Marmalade Swirls

Photo by James Kendi

Back in the early 1990s, when grunge was fading away and boy bands were cramming into the golden elevator, recent college graduate Pat Gubler helped start a band called Tower Recordings. Pat and cofounders Matt Valentine and his wife Helen Rush all lived together as a happy household of bedroom-psychedelic weirdos. It was a big, mellow cuddlefest that happened to lead to the most experimental "folk" music ever put to tape. "We'd make these ‘sketchbooks' of songs all the time," says Pat, "and all we ever wanted to do was play." So they did. Their days and nights were a musical ménage à trois that would end with sweat-soaked clothes and unselfconscious black-light meditations. "We loved it," says Pat. "Tower just took us over." But the avant utopia didn't last. Matt and Helen got divorced, which threw an "Eww, gross" pall over their group hugs. They tried to stick together as a band, but without love it was a no-go. Tower, like a precious royal diamond, split into three equally sparkling gems. One of them turned out to be P.G. Six, Pat's solo project. He's been working on it pretty much nonstop for the past few years and is now releasing his second full-length album. On his first recording, Parlor Tricks and Porch Favorites, Pat fucked with gypsy mythology as seen through the magnifying lens of American backyard storyteller guys like Townes Van Zandt. With his second album, The Well of Memory, Pat is onto some kind of epic, oceanic thing. This is the kind of music where the cosmos folds around and gives you a big purple-skied hug, then sits down on your couch to play the pedal steel while you brew some fresh sassafras tea. Pat uses everything from the banjo to the folk harp to the old six-string, more instruments than most guys in bands lately even know exist. And with pagan rock in full-throttle revival mode, P.G. Six is finding lots of lovers where there were none before. Pat barely seems to notice, though, spending most of his time communing with the holy muse in the woods of the Hudson Valley. "I don't know," he says of the current vogue for avant folk, "is it really such a big deal? I guess we're finally getting some attention, but I've always been doing weird, acoustic music just because I love it, so who cares?" The Well of Memory is out now on Amish Records.