Mike Patton >> California screaming

I can't believe it's still California Month, tremor #43:

Mike Patton - "Pajama Party Horror"

(Tzadik Records,1995)

In the '80s, Mike Patton was the singer for a then-terrible band called Mr. Bungle.  He was tapped to replace Chuck Mosley as Faith No More's new singer in 1989, leading them through their golden era.  He has always been a seriously ADHD-addled individual (personal observation / opinion), and this solo album, Adult Themes For Voice, is an unabashed manifestation of that.

As an obsessive and newly internet-savvy Faith No More fan, I bought this album right after it came out in spring of '96.  (I remember the lady at Borders in Richmond having trouble finding it and asking me "Michael Penn?"  "No, Mike Patton."  This was in late April.  I ended up buying it in New Orleans a week or two later because that Borders didn't have it in yet.)  I knew what I was getting myself into, having read about the album on the FNM / Mr. Bungle website called Caca Volante, but it was still quite surprising to see just how far he pushed the envelope.  As the liner notes say, "All themes composed by Patton for voice/microphone.  Recorded and mixed in fine hotel rooms around the world using a TASCAM 4-Track Portastudio."  32 specific hotel rooms are listed in the CD booklet, which is printed in cool silver ink, a Tzadik specialty.  The album was produced by Patton and was executive produced by his apparent idol (and Tzadik owner / and Mr. Bungle producer), John Zorn.  The four-part "Guinea Pig" suite is particularly unnerving.  I chose to post "Pajama Party Horror" because it's a good sampler of all the extremes on the album, packed into one minute, and has a great title.  Most of the songs have great titles, and I'm actually shocked that there haven't been noise bands named after almost every song on the album yet.

I don't want to go off on a rant here, but I hate it so much when the clocks "fall back" this time of year.  The sun went down at 8:30 just a few months ago, and now it goes down at around 5:45.  If anything, the "savings time" should be reversed.  This way, sunset would be around 7:30 (not 8:30) in the middle of summer, and 6:30 (not 5:30) in the dead of winter.  This would help keep people's biological clocks, and henceforth their sleep patterns, more consistent throughout the year, and would help fight Seasonal Affective Disorder.

I do want to go off on an extended rant about how Tumblr is destroying the world, but I'll save that for another time.  Instead I'll just post some of my favorite Garfield Minus Garfield strips, since I've amassed a folder full of dozens of them.  The guy who came up with this idea said he did it after realizing that Garfield was not a comic strip about a cat, but rather one about the sad life and existential turmoil of his owner, Jon.  They range from silly to heartbreaking to baffling, and the first one is very apropos to this Patton song / album, and the last one is very fitting for this site:

There have been earthquakes in unusual places recently.  Check out: Did fracking cause the Oklahoma earthquake?

Planets with similar climates - You tell me...


Currently listening to in my car: New Fast Automatic Daffodils - Body Exit Mind, Antipop Consortium - Arrhythmia, Memoryhouse - The Hours EP (2011 version), Cliff Martinez - sex, lies, and videotape (soundtrack), V/A - Ambient 4: Isolationism, Above The Law - Livin' Like Hustlers, a July 2006 mix CD.

Faith No More >> I'll make my pleasure greater, push the accelerator

California Month continued, tremor #22:

Faith No More - "Why Do You Bother?"

(Mordam Records, 1985 / Festival Records [Australia], 1995)

Horace Greeley allegedly said "Go West, young man."  Well, I couldn't just end California Month with a treasure trove of essential songs getting denied.  I need to show them all off in order to complete my alternate history of the state's music scene, one which omits all the '60s dad-rock, hardcore punk, Pavement, gangsta rap, O.C. ska, etc.  If you can actually sit through Pet Sounds or Sweetheart Of The Rodeo without wanting to fall asleep or harm a nun, then you probably like having geriatric music critics and music guidebooks telling you what music to listen to, hence you probably shouldn't be here, plus I hear Wilco just released a new album which probably has cutesy song titles and it's probably streaming somewhere.

Faith No More were a huge part of the adolescence of millions of Americans in my general age range.  I find that their music holds up even better today than it did back then, and they're one of the few "big" bands that every indie rock dude can agree on loving, or can at least reminisce about at great length.  I was totally obsessed with them from 1993-96, and they'll always be in my all-time top 10, or even top 5, if their last album, which I bought the day it came out, hadn't sucked so bad.  Some friends and I had listened to Angel Dust constantly in the car in summer '92 when it came out.  I bought it on cassette in early '93 using only quarters bundled together with rubber bands, after riding to a record store at night on my bike.  I got their debut album, We Care A Lot, on cassette at around the same time.  I bought the album on CD in '96 as an expensive import CD from Australia, on Festival Records.  (Amazingly, it still hasn't come out on CD in America.)  FNM's singer on this album was the inimitable Chuck Mosley, one of the most entertaining frontmen in music history, who was later fired from the band for allegedly falling asleep while singing during a gig.  His singing style could best be described as a train wreck, and on this song it was even less aurally-pleasing than usual, since he's trying to sound all menacing but is really a goofy skater dude dressed in day-glo at heart.  It's one of FNM's most ambitious songs, and one of their darkest.  Almost every lyrical couplet is quotable and/or tattoo-worthy.  The ambient gothy intro draws the listener in, while the piano solo at the end points the way towards the band's big hit "Epic," which concluded with a similarly beautiful one.  Definitely not a song for an FNM rookie, because it's atypical of their overall sound, but their genre-hopping is what made them great.

Back of '85 European LP; L-R: Mike "Puffy" Bordin, Roddy Bottum, Chuck Mosley, Jim Martin, Billy Gould

FNM's next album, Introduce Yourself, included a rerecorded, more metallic version of "We Care A Lot," with slightly different (and even funnier) lyrics.  Ask yourself: Which came first, the Anthony Kiedis or the Chuck Mosley?

I read that the TV show Dirty Jobs uses this as its theme song.  Speaking of funny, Chuck was in a band called Haircuts That Kill, another one called Cement (possibly a spoof of Pavement?), and recently put out an album titled Will Rap Over Hard Rock For Food, which is of course a nod to the fact that some folks credit FNM with inventing rap-rock.  He was replaced by Mike Patton and FNM went on to briefly conquer the charts.  I guess I should mention here that the title track from that album has been my all-time favorite song since I heard it 18 years ago.  I only saw FNM on their final tour, headlining a big outdoor festival in '97, but it was one of the best performances I've ever seen.  Sorry for giving all these years, but I'm really only giving a tiny fraction of all the FNM / Bungle-related stuff I could go on about.  For example, there's Mike Patton's paean to Fiona Apple which I saw inscribed in a House Of Blues New Orleans bathroom stall.  (She was one of the acts at that festival that FNM headlined, and Patton evidently went to see her perform at the HOB later that same night or the next night.)

Fun Facts:
1. Jim Martin, estranged from the band since Angel Dust, played a New Age spiritual guru in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey and is now a grower of gihugic pumpkins.
2. Courtney Love was briefly FNM's lead singer, pre-We Care A Lot.
3. The main reason I started using the internet, in '95-'96, was to visit cacavolante.org, the extraordinarily-detailed FNM / Mr. Bungle fansite, about once every 5 seconds.  I even bought an album by the band Milk Cult in '96 just because I had read that Mike Patton "sang" on one of its songs.  Cacavolante.org later changed to cv.org, and has recently been reborn under its original URL, but in much smaller form.
4. Members of FNM are rumored to have been in Brujeria.

Planets with similar climates: Bailter Space - "Pass It Up" (1997), The Pop Group - "Sense of Purpose" (~1980), The Comsat Angels - "Don't Look Now" (1982).