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Ten Best Atom and his Package songs
-Patrick Rapa

February 20-26, 2003

cover story

This is Punk?

Big punk star in my backyard: Atom and His Package (and his guitar) rock Villanova.

He's a former prep school outcast with degrees in science and education. He’s Adam Goren -- a.k.a. Atom and his Package -- underground rock’s most visceral satirist.

By Patrick Rapa
Photos By Micheal T. Regan

At one end of the room, a punk band called Lux Courageous is hopping around furiously. Their chord changes are tight, if not exactly inventive. Veins shaped like lightning bolts bulge from the lead singer's forehead. What he's yelling his head off about isn't immediately clear, but his delivery is passionate and animated. And everything is very, very loud.

At the other end of the long room, Adam Goren is wearing earplugs and playing checkers. It's two hours before Atom and His Package -- that is, Goren and his Yamaha QY700 music sequencer -- are scheduled to take the stage in this brightly lit, oddly shaped makeshift venue somewhere in the middle of North Philadelphia's La Salle University. He has some time to kill.

His opponent is Maxx, a thin high-school kid with blond, bushy hair and a beat-up Atom and His Package T-shirt. This is a rematch: The two first went head-to-head in July 2002 at a sweaty, crowded punk show in the basement of the First Unitarian Church at 21st and Chestnut. By all accounts, Goren defeated him pretty handily.

This icy February night, Maxx has brought a homemade checkerboard. It's customized for the occasion with Magic Markered messages written along the border like "Atom vs. Maxx," "Ball Park Franks vs. Hebrew Nationals" and a drawing of a cross versus a Star of David. But the game is not really a microcosmic holy war, just a chance for the fan to spend some one-on-one time with one of his favorite songwriters.

Adam Goren is the most approachable person in punk rock. Which is pretty good because he's, well, kind of famous.

You can't tell from looking, but the unassuming 28-year-old Philly guy in the baseball cap and glasses is a successful, world-touring professional rock musician. They sing along in Japan, they mosh to him in Germany. His first four albums 45,000 copies; his fifth, Attention! Blah Blah Blah, just came out last week on California rock label Hopeless Records.

If you've never witnessed his onstage performance -- leading the crowd in pro-metric system anthems and rocking out to fight songs about starting a punk rock high school -- you might mistake him for who else he is: a married, home-owning guy from the 'burbs who went to private school and was this close to becoming a chemistry teacher. He's punk's funniest personality, its most visceral satirist and maybe the biggest rock star in Philly most Philadelphians have never heard of.

Except for the 100 or so Philadelphians in this room.

Despite the unintelligible but unignorable music coming from the far end of the room, heads start turning toward the checkers game. A small crowd gathers. Maxx snaps photos of his opponent -- who doesn't lift his head from the board. Maxx announces that as soon as he turns 18 he's going to have the Atom logo from his T-shirt tattooed onto his leg. Goren smiles and shakes his head. Maxx requests "Open Your Heart," a Madonna song covered on one of the Atom and His Package CDs (he gives it a personal touch, adding the word "fuckface"). Goren says sorry, he really wasn't planning on it.

The first match of the evening ends in an early stalemate, one in which, most improbably, no pieces have been taken. Under the din, a shouted discussion brews among the onlookers as to whether it's a tie or a win for Maxx, who made the last move. Nobody seems to know. Eventually, Goren accepts it as a loss and a second game begins wherein he accumulates kings early and eventually dispenses with his young opponent. He autographs Maxx's shirt with a message bragging about his 2-1 record. The two shake hands and Goren returns to his post at the merch table. The spectators dissipate as if suddenly remembering they're at a rock show.

"Maybe I'm undefeated still," says Goren later. "The one loss has an asterisk next to it, definitely."

Friendly, funny and conversational, he doesn't hurry browsers away from the table after a sale is completed. On this evening, many Atom and His Package fans appear to be amiable, if sometimes awkward, high-school and college kids who want a little talking time to go with their CD and T-shirt purchases from the "Atom and His Crap" display. Goren obliges.

He knows what it's like to be a kid, going to punk shows, being something of an outcast. That's exactly how he felt when he was in high school at Penn Charter.

Of course, the music Atom and His Package make isn't quite punk, at least not in the traditional sense. The current Package -- like Lassie, there have been several over the years -- is able to simulate the sounds of 500 different musical instruments. The muted thumps of electronic drumbeats, replicated trumpets and playful keyboard from the Yamaha QY700 sequencer give the songs the processed feel of '80s synthesizer-based pop. When he does choose to add guitar into the mix, which has been happening more often on each new album, it tends to come off like heavy metal.

On top of that, Goren can spit out lyrics with the rapid-fire delivery most commonly found in hip-hop. At other times his upper-register, semi-nasal vocals recall -- well, there's nothing quite like the way he sing-speaks and times the cracking in his voice.

Respected punk magazine Maximum Rock And Roll initially didn't know what to make of Atom and His Package, and refused to review his first few CDs.

"I completely understand. They're a guitar punk magazine," he says. "They should cover what they want to cover and they do. They shouldn't listen to me."

But when several early Atom songs were, on a whim, re-recorded with a full band for the Atom and His Rockage 7-inch, Maximum took notice. "I just wanted to do it with real guitars and drums and see if they would review it, even if it's the same songs, just different timbres or whatever. And they did. The reviewer liked it."

Another point that separates Atom from other punk acts is his sense of humor. That he has one at all immediately puts him at odds with the popular D.C. hardcore scene of the '90s. His fight songs, the ones that have the kids raising their fists and shouting along at the La Salle show, include one about how much moving sucks and another passionately pleading for the United States to switch to the metric system:

All cool things are in metrics

For example here's just one

I've got my nine, well that's nine millimeters

Sounds cooler than .3-something-inches gun

The permanent-if-nonexistent "they" will call me communist

They'll call me scum

But it's worth it, Canadians will think we're smart

Well, at least they will think we are not as dumb.

You're drunk with your tradition that has no validity

While I'm intoxicated with smarts and metrics

Come drink a decaliter with me

We want metrics! We want 'em now!

We know we can win!

I weigh 170 pounds, that's 90 kilograms

See, metrics can even make you thin!

--from "(Lord It's Hard to be Happy When You're Not) Using the Metric System"

That song, from 1999's Making Love, has a corresponding T-shirt with "Stick your foot up your fucking ass" on the back. Get it?

Song titles on Attention! Blah Blah Blah, his new album, include "I'm Downright Amazed at What I Can Destroy With Just a Hammer" and "Does Anyone Else in This Room Want to Marry His or Her Own Grandmother?"

"Mustache T.V." is about a trick Goren learned from a friend: Draw a mustache on a piece of Scotch tape and put it in the middle of your television screen. Then laugh every time it aligns itself properly on a face.

"It's stupid," admits Goren. "But it's really funny. Lots of unsuspecting non-mustached personalities become mustached." At shows these days, Goren sells little plastic reusable mustaches for 75 cents so even lazy fans can try it at home.

For every song that strays into simple, amusing minutiae, there is another that's actually about something important. Just below the surface of a title like "If You Own the Washington Redskins, You're A Cock" is a stirring indictment of racist sports team names:

Wouldn't it be offensive if we cheered

"Rah rah rah" for the Carolina Negroes with our beatbox cheers and our fake-foam afros?

If the Minnesota Vikes became the New York Kikes

with dollar bills on their helmets

'Cause that's what they're like, you know?

"Atom, what about the Saints, Angels, Padres too,

ain't that the same thing for Christians that's offending you?"

When there's a Jesus Christ mascot, with a hot dog-shooting crucifix thing, nailed to a cross

dying to save the team

You'll be right, you'll be right!

But until then

you're not right!

Sometimes, not everybody gets the joke. Under the "Hatemail" section of his website, Goren answers with utter sincerity the complaints and criticisms his music inspires.

"If someone e-mails me and says You suck,' then it's like, OK, it's really not that hard to avoid listening to Atom and His Package,'" he reasons.

The song "Hats Off to Halford" -- an ode to former Judas Priest singer Rob Halford for coming out of the closet in the normally close-minded heavy metal subculture -- has garnered all sorts of befuddling responses.

Most of the "Halford" letters are from metal fans who object to lines like, "See I told you/ Metal dudes are gay, too/ And I haven't seen the proof so far/ That your sexuality determines the way you play guitar."

Says Goren: "I'll get people who e-mail me like, I like metal -- don't call us fags!'" Apparently fear of being called gay raised the metalheads' ire quite a bit. But Goren has not yet received any flack for saying in the same song that metal fans are "evolutionarily one step behind."

Being understood seems to be a big deal for Goren. Every single song on every CD comes with lyrics and some kind of explanation, what the song's about (and which artists he hopes won't sue for borrowed lines and riffs).

"What WE Do on Christmas," a hilarious takeoff on the racist myth that Jews run the world that has the potential to offend a lot of people, ends with: "This is a disclaimer:/ My name is Adam. I am a Jewish boy/ I'm very neurotic that people are going to get mad at me/ I like Jews. I like Christian people/ There should be no problem."

In concert, Goren recites annotations and backstories before each song like a loose comedy routine. Sometimes it's simple: "Upside Down From Here," he explains before he sings, is about "people who think north' is the same thing as up.'"

Other times it's complicated, as with the anthemic rocker "Shopping Spree." The song is more or less stolen from The Dali Llamas, a band Goren happened to see in Flagstaff, Ariz., while on tour with Minnesota's Sean Na Na. Although the song had a catchy, senseless chorus ("I can't take it no more so I'm going on a shopping spree, yeah/ I can't spend no money 'cause I spent it on a shopping spree, yeah!"), it was apparently the only thing in the Llamas' arsenal worth a damn. So after a couple of mediocre songs, Goren and company chanted for a repeat of "Shopping Spree." Then they got up and danced when the band shrugged and answered the request. Long story short, the Llamas ended up playing the song five times. Poor bastards.

Since then, both Atom and His Package and Sean Na Na have released renderings of the pop masterpiece. Goren's version rewrites history, claiming that The Dali Llamas stole the song from him.

Of course the joke has the potential to backfire. At a recent show in a food court at Villanova University, members of the audience playfully chanted for "Shopping Spree" 10 minutes after he had already played it. Goren responded with "That's mean," but was only kidding. He did not repeat the song.

As for his tendency to explain each song, Goren says it's just to make sure everyone's on the same page. "It's not necessarily that there's a joke behind each song," he says. "It just feels right to explain what the hell I'm singing about."

"It's not like there's that much open to interpretation," he sighs. "Apparently it's open to misinterpretation."

"There's certainly a ton of people who think what I do is stupid, which is fine," says Goren. "People e-mail me all the time and say I'm an embarrassment to punk."

Looking over the press kit his label sends out with his CDs, Goren notices a pattern in the clippings. "See, I'm a dork," he says pointing to one review. He also finds the words novelty, geek and nerd fairly often. "Does it mean someone who's smart and wears glasses?" he wonders. "OK, then I guess I'm a nerd or a geek because I think about stuff."

"If it just means a jackass I would probably take up an argument with that because I don't feel like I'm a jackass. I'm not a clown."

(The La Salle Collegian heralded the Atom and His Package show with an article calling him "The pride of Philadelphia." Goren agrees. "Yes. Without Atom, Philadelphia would collapse.")

None of the comparisons to other "funny" artists seem to make sense: Pop parody king Weird Al? Doesn't really fit; Goren writes his own stuff. Schizophrenic indie icon Wesley Willis?

Well, they are both --

"Big black men?" jokes Goren dismissively.

Writing rock songs with a smirk, Goren has found, puts him on common ground with a band of Philadelphia punk legends. "I think The Dead Milkmen -- who, in my opinion, wrote some really unbelievably good pop songs -- were totally written off by people just because some of their stuff is funny." A sincere cover of the DM's

"Nutrition" pops up on Atom and His Package's Making Love CD.

Goren is hardly the court jester of punk the critics make him out to be. In fact, he may be the genre's sharpest satirist.

I got a patch

I got a pin

Obtained political beliefs from the same songs as my friends

I got a five-finger discount to the little record store

It's easier to get the stuff I want out

We're gonna tear this stupid city down

Throw our trash on the ground

And whine, whine, whine when no bands come to town.

--from "Anarchy Means Litter"

But he's not blasting his fans, exactly. "There's definitely a stupid contingent of punk rock people, no doubt," he says. "I mean any group where you're gonna have a lot of people, I'd have to imagine that there's got to be a contingent of them that's really stupid."

On the new record, he takes aim at dimestore political pontificators and "people who wear the right clothes but still act like jocks."

"The Palestinians Are NOT the Same Thing as the Rebel Alliance, Jackass" is not about the Middle East, not exactly. "The situation's really complex and I don't think I could do everything justice while rhyming and singing," he says. "It's stupid anyway to try to tackle that in two minutes."

He seems to have a particular contempt for those he meets through music who can regurgitate a clever catch phrase but haven't done the homework to back it up in conversation. Quoth "The Palestinians ": "Add inane, hip arguments when it comes your turn/ All the while weakening and invalidating legit concerns." It's a testament to his skills on the mic that he's able to enunciate such scathing criticism within the context of a rock 'n' roll song.

"I don't think about punk rock very much," he says. "I do think there are certain ways that you should behave. You should treat people with respect who deserve it, and people who don't deserve it, you should treat them with disrespect."

At the La Salle show, Goren and his friends sit at the merch table and ponder the young woman with the pink things in her hair and the word "FAGGOT" written in huge letters on a piece of fabric and baby-pinned to the back of her sweatshirt.

They contemplate her motivation, reasoning that there may be a rational explanation for it. Like perhaps she gets harassed for being gay, or she's attempting to desensitize the word.

"Maybe it's the name of her dead cat."

"Maybe it's an acronym."

Goren, who just sold some pins to the high schooler 20 minutes earlier, decides he has to find out.

"If you have a sweatshirt with giant 6-inch letters pinned to the back of it that says faggot' on it, you should expect that someone's gonna call you on it," he says later. "I would hope so, especially at a punk rock show."

Turns out, she was wearing it "just to piss people off.'" What people? "You know, if you're at the mall and kids are making fun of you,'" Goren recounts. "And she had pink hair -- she was the kind of kid who could get picked on easily at a mall. She's like, I just turn around and show 'em the back.'

"And I was like, OK, I understand certainly what it's like to be picked on. But I want to let you know that to someone who doesn't know you, the word faggot' has connotations that are homophobic and can be really hurtful.'"

After Goren comes back to the merch table he sees one of the young woman's friends write something at the top of the sign. It now reads: "Atom doesn't like this. FAGGOT."

"Oh good," he says, relieved when he finds out what was written. "I thought she was writing Atom is a'" A couple days later the young woman e-mails Goren to say she'd been thinking about it a lot and hopes he wasn't offended.

Edging out both the FAGGOT girl and Maxx for Most Interesting Fan Encounter this evening, however, is the duo who named themselves Team Lightspeed. Julia and a boy named "Fish" are a

pair of smiley 16-year-olds from Friends Central School. Before this evening, they'd e-mailed Goren to say that they'd been working on an interpretive, conceptual dance for the school talent show, set to Atom and His Package's version of a song by another one-man band, Iowa's The Mountain Goats. The song is "Going to Georgia" and the synchronized steps include flitting across the stage while pretending to travel to the peach state by car, by plane, etc.

They catch up with Goren before the show, introduce themselves and volunteer to perform if he wants to work the song into his set. He agrees and the kids steal the show for all two minutes of "Going to Georgia." The next week they pop up at the Villanova show and do it again. They are cheered for their bravery.

Despite the obvious differences between Atom and most other punk acts, Goren still finds himself on bills like the one at La Salle, with loud, young, angry rock bands. It's not an uncomfortable place: He spent five years playing guitar with Fracture, an honest-to-Satan punk rock band, in the early '90s.

That band of friends toured the U.S. and Canada twice.

"We had a really great time and in five years wrote, like, 42 minutes of music or something," he laughs. "We had a blast.

"Most of the shows were really small. We probably played two shows that had over 40 people." Perhaps the highlight of Fracture's existence was a gig at a barn in the middle of Illinois where everyone in the crowd miraculously seemed to know the words.

It was after Fracture split up that Goren first learned of the wonders of the digital sequencer from a friend. "I thought, This is awesome, you can like write and record and arrange entire songs on it,'" he remembers. "Rather than just me playing guitar with nobody."So he bought a QY10, and started messing with it. "Initially I didn't intend this to be a band," he explains. It was just a way to get that full-band sound while going solo. Eventually he had a bunch of songs he liked -- among them "Avenger," about a big crane designed to scoop up the world's assholes and maroon them on an island together in the middle of the ocean -- and started to book himself on bills with his friends' bands. "Back then it was purely recreational," he says. "I'd go and I'd get to jump around and it would annoy the shit out of a lot of people who were at the shows. It's fun to playfully be obnoxious."Goren wrote and programmed the music, then went to friend Mark Scott's house to record the vocals for the first few CDs -- a self-titled album, his breakthrough A Society of People Named Elihu and the odds-and-ends compilation Making Love. More recently, he's become even more self-reliant, learning how to do the recording himself at home. He hasn't recorded in a studio since his days with Fracture.

Calling the sequencer His Package was a somewhat regrettable move for Goren. It's humorously vulgar in the tradition of naughtily named punk bands like Come, Assuck and countless others who used to play all-ages shows at the Firenze and J.C. Dobbs. But Goren rarely delves into that kind of comedy in his songs. "It's kind of a stupid name," he admits, and takes the blame for all the obvious jokes it inspires. "But what can I do?" With five albums under that name, he's stuck with it.

"Atom," a seemingly ideal, punny stage name, actually derives from Goren's science background -- he has a degree from Wesleyan to teach high-school chemistry and astronomy. He also has a master's in education from Penn. If the music thing ever comes to an end, Goren has a pretty decent backup career. That is, if he wants it.

His student-teaching stint at Germantown High School while he was at Penn

was difficult and unpleasant. "[It's] in pretty bad shape like I'm sure a lot of the Philadelphia school district is."

It's not entirely a surprise he didn't enjoy teaching high school; he absolutely hated it when he was a student at Penn Charter. "It's a very conservative, sports-oriented place, like many schools, of course. I had two friends there," he recalls. "It was awful."

That misery, however, gave rise to Atom and His Package's most recognizable anthem to date, "Punk Rock Academy," wherein Goren dreams up his own version of a rock 'n' roll high school.

"If all of us hated high school so much," he sings, "Why was nothing ever changed?" The Punk Rock Academy would be a safe haven, a righteous revenge for the outcasts: Everybody has A.D.D, the radio snow code is 666, nobody buys anything with a UPC symbol. "We'll appoint a token jock and we will kick his token ass./ There will never, ever, be a physical education class."

Goren graduated from Penn in '97 but never went looking for a teaching job. Six years later he has no regrets about making music his full-time gig. His parents (Mom's a divorce mediator/lawyer, Dad's an endocrinologist; "We're the Huxtables," jokes Goren), who still live in Oreland, Pa., where he grew up, are cool with his career choice even though his siblings took more traditionally successful paths (his older brother's a lawyer; his younger sister's in med school). "They know I'm not a fuck-up," says the middle child.

Goren co-owns a refurbished three-story brownstone in Fairmount with his wife, artist Jenn Schumow, and pal Brian Sokel, with whom he's been friends since childhood. Songs about (and guest-starring) both of them spring up more than once on Atom and His Package albums.

Up until recently Goren, Sokel and their pal Matt Werth (also the subject of a few songs) ran a small record label together. But the three decided to give up File-13 Records to make more time for their respective musical projects (Sokel's in AM/FM, Werth is in Aspera). They handed it off to a friend in Chicago this past October.

Sokel, Schumow and Goren fixed up their home themselves (with lots of help from Sokel's father, apparently) -- moving this wall, refurbishing that bathroom. The experience inspired two songs on the new record. Fans don't seem to mind their punk mini-idol sporting his domestic side. As long as it rocks.

In fact, Attention! Blah Blah Blah contains several hints that the author of "Goalie" (about how the Flyers should hire a really fat netminder) is maturing. In addition to the improved sound quality and more complex arrangements, Goren is writing about subjects like home repair, whether or not to have children and why his friend should quit smoking.

And "Does Anyone Else in This Room Want to Marry His or Her Own Grandmother?," despite its obviously tongue-in-cheek title, is secretly a warm song about keeping his grandma company following the death of his grandfather. "It breaks my heart to see you alone/ Grandma, let's elope." Goren's only tattoo says "Grandpa" on his left shoulder.

What makes music a viable commodity for Goren is its streamlined business plan: Solo artists don't have to split the money or collaborate with anyone. He works at his own pace in all aspects of making an album.

That also means everything is on his shoulders. "If you're playing with a bunch of people, someone will probably tell you if you have a bad idea," he says. "I have friends who can tell me if something sucks, but for the most part there isn't really that filter."Being a singer/songwriter who plays like a band also means that putting an Atom tour together is much simpler than it was for Fracture.

"Over the last five years I've been touring at a really ridiculous pace which would have been tantamount to impossible with having to schedule five people live," he says. "If I want to tour, or play a particular show, I go."

This approach has taken him all over the world: Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Israel. He was lucky when he played Japan -- the yen was strong and the expensive trip ended up paying for itself. He's out on tour, in Tallahassee, right now behind Attention! Blah Blah Blah. The trip will have him sleeping on floors and couches across the U.S. and Canada, then Germany, England, Denmark and France. He'll be on the road through mid-June at least. (Read his tour diary on www.atomandhispackage.com.)

The offer for Atom and His Package to perform at bar or bat mitzvahs, as advertised in the liner notes of the early CDs, is officially off the table, though he never did play one. The few experiences he had playing weddings were awkward enough to make him rethink the possibility. "The stuff I do isn't for everyone," he concludes. "I don't wanna make someone have a bad time at someone's bar mitzvah."

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