Bill Bartell, a.k.a. Pat Fear, plays guitar and gets attacked by an alien while Tracy Harrison, a.k.a. Trace Element, plays drums at a White Flag show. (Kimberly McWhorter/Contributed Image)
I love my job because I get to talk to people about music all the time. However, there are days when there’s a sad undercurrent to it. Today I wrote about the death of White Flag’s Pat Fear, who was known as Bill Bartell to his many friends. I can’t say thank you enough to everyone who took the time to talk to me today and share stories and your perspectives. There’s a story about Bartell’s death at PE.com and there will be one in The Press-Enterprise print edition tomorrow. However, I wasn’t able to share all of the details I learned today about his shenanigans, music, and more, which is why I wanted to spend some more time with these stories here in the blog.
Tracy Harrison, also known as Trace Element of White Flag, had played with Bartell for more than 30 years, but neither one of them really remembered how they started playing together.
Harrison said it was all centered at The Ritz, a defunct club off University Avenue in Riverside where all of the punk bands played. Right as White Flag was about to release its debut album in 1982, someone had given Bartell Harrison’s number and he called the drummer to see if he wanted to tour with White Flag. They would rehearse and play three times each week.
Harrison, who lives in Moreno Valley, said that when he joined the band, Bartell already had its ethos. At the time, punk rock had started having rules, the antithesis of the individuality and freedom of the genre in the first place.
“We would have a band that pointed to the ironic full circle,” Harrison said.
As Harrison joined the band and they went on tour, White Flag started to make a name for itself, a far cry from the first shows that Bartell had performed in in Sunnymead backyards. Band like NOFX and The Offspring opened for White Flag when they were just starting out.
White Flag also paid it forward for other bands.
Bartell, a huge KISS fan (multiple folks told me about the story of him sneaking out and flying to New York as a teenager to see KISS in concert and he was also in the movie “KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park”) and White Flag has a record label called Gasatanka, a play off KISS’ old label, Casablanca, and put out music from emerging bands such as The F.U.s and later, Shonen Knife, plus a host of compilations.
Around 1987-1988 Bartell, a huge fan of The Beatles, recorded a cover of “Tomorrow Never Knows” and a couple of Yoko Ono songs and released it under the project Tater Totz, with members of Redd Kross, Pat Smear and more guests, including actor Danny Bonaduce.
A number of people told me about how Bartell could always be seen at concerts large and small.
“Every show was important to Bill,” Harrison said.
He even joked about White Flag’s never ending discography–describing it as a “vinyl collector’s nightmare.”
“Bill was working on something with everybody he knew–always,” Harrison said.
“Any time somebody was coming through town–Bill was trying to get them to play on something,” he said, laughing.
He also was a champion of underground music, constantly turning his friends onto new things. Harrison and Bartell would constantly try to one-up each other in discovering new music. He was responsible for getting Shonen Knife and Os Mutantes recognition in the United States.
“He was very much an asset to not only the punk rock scene, but music in general,” Harrison said. “He not only loved music, but also became a good friend to everyone he came in contact with.”