Faith No More Biography
Written by Steffan Chirazi
San Francisco, August 1998
Taken from the "Who Cares A Lot?" Faith No More Greatest Hits CD booklet
The REAL Magnificent BASTARDS
They were unique. Without peerage. Exceptionally creative. And weird.
For all their arguments, Faith No More spent 16 years between 1982 and 1998 making uniquely great music. It had to be that good: anything less and Faith No More would've imploded years ago.
From the very first moment I was dragged to see them play, in the Summer of 1986 at a San Francisco rock club called The Stone, it was obvious that Faith No More were not normal. Their singer was some tweeker-flake, the guitarist had the stare of a serial killer and the drummer was a sinewy little thing with behemoth dreadlocks. Their bassist occasionally took to wearing dresses and the keyboardist should've been in an airport hawking vegetarian meals and color novels for the Krishnas.
The impression was proven a solid fact when I next saw them, a few weeks later in a wino-saturated, urinous club called The Sound Of Music, again in San Francisco. They played a breathtaking set; their first proper singer (Chuck Mosely) hurled himself everywhere, and at the end he refused to sing "War Pigs", instead lying down on stage while the others took up the slack in front of 38 screaming drunks and Metallica's James Hetfield.
Typical stuff. You see, Faith No More were often an obstreperous pain in the arse. Even when things looked like being peachy-creamy, it always seemed that one wheel had to go wonky if only to maintain their status quo. It's a miracle they made it beyond 1988, having spent the best part of three years prior shoving themselves into Ryder trucks (sleeping bags and pillows included) for national tours, with tempers often fragile in such gerbil-like close quarters.
Most bands last out stuff like this by being close friends. Not here. The truth is that much of Faith No More's longevity and creative magic revolved around thick, fetid, repeatedly denied tensions. Some were obvious: the escalating piss fights with Mosely in the mid to late '80s, the disgust and dismay at Mike Patton's stubborn refusal to place Mr. Bungle a spiritual second to his FNM duties, the sheer anger between Jim Martin and the other four until the breaking point in 1994. But most days there was something bugging someone somewhere. I know they never agreed that tension was a vital ingredient of their resultant sound, and probably still wouldn't, but during the band's richest spells of creativity and commercial popularity, they were always in some form of self-induced turmoil. Secretly, they held high regard for each other's talents, but sadly said it enough.
When they first visited Britain in 1987, they did interviews where they'd rip the shit out of each other to the utter astonishment of journalists, making anything the Gallagher brothers from Oasis have engaged in seem like quaint foreplay. It was tough to tell if they were joking or using interviews as the medium through which to talk to each other. Martin once told me that Mosely was like an irritating pimple being rubbed by cheap ladies underwear...Mosely was five feet away. Patton used to loudly hawk demo tapes of his then unsigned band Mr. Bungle within generous earshot of others. And when the "Epic" single hit the American top ten in 1990, rather than celebrate, they complained loudly about what a big bunch of bullshit it all was because they weren't seeing any dough, only airports.
I think success, and the various trappings that came with it, were a burden to most of the band. They never seemed able to let themselves enjoy some of the peripheral nonsense that comes with popularity, as if afraid someone would mistake them as another rich rocker cliché. Indeed, their reaction to megastardom was often close to suicidal. Take their stadium tour with Guns N' Roses in 1991: Who else, in their right mind, would choose international media to sit and blast every element of their host's behavior? But still, you had to perversely admire their foolhardy honesty, because Faith No More were happy to nudge rock stereotypes with a pointed, shitty stick just because they could.
Through it all, their fan-base, particularly in Europe, remained huge. This was because they continued to make great, genre-busting music and dodged every category that shiny-arsed business folks tried to slip round their necks. If you've ever heard them referred to as "funk metal," those were lazy words from jaded hacks. Indeed, Faith No More's range and refusal to be packaged was their greatest gift, allowing them to be a pop, metal and alternative group simultaneously who would support Metallica one year, Billy Idol the next and Lenny Kravitz after that. Today the words "crossover sound" are tossed at anyone with a sampler next to a guitar: Faith No More were the real deal without even trying. That's because Faith No More only ever did what they wanted, despite the polar opposite personalities within the creative process. Gould was a quiet pressure cooker who would blow his stack every few months in spectacular fashion; Bottum was the floating carefree sort; Bordin would go wherever the comfort and ease of passage seemed greatest; Patton seemed to enjoy the thrill of pissing everybody off in any way necessary; and Martin would often belligerently refuse to entertain his bandmates, just because. Compromise was the equivalent of profanity in church, and its achievement usually came down to producer Matt Wallace's (he worked on all albums until King For A Day...Fool For A Lifetime in 1995) gentle cajoling or sheer accident.
They all had such unique idiosyncrasies that the band's managers Warren Entner and John Vassilou deserve degrees in psychology. Everyone would marvel at Bordin's curious penny-pinching habits, which once went to the absurd length of trying to exchange some free shoes for another pair at some sportshop in the next city during the band's Billy Idol tour in 1990. Patton would talk shit about everything and everyone for awhile, seemingly delighted to plant such seeds of insecurity. Bottum's lifestyle and interests saw him drift away from everyone in the group, and Martin was an outright antagonizer, jabbing a boney finger into what he saw as an open wound that was being left untended. Billy Gould, a mischievous master of experimentation, unwittingly found himself in a "den mother" role he carried to the band's last day.
I've always believed that deep down the band knew that, musically speaking, it was better this way, like a a dysfunctional family that believes its total strengths can outweigh its internal problems. Bordin had tremendous tribal beats, Gould and Bottum a punky Killing Joke attitude, Martin the Zeppelin/Floyd/Iommi fingers and Patton the freedom to create whatever his young spinning head wanted.
But Faith No More's biggest problems was never really their characters more than their inability to communicate with each other. Minuscule matters grew into resentments which rapidly grew into major aggravation. Instead of sitting down and having frank, open-band meetings, they would often keep matters to themselves, leaving problems to manifest in appallingly petty, yet damaging, ways.
After the consistent failure of that "c" word resulted in Martin's departure during 1994, it did appear as if Faith No More would enter a period of calmness. All seemed to be fine until King For A Day...Fool For A Lifetime was written largely without keyboards, and it became clear that there were problems with Roddy, not of a particularly confrontational nature but just as damaging. And then came problems with new guitarists Trey Spruance and Dean Menta after a period of touring. Even when Faith No More were making their last release, Album Of The Year, it was pretty much without half of the band, proving that their problems were always too copious and scattered to ever be successfully sourced and eradicated.
Like any group who has been around for 17 years, they dipped into the debauched rocker stuff such as drugs, booze, weird sex trips with peering games and obscure ritualistic events, albeit with the curious air of innocence more than the sleazy veneer of glee. But with Faith No More, there was so much other interesting stuff going on that such clichés never piqued the interest like with most other bands. When it was revealed that Roddy was gay, or that he had just dealt with a heroin problem, it was comparatively insignificant when put against Faith No More's music, loud-mouths and bizarre actions. Indeed, there were probably more column inches given to Mike Patton's shit-eating and piss-drinking of the Angel Dust era than Bottum's personal revelations.
When I heard the magnificent bastards had called it a day, I was shocked. They'd finally looked set to enjoy some creative, and spiritual, consolidation. Their latest album was a great one. Their tours were selling out again. However, it was in retrospect the perfect time for them to suddenly quit. Patton once again had mentioned he was thinking of quitting shortly; Roddy was insistent that he would tour with his own project, and Mike Bordin got offered another job for the second time. It was like a big game of chicken. In the end it wasn't any one thing that caused the break-up, just the usual accumulation of cheap factors and tiny problems which happened one time too often.
Seventeen years of uniquely creative work and struggle and success and stress over. Just like that. In truth it's probably better that way than some "we're going to do a farewell tour" bollocks. That wouldn't be their style because this really is Faith No More.
---Steffan Chirazi, San Francisco, August 1998
Home
