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In memory of Pig Champion

As the message on my phone said, Thomas Roberts woke up dead the morning of January 30, 2006. He was 47, and much better known by his stage name, Pig Champion. I suspect he was surprised it took so long.

We met just once that I am sure of, and, for that matter, I can only remember having seen Poison Idea once, at the club my old attorney friend Rob Taylor-Manning now owns (I think) under the viaduct in Seattle, where Mother Love Bone had their first gig, though I couldn't get in and probably wouldn't have liked it anyhow.

Whatever. Pig Champion is gone forever, that part matters.

Portland, Oregon's Poison Idea were -- still are, so long as Jerry A.'s still singing, I reckon -- one of the great American hardcore bands. I type that as somebody who left punk rock (for the first time) in the early 1980s because hardcore had taken the fun and humor out of the music, and not as a hardcore expert. I type that because it was in all the obituaries, and because it is true to the music I heard. I type that because even though I've never much cared about hardcore, they were a band whose artistry and commitment commanded respect and attention.

Even having known for some years that one day I would have to write about his passing, this is difficult. Surprisingly difficult.

I really liked Tom. It would have been impossible to have been his friend, for I could never have kept up with his self-destructive habits, and have always been just a little too middle class to have any proper punk cred. But he was a very smart man, well-read in his way (in the way Henry Miller and Steve Earle learned their truths), honest to many faults, true to himself, and one hell of a guitar player.

Sonic Youth and Soundgarden and Screaming Trees and dozens of other bands I didn't listen to nearly as often (and Tad, let's not forget Tad) taught me to hear an elegant beauty in carefully orchestrated noise, but it's difficult to pull off. Tom was a huge man (I've not seen a single obituary that failed to report his weight at over 450 pounds) with small hands and a smallish guitar that he played with fierce love and enormous eloquence. He was one of the first punk musicians to toy with noise as a language, and he made it work.

And he lived what he believed, though he knew where the path led: His father had died at 50, when Tom was seven years old, a dentist who was also an alcoholic and a barbituate addict.

Best thing I can do here is step aside and let Tom talk for a moment. I interviewed him twice, the last time in his home (which doubled as the office of American Leather Records), a shotgun house filled with broken chairs strategically placed so that he could have something to lean on everywhere he chose to walk, with a small shelf of well-chosen books, empty bottles, dirty dishes, music. It was January of 1992, the story ran as the cover of the late Rocket magazine.

"Our politics are: 'Think for yourself, take care of yourself, look out for number one,'" Tom said. "Being greedy only so that you don't hurt other people. Being selfish only that you don't, in your selfishness, step on other people. Basically value your friendship and your loyalties to people that matter around you."

What, then, is left to believe in?

"Independent thought, anarchy, nihilism, existentialism, minding your own business above all." Then he quoted Hank Williams. "'If you mind your own business, you won't be minding mine.' If you don't like what someone's doing, ignore it. Keep your mouth shut. Don't talk to cops. Don't talk to politicians. Don't talk to anybody who tries to control other people. Freedom. Freedom of thought. The absolute total autonomy of the individual not being interfered with by systems created by small-minded idiots."

A few years later Tom was mostly out of the band. David Wilds, my photographer friend who once managed PI for a time, has a memory of Tom showing up at a party unexpectedly, sitting down with a guitar and running through an album's worth of Hank Williams songs -- with rough beauty, near as I recall the telling -- and then vanishing again. He lived hard and sometimes homeless, the way I heard it, waiting around to die, as the song goes.

"My body's a total wreck, in a lot of ways," he had said that January, "but the way I stay alive is by drinking. It keeps me alive, it keeps me happy, and when I'm drunk I'm happy, and when I'm hung-over, I'm bitching, and when I'm bitching and pissed-off it gives me a reason to live. And when I start to drink again I feel better.

"I think that drugs and alcohol belong in the realm of art. People that create things. If you can create things without altering your consciousness, fine. If you need to use drugs and alcohol to create something, fine. But when the drugs and alcohol stop you from creating, then you can stop."

The problem is, of course, what Tom stopped doing was creating, not drinking. But.

"I can damn well tell you that I wouldn't have been in this band, doing what we're doing, for as long as I've done it, without drinking. Because when I've had a good shot of booze, and I'm feeling my oats, there's nothing feels better than to crank up the type of music we do and let it shake ight through your soul. That's when it happens for me."

I hate that it stopped happening for him, and I wish he had chosen otherwise. I wish he had made a recording of those Hank Williams songs. I wish I'd thought to spend another day listening to him, had found another pretense to invade his privacy. But I didn't. And he didn't. And those are all choices we both made.

But I will miss him.

Posted by grant on February 12, 2006 10:52 AM | Permalink