THE POP LIFE
Drugs, Demons: A Man in a Mask
By NEIL STRAUSS
Published: January 8, 2004
OS ANGELES, Jan. 7 — "For some reason, pharmacologists, doctors and nurses are always attracted to my music," Patrick Miller told me one night in his basement apartment in New York, scratching his legs through his jeans with both hands. "That's how I got started. They'd invite Minimal Man to play all these parties, and then feed us coke."
I was a junior at Columbia. He was a legend, as far as I was concerned. Miller, who died last month, was a pioneer of electronic and industrial music with at least seven albums to his name. He had played with some of the more legendary experimental and alternative musicians of the previous decade, the 80's. In Belgium he had performed in the avant-garde group Tuxedomoon; in San Francisco, his band Minimal Man used to rehearse with seminal punk-rockers like the Dead Kennedys and Flipper. Faith No More, Negativland, even the Go-Go's had been his opening acts, he said.
On his wall, alongside prints by Bruce Nauman and Dennis Oppenheim, hung his own paintings. I recognized them from the covers of his albums, which I played regularly on my college radio show. They were all variations on one image: a featureless head or mask, usually wrapped in strips of bandages that were peeling off to reveal a discolored, decomposed face.
"I invented Minimal Man as this wild person," Miller said, "and then I actualized it and took all kinds of drugs and stuff because I felt guilty for not living up to this fiction."
"For a while I was shooting an eight ball a day," he continued, using a street term for three and a half grams of cocaine. "That's like 100 shots. It got so crazy that I thought I'd take something to cool me off, so I got into heroin."
Patrick Miller had fallen on hard times. He was living on the Upper West Side and, outside of the Dominican drug dealers on his block, I seemed to be the only person who ever visited his apartment. I would stop by every other day, and he would regale me with stories of punk, industrial and new-wave musicians like Monte Cazazza, Bond Bergland (of Factrix and Saqqara Dogs), Penelope Houston (of the Avengers) and Robin Guthrie (of the Cocteau Twins). He'd play me new music for hours, including cassettes with rare Lou Reed and Arto Lindsay recordings. "Rock has taken such a nose dive," he would constantly tell me.
He was the kind of mentor my parents would have preferred I stay away from.
We never would have met if I hadn't seen a hand-scrawled sign on a lamppost one day advertising books and records for sale. When I arrived at the address, it was Miller's apartment. He answered the door, a thin, bald and intense character with a warm smile and a manic energy. I offered to buy his Throbbing Gristle vinyl box set, several records on the Crammed Discs label, all 11 issues of the rare punk magazine Search & Destroy, and a book on the Fluxus art movement.
But every time I showed interested in an item, he would decide that he couldn't part with it. Even later in our friendship, I would buy something and he would later buy it back from me. They weren't just records and books to him, it turned out. They were memories, each one telling a story that he couldn't bear to lose.
I never saw him leave the house. One afternoon I came by because he had decided to go to a music convention, the New Music Seminar, which is now defunct. "I want to find that guy from Play It Again Sam and make him pay me," he said, referring to his former record label. "You know, that's all the seminar is: musicians looking for record executives who owe them money."
Before we left, he scraped a white powder out of a pot in his kitchen and dropped it into the end of a glass pipe. It was the first time I had seen anyone smoke crack. I thought that if I could distract him, he would stop smoking it.
"Ever hear of that band Lights in a Fat City?" I asked.
"Shh," he said. He took a flashlight off the table and switched it on (even though the lights in the room were already bright). He then began scanning the room with it, looking for some sort of hidden predator. Slowly, he backed into a corner and pulled a chair in front of him. He crouched behind it, then grabbed a book off his desk ("Rush" by Kim Wozencraft) and began batting at molecules of air, as if they were trying to attack him.I looked up at one of his paintings — the bandaged, decomposed head that stared fearfully from his albums — and suddenly realized: it was a self-portrait. It wasn't even a mask; it was what lay beneath the mask (at least in his darkest moments) — a paranoid, dark, disturbed shell of a human being.
It is very difficult to persuade drug addicts to get treatment. The decision is usually one they must make themselves. The next day, he made that decision. He sold the self-portrait to me for $40 for spending money and checked himself into a clinic. I couldn't bring myself to hang his painting on my dorm room wall. It was too disturbing to sleep beneath.
When I saw him weeks later, he was cleanshaven, well nourished and wearing newly bought clothes. Explaining his paranoid reaction of our previous meeting, he said, not even half-convincingly, "I have a feeling I just staged that so we wouldn't go out."
He bought his painting back, as I knew he would, and soon after moved to the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles to get away from the environment that had dragged him down.
When I heard a few days ago from a mutual friend, an experimental musician known as E. J. Vodka, that Miller, who had hepatitis C, had died last month, I thought back to the afternoons and evenings I had spent at his home. "He always used to talk about you," E. J. said.
Miller and I were unlikely friends with only a love of music in common. I don't know what he learned from me, because I knew nothing of life, but among the many lessons I learned from him was that sometimes our heroes are just flesh and blood, and that the demons that drive them to create the music we love are not glamorous at all. They are just sad.
It has been a disturbing few weeks for rock 'n' roll: Ray Davies of the Kinks was shot by a robber in New Orleans; Cris Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets was shot in an altercation with a security guard outside a Phoenix post office; Jack White of the White Stripes was arrested after being accused of repeatedly punching Jason Stollsteimer of the Von Bondies in the face during a fight in Detroit; Alex Lifeson of Rush was arrested after a brawl with police at the Ritz-Carlton in Naples, Fla., allegedly spitting blood in an officer's face; a coroner in Los Angeles County said that the death of the singer-songwriter Elliott Smith last October from two stab wounds could have been either suicide or homicide; and a recent coroner's report on Bobby Hatfield of the Righteous Brothers attributed his death last November — originally thought to be coronary — to cocaine.
Together, they add up to yet another reminder that our idols are just human beings with recording contracts. They are not invulnerable or immune to the vagaries of life, the personality defects that fuel the self-help industry or the kinds of errors in judgment that can't be taken back. Offstage, there is no such thing as a rock god. On VH1's "Behind the Music," we are led to believe that rock stars live life in three acts: the struggle to the top, the tragic downfall and, finally, the recovery and the redemption that constitute a happy ending. But sometimes, there are just two acts.
