Al Weisel
Hit, With a Bullet: Filter's "Hey Man, Nice Shot"
By Al Weisel
Rolling Stone, July 13-27, 1995
Filter's Richard Patrick has a bizarre collector's item. It's an oft-bootlegged video dubbed from news footage. A politician who has been convicted for corruption is giving a news conference when he suddenly pulls out a gun and shoots himself. The camera is momentarily disoriented, then catches him slumped in the corner of the room and voyeuristically zooms in on his face, which is gushing a waterfall of blood.
This disturbing video is what motivated Patrick to write "Hey Man, Nice Shot," a meditation on suicide that is the first single from Filter's debut LP, Short Bus. Starting off with a spare, foreboding bass line that suddenly explodes into a furious cacophony of guitars, the song, the video for which has just been added to MTV's Buzz Bin, is as creepy, startling and morally ambiguous as the imagery that inspired it.
Although Filter have the power of a full-fledged rock band, the group consists of just two people: Patrick, 27, who plays guitar and sings, and Brian Liesegang, 25, computer nerd. They are both former Cleveland residents and Nine Inch Nails alumni, which accounts for the Reznorian resonances in their music. Patrick, whose brother played the killer robot in Terminator II, was once Reznor's good friend, though the two haven't spoken much since Patrick left the band in '91. Patrick and Liesegang, who now live near each other in Chicago, do most of their arranging and songwriting at home.
"We would leave the computer on for days and go in at separate times or together and hash out an arrangement," says Liesegang. "Doing a drum or vocal line in your underwear a little hung over at 10 a.m. is better than having an engineer shoving a mike down your throat."
Patrick wrote most of "Hey Man" before he teamed up with Liesegang, The escalating tension between the restrained dread of the verse and the unleashed rage of the chorus was the result of an Enoesque happy mistake. "It was originally the chorus the whole-way through," says Patrick. When that didn't work, he decided to strip the song down, so he muted everything but the drums and bass. "Then at the chorus I just hit all the mute buttons at the same time, and all these guitars came pouring in. I thought, 'Wow, you can arrange through mute buttons.'"
The fact that Patrick doesn't take a stand on suicide in the song, which seems to waiver between sympathy, celebration and sarcasm, has made it controversial at a time when Jack Kevorkian is alternately demonized and lionized. (Although Patrick is unequivocal about one thing: "It's not about Kurt Cobain," he says, adding that the song was written before Cobain died.) "I'm not condoning what he did," Patrick says, referring to the man in the video. "But you at least have to respect him. I think suicide is pretty wasteful. But sometimes people have to do the most drastic thing in the world to let people know that there's something wrong." Yet Patrick doesn't pretend to have all the answers. "I'm not a gym teacher. Or Henry Rollins."■
Al Weisel is the co-author, with Larry Frascella, of Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause, being published in October 2005.