Pat Irwin got his start in music as a Cleveland boy in the second grade, with a clarinet. As he grew up, he was drawn to the guitar, but his parents forbid him to have one, so he did the logical thing: he bought one and hid it at his friend’s house.
Since then, he’s played with the B-52’s, Lydia Lunch and the Raybeats, composed soundtracks for Rocko’s Modern Life and Dexter (the most watched series on Showtime), and he continues to make music in a variety of formats, including the “country ambient” combo SUSS.
An early high point in his musical career came when his folk rock band (“a Crosby, Stills and Nash-type thing”) won his high school’s battle of the bands. A financial peak was reached during his first paid gig, as a cocktail pianist, where a patron at the Maitre D’ Lounge once tipped him $100 to play the theme from “Midnight Cowboy” over and over again.
Although he had determined that “music wasn’t going to be an option” as he went through college as an American History major, he kept up performing with a friend in an Everly Brothers-influenced duo in a local Holiday Inn. Upon graduating, he was awarded a research grant that allowed him to go to Paris to interview American ex-pat jazz musicians — including Dexter Gordon, Mal Waldron and Steve Lacy.
It was there that he met Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, which led to his studying with the legendary iconoclast composer John Cage.
“Cage was an incredible life changer,” Irwin recalls. “He was so kind, warm and generous. He had so much conviction.”
After the year in Paris, where he saw all the major new bands – Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith – he had a new focus.
“All I wanted to do was go back to New York and play at CBGB’s or Max’s,” he says. “The first show I went to when I got there was Suicide at CBGB’s. … I can still hear it. It was mind-blowing, on another level. I still don’t think I’ve processed it.”
Irwin’s first…
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