Can We Talk About Paul K (part two)

Fly Below the Radar / Pretty Soon You Hit Some Trees / Many of My Songs Have Been Forgotten

Paul Gregory Kopasz was a tall skinny Catholic School kid from Detroit who loved ice hockey and ended up on a debate scholarship at the University of Kentucky. In the post-punk music environment of the early 1980s, Paul bounced between New York and Kentucky and began carving out a four decade body of work informed by equal parts Beat Poetry, Velvet Underground, and Townes Van Zandt. These reductive statements aren’t any new observations, and they aren’t especially insightful. There are scores of eulogists and critics that can and have done a better job than I can of explaining Paul’s life and work. John Bosch’s quasi-documentary film A Wilderness of Mirrors is a great primer on Paul’s life and there have been loads of stories, remembrances, and tall tales written about Paul and published online.

His exploits and musical output are surprisingly well-documented for such a relatively unknown artist. His prodigious body of work is available across streaming platforms and purchase vendors—I’ll include a few links below. I’ve been listening to Paul non-stop for the last couple of weeks, and I keep being re-amazed. The first thing you notice as a listener is the sheer volume of writing. He has SO many songs. When Paul got started, he wrote, recorded, and released cassette after cassette of full-length works. It’s hard to imagine producing this much content, and it’s especially impressive given how much of it was done pre-digital recording, when recording and editing was more labor-intensive, but also when the actual recordings took up so much more physical space. These days, almost unlimited numbers of songs can be stored on a hard drive and distributed through the cloud, but to produce even a single cassette album, all the final recordings had to be moved to a master recording and then stacks of physical copies had to be reproduced for sale—and Paul put out dozens of these.

The post-CD/digital output is also prolific, and thankfully, it’s widely available. The work bends, twists, expands, and defies genre. Paul’s music is hard to pin down—but it’s also timeless, and this timelessness is the second big thing I’m reminded of as I listen. The sounds on his records are unique and don’t belong to any particular era. The work doesn’t follow any orthodoxy of production that binds it to a locked moment in time. A song might start with a compressed acoustic guitar, pulsing with the clips of peaks and without any drums or percussion instruments, and then the same song might be interrupted by a searing guitar solo full of chorus or flange and high frequencies that demand the listener’s attention and penetrate the aural experience. Paul’s voice operated much the same way, drifting from a bass register that whispered conspiracy to a falsetto pleading that manages somehow to hover right along the point of cracking without doing so. The next track might be a straight rock ballad or a soul jam, the one after that a hard rocking onslaught of screamed lyrics and pounding drumbeats and chords, and then he might round the track list out with a Townes Van Zandt, Gram Parsons, or Stevie Wonder cover. Paul K was all over the place, but his enduring vocal quality made it all quintessentially his.

Finally, listening to his music now en masse makes me realize the depth and maturity of it. Paul K’s work astounds me for it’s lyrical depth and the gritty humanity of his subject matter, but I’ll confess that as a thirteen year old, I maybe wasn’t prepared for what he was trying to do as an artist. Last week, I wrote about the first time I saw Paul K and the Weathermen—the second time was an outdoor show at a Unitarian Church. I had remembered one of the songs I had seen at my first club show, and I had the audacity to request it. The song was “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess. I had been amazed at the rendition that Paul and the band had done and the dark electric arrangement of the tune had stuck with me. So there I was—a skinny 13-year-old in a punk T-shirt, ripped jeans, and boots on a Saturday afternoon in the Kentucky sun screaming for “Summertime” like it was “Freebird.” Paul looked confused and peered at me like I was from another planet. “Seriously?” he asked. “Gershwin? Kid, he was dead forty years before you were born…” Then he kinda chuckled and shook his head, and then happily obliged. It was a great moment for me to understand the ephemeral connection between artist and audience in a live music setting. I wanted more—a lot more, and I never stopped wanting it.

I saw Paul play dozens of times over the years—had a handful of conversations with him. He was always kind, generous, and thought-provoking in my few exchanges. Paul said that the body is “not a temple, it’s a rental car.” He put a lot of miles on his, and they took their toll over time. I connected with Paul and his wife on Facebook—he surely had no idea who I was, but I was able to see updates as he put out his last few albums, got sober, got sick, and put together his final compilations of material before he passed. I sent a brief note thanking him for his work and his wife Danielle said she read it to him, and she sent back a very kind reply on his behalf. As the condolences and tributes came pouring in over the weeks that followed, the impact that Paul K made upon the world was illuminated through the messages of the lives he touched. I am honored to have been one.

Words like “legend” are tossed around too generously, I think, but Paul K fits the description. I got to spend a minute or two with him over the years. I learned some songs from listening to him play, and I saw what being an artist, musician, and poet looks like from a very close view the very first time I ventured into the world of live performance—saw what it looked like on a real, raw, and personal level. For that, I will be forever grateful, and I will do my part to spread the word, honor his art, and draw attention to his music to those who haven’t had the chance to hear it before. I’ve included a few samples of some of my favorites here—do yourself a favor: have a listen and allow yourself to get lost in the songs. It’s a dark wilderness at times, but there’s so much beauty and joy in it, too. You’ll be glad you made the trip.

RIP Paul K — see you when I get there.