silver mulet of death serigraphie

obert C. Porter
July 24, 1951 - Oct. 28, 2010

If anyone in Pittsburgh had a shot of singing over a punk band without a microphone, it was Bobby Porter.

The small but mighty singer, who fronted such bands as Young Lust and Thin White Line with vocal ferocity, was silenced Thursday when he died of stomach cancer at the age of 59.

To say his contribution to the Pittsburgh music scene was unique would be putting it mildly, as the various youtube videos of him performing attest.

Porter, of Polish Hill, grew up in the Hill District honing his vocal chops in the church and, after high school, joined the Marines and was dispatched to Vietnam.

“He was a tunnel rat,” says Nigel Swat, Young Lust bassist and his friend of 35 years. “He was as small as the Vietnamese, so they sent him into tunnels to look for explosives. It was a dangerous job with a high mortality rate, but he lived through it.”

Upon his discharge in the early '70s, he settled in New Mexico fronting a band called Otis and the Red Z that played the rock standards of the day. As the decade wore on and the punk scene exploded, Porter returned to Pittsburgh and formed the garage-punk band Young Lust.

Despite his stature, he stood out from the pack at the Electric Banana and the Lion's Walk with his Otis Redding-style vocal chops and acrobatic performances that included jumping on tables and doing backflips off the stage. Porter loved to get up and wail “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” and his next band Thin White Line would urbanize that with one song called “Dock of the Busstop.”

He had abandoned his soul roots for punk, Swat says, because, “it was new and exciting and Bobby always liked music that was cutting edge.”

"I met him when I was in my late teens," says guitarist Duane Irate Jones, "and he was doing R&B. Like me, he went from blues and soul into [punk] and incorporated that into it."

Joseph Romano, who was a DJ at CMU station WRCT in 1980-81, says he put Young Lust into rotation, even though the mixes were pretty raw. "I thought he was a superstar talent in a burgeoning scene, so I was super-eager to turn anyone on to this man's talent."

He was as much of a character off the stage. "I knew him as a shockingly real and present, charismatic and disturbing singer," Romano adds. "He told me of service in Vietnam and his exposure to Agent Orange during chats at Chief’s [bar]. I was chilled and alarmed."

“He didn’t like talking about [Vietnam]," Swat says laughing, "unless he was very drunk and then he would swear about it."

He was married briefly to a Vietnamese woman in Pittsburgh, Swat says, but that was another thing he didn’t like to talk about.

Music would never cut it for him as a way to make a living, partly, says one friend, because the personnel in his bands was constantly shifting. “He did what he needed,” Swat says. He was a bouncer at the White Eagle on the South Side during the ’90s and worked at times at a printing plant or doing janitorial work.

In this century, Thin White Line became Short Dark Strangers, which managed to do two tours of Europe.

"Bobby had some of the best vocal chops anywhere," says Mary Jo Coll, who booked him in recent years at Howler's in Bloomfield. "He was crazy as hell and charming, lovable and frustrating, gave 100 percent at every performance and then always over the top. He could make you nuts and make you smile -- all in the same moment."

Swat says he had a hard time letting his illness slow him down.

“At one point, the doctor told him ‘You can’t lift anything over 50 pounds over your head.’ I said, ‘If you’re doing a cartwheel, that’s lifting 50 pounds over your head.’ He didn’t listen.”

As far as his friends knew, he had no surviving relatives in the Pittsburgh area.