Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Pat Liston
Pat Liston might be as familiar with the roads of St. Louis as any musician in town. Thursday through Sunday, Liston’s weekends are a blur of three-a-night, 45-minute sets, with gigs in the widest array of towns and neighborhoods possible. A monthly calendar might include dates in Defiance and Alton, Ill.; Godfrey, Ill., and Soulard; Belleville, Ill., and Chesterfield. He logs a lot of miles bringing his music to the people, accompanied at almost every show by his wife, Dawn, who serves as his manager, booking agent, and equipment tech.
“We play everywhere,” Pat acknowledges. “I have to look at the calendar first thing in the morning to know where we’ll be at.”
A musician’s lifestyle in nothing new to him. He’s played in professional settings for a full 50 years, starting out as a 15-year-old sideman in the rhythm-and-blues bands that entertained St. Louis Teen Towns in the 1960s. By 1972, he had formed a group with his younger brother, Danny, and some longtime pals from his old stomping grounds in Dogtown. As Mama’s Pride, they released two albums on an Atlantic Records subsidiary, Atco Records. But within a few years, a variety of circumstances halted the group’s momentum. Disbanding in 1982, the band’s players pursued new gigs and a life apart from their collective identity.
After a decade apart, the Pride reunited on a part-time basis in 1992. And in 2003, the band kick-started its career, playing annual shows at The Pageant, which led to other high-profile shows. All of that activity’s been a neat homecoming for Pat, though his solo work is what keeps him busy year-round. He knows that his fan base is rooted in the Mama’s Pride years. But he’s produced a lot of other music over time, including the two solo albums released in the last decade.
“I’ve always been a looking-forward guy,” he says, contextualizing his projects. “Yes, I was the leader of Mama’s Pride. I was also in California for three years. I had a record deal with a small label. I’ve done a lot of things without Mama’s Pride.”
His sets mix and match his solo work with several tracks from the original pair of Mama’s Pride releases: its 1975 self-titled debut and 1976’s Uptown & Lowdown. Some cuts, though, don’t get play unless he’s got the band around; they’re too full, too produced to do them justice alone, he says. On the other hand, he closes his set nearly every night with the KSHE-FM staple “Blue Mist,” which he still performs with gusto.
“You can’t play all the songs,” he says, “but that’s always been a good song for me. It’s very sentimental. It’s the No. 1 all-time requested song on KSHE. At the level I’m at, I want to do the songs that fans want to hear. But there are songs that are production numbers, and I just can’t do them justice on an acoustic guitar.”
But what he can do is tell stories—about those songs, about his life in music. Offstage, he’s been compiling stories with Dawn over the past year, hoping to complete a memoir in the next few months. To his listeners, though, he can offer snippets, engaging them in little ways. He’s got a theory about drawing in an audience. “There are four elements to a song,” he says. “There’s writing the song. There’s recording the song. There’s performing the song. But there’s a fourth element that I can’t control: It requires an audience’s attention. It’s about receiving the songs. People will receive a song differently than how I hear it in my own head. I don’t write a lot of ‘being on the road’ songs. People may like them, but I want to write songs that people really relate to on some level.”
His own life, he says, has brought him a lot of material in recent years, starting with a very youthful component that’s entered his life. When he and Dawn were married, they brought four children into their new blended family. And just about seven years ago, they welcomed a fifth child, Thomas. Needless to say, their youngest has brought a lot of changes, ones that Liston’s embracing and enjoying.
“Especially when you get older, you start thinking about the old Andy Capp thing, that you’re doing a lot more for the last time and a lot less for the first time,” Pat says. “All of us, we’re getting older. But you don’t have to have an old mentality. I was raised by a woman who was vehement about that. Our little boy helps; it’s almost like I’m living life in rewind. I’ve had to go back with him to that young way of thinking. Most of our fans have grandkids. I have them, too, and I love them to death, but I don’t think in old terms. Now, I don’t think I’m 35. I know just how old I am. But there’s no reason to put deadlines on life. I can’t tell you how many guys I’ve known who’ve retired and two years later, they’re dead.”
Extending that idea to music, he says, “I’ve felt that way about a lot of these tribute bands. It’s almost like you’re saying, ‘We’re done, there’s no more new music left.’”
For Pat, the balancing act continues. There’s new music he wants to play for you and some old songs that he knows you’ll want to hear again. He’ll drive to your town once a month to play you both kinds. And he’s confident that you’ll dig the mix.
For more info, go to patliston.com.
Now Hear This
The Trip Daddys, What Comes Natural: You’d be far from correct in calling The Trip Daddys a cover band, though the group has always been generous in sharing the songs that’ve influenced it. That’s true in both the live setting and on disc, as the band blends originals and tasteful tributes on What Comes Natural.
As always, big-voiced bandleader Craig Straubinger is the centerpiece, in dual roles as singer and guitarist, sharing space on the disc with a very able rhythm section of drummer Dennis Williams and bassist Michael Graham. Together, they bring to life a half-dozen classics, along with a handful of Straubinger-penned cuts.
At the time of the release, the lead Daddy told SLM, “While I always try to have good original material on hand—four tunes this time around—we threw in some of our fave covers from the live show at the moment. I feel the latest disc is a truer roots effort than the roots-punk vibe we’ve offered in the past. While it’s not an about-face from our previous identity, I did want to shift gears a little bit on this one. We’ve never fit neatly into any box, which makes it difficult to market the band, as people like things in their boxes, as I’ve learned. Is it a rock ’n’ roll project? Rockabilly? Blues? Yes! The first question I ask myself is, ‘Does it feel good?’ And does it sound good? If the answers to both are yes, I let the rest of the world figure it out after that.”
