Culture

Taking charge

As the band's lone constant member, Richard Patrick started Filter in 1993 after a stint as a hired gun for Nine Inch Nails. Now he's the one doing the hiring.

Filter was initially a duo, with Patrick sharing the workload with cofounder and fellow former NIN cohort Brian Liesegang. The resulting project's first album, "Short Bus," shared a few similarities with the pair's previous band -- a crystallization of the gritty industrial music that had bubbled over in the '80s underground matched with a heavy dose of Alternative Nation overdrive.

The approach resulted in a surprise hit in "Hey Man, Nice Shot," which caused a bit of controversy when it started getting regular radio rotation in 1995. Released a year after Nirvana's Kurt Cobain committed suicide, many assumed that's what the song was about. Eventually Patrick revealed it was about former Pennsylvania state treasurer R. Budd Dwyer, who committed suicide during a press conference after a jury convicted him of bribery.

That would prove to be the band's second biggest single. Its most successful was "Take a Picture," a track about being drunk on an airplane.

"Picture" was plucked from the 1999 album "Title of Record," which was eventually certified platinum and stands as the band's best selling album. Removed from the industrial crunch of the band's previous output, "Take a Picture" reconfigured the Filter fan base. In an interview last year with the Aquarian Weekly, Patrick explained how the make-up of the concert audience changed.

"(I)t alienated a lot of the 'Hey Man, Nice Shot' fans because they were like, 'What are all these pop fans and middle-aged housewives doing at my concert?' The fans that are showing up to Filter concerts: You're going to see some Pantera shirts; you're going to see some Radiohead; you're going to see some Cher."

Even as the band's most successful single falls on the opposite end of the sonic spectrum, Filter never fully abandoned the hyper-compressed distortion that marked its debut, but the band generally pushes its softer, more melodic numbers as radio singles. There's "Where Do We Go From Here" from the otherwise mosh-baitng album "The Amalgamut" or "Soldier of Misfortunate" from "Anthems for the Damned," a record Patrick describes as "pro-troops, anti-war" and is maybe Filter at its softest.

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The band's trip to Alaska comes as part of the touring cycle for last year's "The Trouble With Angels," an album that reclaims a lot of the group's past aggression.

And as the guy calling the shots, that seems to be where Patrick's heart is anyway.

"The funny thing is that I really only love the heavy stuff," the front man told the Aquarian. "I love 'Take a Picture,' don't get me wrong, but to perform, I love the heavy stuff. I mean, I just have more fun running around the stage and screaming."

By Matt Sullivan

Anchorage Daily News

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