Singer-songwriter Joe Pug is intent on blazing his own trail, writes Larry Schwartz.
GRANDPA Pugliese was the least impressed of the relatives when young Joe changed his surname to Pug.
“Most of my family was fine with that,” the singer-songwriter says. “My grandfather, who was first-generation Italian, was pretty unhappy with me.”
Pug, who named a high school band for the brand of a guitar, Lotus, has no misgivings. “You know, it’s just a stage name,” he says. “It is all theatre. It’s not a big deal.”
A carpenter’s son who set out to become a playwright before switching to songwriting, he is wary of critics who lavish praise, mentioning him in the same breath as the likes of John Prine and Loudon Wainwright III, and speculate that had last year’s debut album, Messenger, arrived in the 1970s, he’d have been hailed a “new Dylan”.
“I just think it’s unbelievably lazy journalism to say that,” Pug says. “Certainly, it’s in that [singer-songwriter] vein. No one is going to say you’re wrong. But it would be like me writing songs about hopping on a train and saying goodbye to my baby.”
He left home in Maryland in his late teens and went to the University of North Carolina to learn to write for theatre. He was inspired by the 17th-century French playwright, Moliere, whose plays are said to “range from slapstick farce to philosophical satire”.
“The plays I was writing were not serious at all,” says the Chicago-based entertainer, who returns to Australia just months after his first tour. “I was writing comedy mainly and I was really enjoying doing it.”
So why quit? “I just didn’t think school was for me,” says Pug, who has also released two EPs, Nation of Heat and In the Meantime. “You know, I was always in the library reading when I was in college but it was never reading that we were assigned to read in class,” he says. “Probably the only thing that I got out of college was a reading habit.”
He’s been poring over Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Listen, Little Man! by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. “Believe it or not I have never read Hamlet all the way through. I’m really enjoying it,” he says. “But I have had a great deal of trouble with Shakespeare and I really have to get through it line by line.”
He talks with a brash confidence that belies his bookishness and sings of a time when he was so sure of himself he felt as though he “wrote John Steinbeck’s book”. He’s a latter-day troubadour. “That’s my job,” Pug says. “That happens to be a job that Woody Guthrie invented and Bob Dylan reinvented for American popular culture.”
He devised a strategy to get his music out without radio, offering fans free CD samplers. They were eagerly received and he has sent out nearly 20,000 to fans in 14 countries.
Word of his talents had reached Australia before last year’s tour. “You can understand that when I started touring in the US I literally started from nothing. In the first few years of playing there was no one there when I’d get to clubs. So to come down to Australia and to have 100 to 150 people at a couple of shows, for me, it defies all logic. It’s wonderful.”
The Age 25-Feb-2011
Larry Schwartz Writer 