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Was he actually changing the world? Did he really even change punk rock? It’s really hard to say, but what I can definitively say is that he changed the individuals who really engaged with his music. If cash was going to have to change hands with him, you could be damn sure he was going to give you everything he could in exchange. One time, when I saw him live, I told him I only had $10 for a $15 CD he was selling and he insisted on giving me two CDs and a zine.

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He helped found a short-lived collective that provided free bus rides coast-to-coast for artists. He essentially founded folk-punk as a subgenre, working as one of the galvanizing forces behind Plan-it-X-Records, the DIY label that mailed kids records for donation prices. Unlike so many other punk rockers, he truly avoided participating in capitalism as a system whenever possible whatever level of fame he may have managed to attain, he never cashed in on it. Pat didn’t just sing about never having a job, never giving in to power structures, and trying to build new communities based on equality and total liberation, he actively tried to make those things happen in his life. He always presented himself as an anarchist first and a musician second, and he seems to have maintained his integrity in that regard better than just about any other punk musician. More than anything, that’s what Pat’s music was about: A better world was not only possible, but right around the corner. He once described himself as “an alley cat, more scared of you than you are of me.” As a result, his music resonates best at those most lonely moments in a person’s life confused, vulnerable, and willing to believe that a better world is possible. Beneath the rage and joyful defiance, there’s a permeating sadness at Pat’s inability to ever make the world as it could be in his mind.

He was such a quintessentially lonely artist. I’ve seen Pat twice, and he was exhilarating both times, but the real magic of his music came from listening to it in isolation, like most truly exceptional music. I write about him in the past tense here, though he hasn’t died he’s just completely stopped sharing his music with the world, which feels like a death to his fans who’ve really only ever touched him through his music. He managed to pull himself back from that brink, and sang about it with equal honesty. He lived a life of reckless hedonism very much intending to die, and captured that lifestyle with ruthless honesty. He could take complex political theory, philosophical principles, and tense moments of moral compromise and reduce them to a few salient lines of poetry, hurling them back at you with his whole being. If we’re lucky, he eventually won’t just be equated to Crass and Fugazi, but to Bob Dylan and Woodie Guthrie as well. He represents a type of songwriter who truly comes along once in a generation, if not once in a few generations.

Pat the Bunny could have saved punk rock from itself, had he really wanted to.