Pat Mahoney Details

brought up on an intriguing diet of folk music and, funnily enough, in the white suburbs of Ithaca, New York, reggae – developed an insatiable appetite for music and rhythm from the very start. When he turned 13, he traded in his saxophone for a PA and a mic, becoming lead singer of his first punk band, Distorted View. Three years of basements, garages, coffee houses, and his first manager (“It was fucking fun. We had a manager who was like 17 and had a car; he would take us to shows. He had a car that had no foot floor, it was just the street running by underneath it”), and eventually Distorted View made a turn for goth.

Unhappy with this musical direction, Pat instead taped a pair of drum sticks to his hands and picked up a white Pearl Export drum kit for an onslaught of basement punk shows with his second band, The Five Deadly Diseases (each of the five members named after a disease – Chris Syphilis, for example). A few years and an art school education later, Pat was recording for his next band, Les Savy Fav and found himself a good friend in their sound engineer, the indie/punk home-studio recording guru James Murphy.