Tag Archives: faith no more

Mike Patton didn’t originally sing “As the Worm Turns,” which appears on Faith No More’s debut album We Care A Lot. But like a number for tunes that were originally sung by the band’s original vocalist Chuck Mosley, Patton took the song and made it his own.

The story of the end of the Mosley era and the beginning of the Patton era is a story of 1) annoyance and 2) a musical fork in the road.

As we explained in the “Introduce Yourself” passage, the rest of FNM just kind of got tired of dealing with Mosley as Mosley seemingly was moving in a different direction than the band.

“There was a certain point when I went to rehearsal, and Chuck wanted to do all acoustic guitar songs. It was just so far off the mark—I think I actually attacked him again,” said bassist Billy Gould, who had previously punched Mosley on tour.

So, FNM basically fired Mosley and went on the search for a new singer—apparently Chris Cornell was considered because Soundgarden had opened for FNM on a few dates of a previous tour. But, as Louder Sound explains, after drummer Mike Bordin and keyboardist Roddy Bottum visited Cornell’s house to jam, they discovered the chemistry with the singer wasn’t there.

A few years earlier, Patton had met Bordin and had given him a Mr. Bungle tape. Bottum had listened to it—and he was not a fan.

“Mike Bordin really liked his Mr. Bungle tape he gave us,” Bottum told Louder Sound. “So did Jim Martin. I didn’t. Not my cup of tea.”

Guitarist Jim Martin said that, among the other five singers the band had auditioned, Patton clearly had the most natural ability.

“We called him and told him to come down; we wanted him to go to work immediately,” Martin said. “He was very hesitant, like, ‘I can’t do this right now; it’s not a good day. I have a school box social to go to. And tomorrow is show and tell. If I had plenty of advance warning, I might be able to come down for a little while, but today is not good.’ I told him he was at a crossroads in life—one way was to become a singer, the other way was to be a record store clerk in a shitty little town in Northern California. He really was like that. Very clean and shiny, nice kid. Milk and cookies type.”

Patton eventually saw the light, joined the band, and eventually improved on many of Mosley’s numbers.

Here’s Mosley’s version with really beautiful piano and synthesizers by Bottum.

Like usual, Mosley does more of his spoken-word style that I never loved. But I really love the song when Patton does it.

Here he is in 1990 during the You Fat Bastards video taping at Brixton Academy in London …

… And in 2010.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZWLIUd_qh

Whether it’s Patton screaming it 25 years after the tune first came out or Mosley doing more speaking than singing, the song rocks pretty hard. Patton just makes it a little better.

To follow along on the 365 days of Patton, click here for a list of each day’s post.

Aside from Faith No More’s breakout hit “Epic” in 1989, I hadn’t seen many of the band’s official music videos. Not sure why. I guess when I stopped watching MTV in the mid-1990s, I stopped searching for music videos in general, even the ones from my favorite band.

But “Last Cup of Sorrow” from FNM’s Album of the Year is an interesting one. The video is a parody of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece Vertigo. The video features Mike Patton in the Jimmy Stewart character. Jennifer Jason Leigh in the Madeleine character. Bassist Billy Gould dressed as a woman. And drummer Mike Bordin, for some reason, eating a bagel.

I’ve always loved the song—it was the album’s second single, and it landed at No. 14 on the Billboard charts, better than the other two songs releases from the album—but until this very second, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the entire music video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xl9tJ660gwA

That’s kind of cool. And considering some of Patton’s career revolves around his love of movies—his second Fantomas album is a cover of a bunch of old soundtracks, and he’s produced a number of film scores in the past decade or so—it’s interesting that his love for that artistic genre had leaked into his most successful band.

“I always thought Vertigo had an interesting music video feel to it because of the [rich graphics] in the film,” the video’s director Joseph Kahn told Billboard, via Faith No More Followers. “Also the of idea of FNM’s Mike Patton playing Jimmy Stewart seemed funny to me. Basically you’re taking this really subversive person and putting him in this clean, sterile, technicolor 50s world, yet pieces of the subversiveness of his persona keep coming through this world. It’s like blending an old film with this totally weird 90s type of guy.”

As for the song itself, it’s dominated by Roddy Bottum’s keyboards, Mike Bordin’s crisp drumming and Gould’s “dub-ish” bass. As for Patton’s vocals, they’re gritty at times and then his voice turns more pure on the chorus. Like many of his songs, I enjoyed the contrast.

As Gould told Keyboard magazine in 1997, “Mike can do a lot of wild things with his voice, for one. But, yeah, he sang through an old Telefunken tube mic and we compressed the living shit out of it.”

Previously from Album of the Year:

• “Ashes to Ashes” (Day 48)
• “Naked In Front of This Computer” (Day 18)

To follow along on the 365 days of Patton, click here for a list of each day’s post.

If you’d like a soothing, do-wop style song in the middle of the all funk and metal on Faith No More’s The Real Thing album, “Edge of the World” is the song for you. It sounds like a jazzy love song, but beware: It’s basically the opposite.

It’s a song written from a pedophile’s point of view.

So, the lyrics of “Come here, my love/I’ll tell you a secret/Come closer, now/
I want you to believe it” and “You can trust me/I’m no criminal/But I’d kill my mother/To be with you/Be with you/Be with you/Be with you” all of a sudden, become that much more creepy.

As bassist Billy Gould—who composed the tune with drummer Mike Bordin and keyboardist Roddy Bottum—explained, via Song Facts, “The way we write is visual. We start by describing a scene to one another. Say there’s a guy in a beat-up Cadillac with ripped upholstery. Empty Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes and malt liquor bottles in the back. And there’s a baby seat. In fact, that image became ‘Edge Of The World.’ Mutated a little on the way.”

Yeah, I’ll say.

Previously from The Real Thing:

• “Underwater Love” (Day 32)
• “Epic” (Day 2)

To follow along on the 365 days of Patton, click here for a list of each day’s post.

One of my favorite songs on one of my least favorite Mike Patton-led Faith No More albums is “Ashes To Ashes.” And my ears didn’t deceive me. According to FNM bassist Billy Gould, this song just clicked when it was being created.

“The bulk of that song was written the first week,” Gould told Keyboard magazine in 1997, via Faith No More Followers. “We arranged it here, and then we sent Patton a tape. He was in Italy, but he came up with the lyrics and the singing right away. It was one of those songs that just clicked—one of those songs that we do most naturally. That’s our sound.”

It features Patton crooning, it features Patton shouting and it features Patton’s intensity. Meanwhile, the guitar is heavy, the keyboard is haunting and the bass is brooding.

The Album of the Year record didn’t get great reviews, and ultimately, FNM broke up soon after it was released. But “Ashes To Ashes” is a good enough song that it would have starred on any of FNM’s albums (and the last 20 seconds or so of the tune is some of my favorite FNM music ever).

The band even made a music video for the single—which peaked at No. 23 in the U.S. and made the top 10 in Australia and Finland.

The song also made for a fantastic moment during FNM’s reunion. Playing the Troubadour in L.A. in 2015, Patton did a little crowd surfing on his way to the bar while singing “Ashes To Ashes.” Would have been pretty cool to be in the room that night. Make sure to check out 1:20 when he gives an epic scream from the top of the bar.

Previously from Album of the Year:

• “Naked In Front of This Computer” (Day 18)

To follow along on the 365 days of Patton, click here for a list of each day’s post.

I’ve discovered a few vocal coaches who react to other singers on YouTube, and I quite enjoy watching them dissect and analyze live performances from musicians of all genres. Earlier this week, the Rebecca Vocal Coach channel (with more than 400,000 subscribers) watched and commented on Faith No More’s “Midlife Crisis” performance from The Tonight Show in 1993.

Naturally, she took a close look at Mike Patton to watch who she called “a fascinating creature.”

Just a few seconds into the song, she said she was drawn in by his attitude and, I don’t know, his essence.

“Straight away, I was blown away by the rhythmic, the beat, that pulse that you need inside your body when you sing,” she said.

She also called him a “great manipulator” of the larynx, and she certainly appreciated his contrast in vocal styles in the song, going from a clean sound to plenty of distortion. She also called him a spider, because she doesn’t know where he’s going to go in the song. Then, she called him a wildebeest.

Rebecca seemed blown away by the performance though there are plenty of other Faith No more songs that show off Patton’s vocal range and skills. Apparently, another one of the YouTube vocal coaches I watch, Beth Roars, is also going to create a video on Patton. I’m interested to hear what she has to say as well.

I remember where I was in 1998 when Faith No More announced it had broken up. I was sitting in the computer lab at my freshman dorm in college, and I was reading version 1.0 of whatever music site I was perusing. I was devastated. Even though I had been obsessed with FNM for only three years, I felt like I had lost something special in my life.

My love of the band (and really, most everything Mike Patton related) only grew for the next dozen years. We thought FNM was done for good, and because I had seen the band live in 1995 and 1997, I could accept it and move on with my life. I had closure.

Then, the band started playing European festivals in 2009, and since those shows had gone over so well, the Patton community wondered if the band would make new music together.

For the next half-decade, most of the quotes from the band members weren’t filled with optimism. Then one day, we learned that FNM was indeed creating new tunes for the first time in 18 years, which set the stage for the U.S. tour we hadn’t gotten since the late 1990s. The album is Sol Invictus, and I think it’s glorious. No, it’s not the masterpiece Angel Dust is or the hard rocker that King For a Day, Fool For a Lifetime was. But it’s pretty damn special. Mostly because we never expected to get it and because, well, it’s good.

And “Separation Anxiety” is one of my favorites. It’s creepy. It’s hard. It’s filled with Patton’s talents, both crooning and screaming. And the video is interspersed with clips from the 1955 noir film Dementia.

The song, the video, the old band making new music. It was all so long in the making—and it was such a long way away from the moment in Russell Hall I read the news that my favorite band had exploded.

“I remember the day that we collectively decided—and I kind of came in a little nervous, because I thought it was only me—again, we weren’t communicating,” Patton told Rolling Stone in 2015 about the band’s breakup. “I just said, ‘I think I’m done.’ It took a lot to just say that and be honest and I didn’t know how to react. The amazing part was we all looked at each other and felt the same way. It totally disarmed me and that also reinforced my feeling that it was a natural progression and it was over.”

But only for nearly two decades.

Said Patton: “Look at us now, how wrong I was.”

To follow along on the 365 days of Patton, click here for a list of each day’s post.

It was my first Faith No More concert. I was standing in the middle of the floor at my favorite ever venue, the Masquerade in Atlanta. The lights went dark to signify the start of the show, the crowd roared, and Mike Bordin hit the cymbals four times. And then pandemonium ensued.

I got hit from the left. I got hit from the right. I got bounced around (hard!) a few times more in the newly formed mosh pit, and that’s when I decided I should listen to Faith No More a little bit further away from the stage. I remember being completely floored by the music and the energy and by Mike Patton’s screams. I also remember somebody lost a shoe in that mosh pit.

That’s probably when I fell in love with Faith No More’s (and Patton’s) music.

While people still remembered Faith No More for its biggest hit, “Epic,” a half-decade earlier, its subsequent albums, Angel Dust and King For a Day, Fool For a Lifetime, are my two favorites. “Digging the Grave” is the ninth song on the latter record, and it’s just killer.

It’s the perfect way to open a hard rock show.

See what I mean?

When I saw FNM on its King For a Day tour, it was playing in front of about 500 people in a mid-sized club. In the U.S., the band never could sustain its popularity after “Epic.” In much of the rest of the world, though, it was a different story, where King For a Day blasted into the top-five of the record charts in the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and Finland. Its peak in America was No. 31.

“By that time, we knew that our unpopularity in America and our popularity everywhere else was letting us know that we must be doing the right thing because American music was so fucking bad at that time,” bassist Billy Gould told Metal Hammer. “At that time we all went off and did solo stuff for a couple of years because we were so tired of all the bullshit that people bought to their experience of Faith No More. But that wasn’t fatigue with the music, just with being so fucking misunderstood. Which sounds primadonnaish but is true: Right now when people tell me they love that record I think, ‘Where the fuck were you when it came out then?’”

I was there, Billy! In the mosh pit, getting bashed around, watching somebody look for a lost shoe that was probably never found, falling in love.

Previously from King For a Day:

• “Take This Bottle” (Day 13)
• “Ricochet” (Day 9)

To follow along on the 365 days of Patton, click here for a list of each day’s post.

We don’t normally write about Faith No More songs from the band’s first two albums, We Care a Lot and Introduce Yourself, because Mike Patton didn’t perform on those records. Instead, it was a singer by the name of Chuck Mosley who acted as the frontman of the band before he was eventually kicked out, which then made room for Patton.

But I’m including this song from the band’s second album, because Patton sang it plenty on stage with Faith No More and because his style on this song clashed heavily with what Mosley produced in the studio.

First, here’s Mosley in 1987.

And here’s Patton live in 1995.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXoQQORS0h8

I’m not a huge fan of Mosley’s style, which is why I almost never listen to the first few FNM albums. But other than the roll call of the band members’ first names early in the song, I don’t mind his version. But still, I much prefer Patton’s chaotic, screamy take on it.

Anyway, here’s how the band fired Mosley. Not unlike guitarist Jim Martin a few years later, FNM just kinda got tired of him (and because they were all going in different musical directions).

As Louder Sound tells it, the band was on its European tour after Introduce Yourself was released, and one of Mosley’s roadies got into a physical altercation with guitarist Jim Martin, a brouhaha which apparently broke Martin’s hand (not a great injury for a guitar player). The band fired the roadie over Mosley’s objections.

Later in the tour, bassist Billy Gould apparently punched Mosley (not unlike Patton one day throwing bottles at Martin while on stage) because he was so sick of him. Then, once the band returned home, everything went to hell.

“There was a certain point when I went to rehearsal, and Chuck wanted to do all acoustic guitar songs. It was just so far off the mark—I think I actually attacked him again,” Gould said.

Afterward, Gould said he quit the band. Then, he talked to drummer Mike Bordin, who said, “Well, I still want to play with you.” Then, a similar conversation was had with keyboardist Roddy Bottum. He also decided he’d rather play with Gould and Bordin than Mosley. Pretty soon, that was that, and Mosley was gone.

Patton’s arrival would change everything.

I’m not sure anything I’ve heard from Mike Patton that could be considered a country and western song. Except, of course, for “RV,” the fourth song off Faith No More’s masterpiece Angel Dust.

For the first time since joining the band a few years earlier, Patton had a big say in the music and the lyrics for Angel Dust (pretty much everything was pre-manufactured for Patton on 1989’s The Real Thing). We know how eclectic Patton can be. So, we can assume “RV” is something that could have sprang from his mind. Or Tom Waits’ mind, as a number of reviews of Angel Dust said at the time (or, as Rolling Stone wrote, “’RV’ is a bizarre Tin Pan Alley/country hybrid,” and as many mention, it might take inspiration from the scenes in “Super Mario Bros” when Mario was swimming underwater).

About a year ago, there was a thread on the Faith No More subreddit about whether “RV” was a stupid comedy song, and at first glance, it appears it could be.

With lyrics like …

“Yeah, I sweat a lot

Pants fall down every time I bend over

My feet itch

Yeah—I married a scarecrow”

… you could see how that can be taken as some sort of crudely cruel comedic song about some sad sack of a man who has no real future in life.

But it’s probably not. If you read between the lines, there’s some dark content contained in the song, particularly an element of child abuse and self-hatred and perhaps suicide. This isn’t a funny song at all. Especially the last line which is just a killer kicker.

I love this song, but damn if it doesn’t make me feel slightly uncomfortable.

Previously from Angel Dust:

• “Everything’s Ruined” (Day 15)