need anything but an acoustic guitar. Back then, Schneeweis had no particular interest in folk music, and no taste for it—to him, Woody Guthrie was just some dead guy whose songs he had to sing at school. But he wanted people to be able to hear his lyrics, and he wanted to be able to tour light and play anywhere: squats, parks, parking lots. And so he wound up making a kind of punkish folk music—not realizing, he says, that punks around the country were doing something similar. In the early two-thousands, the term “folk-punk” was applied to a range of bands, including Defiance, Ohio, from Columbus; Mischief Brew, from Philadelphia; and Against Me!, from Gainesville, which soon left the folk-punk underground behind, earning mainstream acclaim and signing to a subsidiary of Warner Music. Schneeweis’s renown was more circumscribed, but plenty intense. His younger brother Michael is a fellow-musician who plays and sings on the Friends in Real Life album; they toured together in the old days. “At some point, he became, like, a rock star in that world,” Michael told me. After shows, there would be a long line of fans who wanted to meet Schneeweis, and often they shared stories as harrowing as the ones they heard in his lyrics. A few years after Schneeweis retired, Michael emerged to assure anxious fans that his big brother was doing well.
Schneeweis told me that he spent those quiet years focussed on sobriety, and on helping other people stay sober; he learned to meditate, and for a time did some computer programming. He knows he is hardly the first person to age out of the punk life style. “I think that the value of punk is that it’s so uncompromising,” he said. “But it’s always going to be predominantly for young people, if it retains that quality, because it’s very hard to be uncompromising forever.” In fact, it’s hard to be uncompromising at all, especially if you’re a working musician. Different iterations of punk are different attempts to solve this unsolvable puzzle, as successive generations find ways to reject the compromises of the ones that came before. (As a boy, Schneeweis didn’t think Green Day had anything to do with the punk scene he was part of.) The sound of Friends in Real Life is more “folk” than “punk,” with some electronic accents that reflect Schneeweis’s current affection for pop music and dance parties. Still, the album reflects his lifelong determination to sing only what he absolutely believes. This resolution can lead to awkward or ungainly lines, but it’s also what makes his best songs so affecting. “Down to the River” is an elegy that’s strikingly gentle, especially when compared with the reckless energy of his older songs: “Do you wanna go swimming? Do you wanna just cry? / I say it’ll be O.K., but that’s just two chords and a lie.”
As a boy in Vermont, Schneeweis was contemptuous of the wealthy ex-hippies who shopped at the local food co-op, a onetime grassroots enterprise that had evolved, since the seventies, into something that resembled a fancy supermarket, fully integrated into the local economy. The punks in Schneeweis’s scene sometimes framed their antisocial or self-destructive behavior as a way to resist the process of integration, to insist that their movement would never become respectable. But some of them probably discovered—as Schneeweis did, in the depths of his addiction—that there are worse things than respectability. “Unless you actually succeed in overturning the existing order, it’s going to ingest you, one way or the other,” he told me. He is thinking of returning to the stage later this year, playing for whoever is still interested in the troubadour formerly known as Pat the Bunny. And he says he will always relate to the wandering bands of tattooed punks who sometimes ask him for spare change, even though he knows that they might not relate to him. He says, “If I see some real fuckin’ street punks, somewhere in my mind it’s, like, Oh, man. They would think I suck.” ♦
Comments
Pat the bunny fucking sucks
Oogle babe (not verified) Tue, 04/08/2025 - 16:23
The only people this kid was like a rockstar to werent actually in the scene. His folkpunk is for art student hangers on.
Tell me you got kicked out…
EmmaAintDead Tue, 04/08/2025 - 16:47
In reply to Pat the bunny fucking sucks by Oogle babe (not verified)
Tell me you got kicked out of the back yard for bringing heroin to the sober show without telling me
Obvs if he ended up with an…
anon (not verified) Tue, 04/08/2025 - 17:28
In reply to Pat the bunny fucking sucks by Oogle babe (not verified)
Obvs if he ended up with an obituary in the New Yorker... he wasn't exactly the most grassroots anarcho-hobo type.
you fucking suck
Cas (not verified) Tue, 04/08/2025 - 19:32
In reply to Pat the bunny fucking sucks by Oogle babe (not verified)
this is the most wildly untrue thing you could have said lol, i was in that scene as long as him, and i know how many bands he inspired, how much joy his songs spread - both at shows and in recordings, or from some kid playing Harmony Parking Lot Song while we're getting drunk around a bonfire, or whatever. i saw bands covering his stuff, and people excited for new songs or a new project, etc. some nerds just like to hate whatever's popular.
I have a lot of feelings…
EmmaAintDead Tue, 04/08/2025 - 19:59
In reply to you fucking suck by Cas (not verified)
I have a lot of feelings about the concept of celebrity, but this is an instance where there is a damn good reason this person's name is attached to a whole scene. Cas is right from start to finish with this comment. It isn't often we get a musician like Pat, who people can relate to on such a visceral level and find each other in a context that is tied to the beautiful idea. Probably the most personable and practical entry point to and amplifier of anarchy in the past 20 years.
Yeah stealing music from dead travelers gets you far
Oogle babe (not verified) Wed, 04/09/2025 - 03:39
In reply to I have a lot of feelings… by EmmaAintDead
I have a lot of respect for all the people that actually wrote the listenable half those songs. Its amazing how little people will notice when you steal things from actually down and out people. Its hilarious watching a bunch of art student hangers on argue for their favorite celebrity like its 2010. The hipsters are back baby!
posting this is 100% bait. i…
anon (not verified) Tue, 04/08/2025 - 16:25
posting this is 100% bait. i refuse to take the bait!!!!!!
But it looks so good, doesn…
anon (not verified) Tue, 04/08/2025 - 16:46
In reply to posting this is 100% bait. i… by anon (not verified)
But it looks so good, doesn't it? A little nibble never hurt anyone.
-thecollective_5555
There's nothing …
anon (not verified) Sun, 04/13/2025 - 12:10
There's nothing "revolutionary" about being a passive disengaged dropout. There's nothing more red white and blue All-American than insisting that the world revolves around us as disengaged atomized individuals. This is no threat to anything. Capital happily tolerates this species of rebellion.
Why, I myself know of someone who has spent their entire long life wearing dirty laundry and getting SSI benefits, who with a superabundance of free time on their hands has never, ever, even once, been involved in anything outside of their subcultural safe space -- and hollers what a rebel they fantasize themselves to be. This stellar track record richly entitles them to be a High Pontiff of the US anarchist subculture.
...anon proclaimed, loudly…
lumpy (not verified) Sun, 04/13/2025 - 13:59
In reply to There's nothing … by anon (not verified)
...anon proclaimed, loudly and self aggrandizingly! without even a hint of bitterness!
did a cute hobo steal your girlfriend or somethin bro?
Capital happily tolerates…
anon (not verified) Sun, 04/13/2025 - 13:59
In reply to There's nothing … by anon (not verified)
Capital happily tolerates any rebellion. Make total destroy is literally our only chance, and even that leaves an incredibly dangerous vacuum of power where the state had been!
Capital has a problem with…
anon (not verified) Sun, 04/13/2025 - 15:15
In reply to Capital happily tolerates… by anon (not verified)
Capital has a problem with piracy, crime and even illegalism in general. Always had.
So a good way to not have your "rebellion" recycled like in a Levi's ad, is through these practices. If you approach crime as a counter-culture and reject its capitalistic avenues, then you got a rebellion.
More likely you have…
anon (not verified) Sun, 04/13/2025 - 15:42
In reply to Capital has a problem with… by anon (not verified)
More likely you have conventional upper middle class acting out tailored to keep your Grandparents awake at night.
hello? early 2000s calling? …
lumpy (not verified) Sun, 04/13/2025 - 15:51
In reply to More likely you have… by anon (not verified)
hello? early 2000s calling?
yeah, just to inform you, your lazy, shitty mischaracterization is dangerously past its expiration date. like, "middle class"?! what middle class? are we still pretending there's a "middle class" if you're under the age of 50?
time to get some new material or the other trolls won't respect you!
Yeaaah, btw, fuck off Boomer…
anon (not verified) Sun, 04/13/2025 - 16:14
In reply to More likely you have… by anon (not verified)
Yeaaah, btw, fuck off Boomer.
If there's younger people lucky enough to be posting from mom's basement, or daddy's office (i.e. Trump's thugs) like that Big Balls pure douchebag "hacker", but a lot of younger ppl these days don't even qualify for "middle-class".
Capital has a problem with…
anon (not verified) Mon, 04/14/2025 - 00:09
In reply to Capital has a problem with… by anon (not verified)
Capital has a problem with piracy, crime and even illegalism in general. Always had.
No, it doesn't. If happily incorporates each of those examples in a myriad of ways. Cartels, extralegal politics, sideskirting regulations and consumer protection. They probably break the law more than anarchists—they created the law. They are the law.
"No, it doesn't."
Autisticanadanarchy (not verified) Mon, 04/14/2025 - 12:37
In reply to Capital has a problem with… by anon (not verified)
YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES it does, X 4953!
"Cartels, extralegal politics, sideskirting regulations and consumer protection. They probably break the law more than anarchists—they created the law. They are the law."
So they created the laws and set up governments every at every mandate... so keep others from profiting from the same crimes they commit, yes? So this means they got a problem with these practices, when done by external groups. Like a mafia doesn't like it if you mess around on their domains. So they write the Lauuuu and use the poo-lease... to wage war on the competition.
That's not the attitude of people who're happy with crime, piracy and, much less... illegalism. Dimwit. The capitalists are for tight laws and going after "criminals". Good luck denying that.
I'm denying that. But you…
anon (not verified) Mon, 04/14/2025 - 13:33
In reply to "No, it doesn't." by Autisticanadanarchy (not verified)
I'm denying that.
But you can't deny the ongoing genocides in Palestine and Sudan show that the elite are fine with breaking laws and going full draconian when necessary.
there are levels to…
anon (not verified) Mon, 04/14/2025 - 15:17
In reply to I'm denying that. But you… by anon (not verified)
there are levels to capitalism?
capitalism as a system doesn't care about laws or illegality.
capitalists who care about who has what, do care about who gets to break the law and commit crimes (ie, them) but not necessarily about crime as a concept, as long as they're the ones doing it.
Capital happily tolerates…
anon (not verified) Sun, 04/13/2025 - 23:41
Capital happily tolerates any rebellion.
Wrong as always.
A mass social movement that brings about the collapse and dispersal of the armed forces, destroys the state through centralized action and abolishes capitalist social relations can solve this great historical dilemma for keeps.
Wait, you've been able to…
EmmaAintDead Mon, 04/14/2025 - 06:33
In reply to Capital happily tolerates… by anon (not verified)
Wait, you've been able to solve this the whole time? What the fuck are you doing here, go solve it!
Guys, this anon figured out how to solve it! We can stop now!
Holy shit this is big news.
"A mass social movement..."
anon (not verified) Mon, 04/14/2025 - 07:46
In reply to Capital happily tolerates… by anon (not verified)
Oh god... Please tell me that's just ancom trolling.
keatingtroll isn't really an…
lumpy (not verified) Mon, 04/14/2025 - 08:08
In reply to "A mass social movement..." by anon (not verified)
keatingtroll isn't really an anarchist so no, just plain old, boring commie trolling
Politically worthless…
anon (not verified) Mon, 04/14/2025 - 09:15
Politically worthless subculture weenies gonna weenie. And, like the middle class USA duds they are, they even use the word "commie." The anarchy of the Yeats poem limps along...
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