Written by “The best description of Mr. Bungle I’ve ever heard is from Warren Entner,” says Mike Patton. “He says, ‘I couldn’t really relate to it because it was like you were having an inside joke among yourselves.'”
Entner managed Faith No More throughout their commercial peak. By the summer of 1991, their third album The Real Thing had been awarded platinum status in North America. This was largely thanks to the single Epic, whose Ralph Ziman-directed video was a near permanent fixture on MTV. And, in a canny piece of self-promotion, Patton wore a Mr. Bungle T-shirt during the song’s climax. Thanks to the band’s flash of mainstream success, Warner Brothers were quick to pick up their vocalist’s high school band.
But Entner may have had a point. Those people who bought The Real Thing on the strength of Epic may have been caught off guard when it came to Mr. Bungle’s 10-track debut album.
But first, a little back story. Mr. Bungle formed in 1985 in the isolated port city of Eureka, California, while they were still at Eureka High School.
“We were in rival death metal bands,” guitarist Trey Spruance told writer Kim Edwards. “Jed [Watts, drummer] and I were rivals with Mike and Trevor [Dunn, bassist]. Trevor and Mike got kicked out of their death metal band because they wanted to shave their heads and call it Turd. So we just sort of merged into this one band and we called it Mr. Bungle. We came really close to calling the band Summer Breeze.”
Taking their name from a 1960s educational film, Beginning Responsibility: Lunchroom Manners – later incorporated into a HBO Pee-Wee Herman special – the band recorded a demo titled The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny.
The Humboldt County band began to experiment with different genres and moved away from their death metal beginnings and incorporated elements of funk, ska, jazz and just about anything else which caught their attention.
“After about a year we got tired of playing speed metal and wanted to do something a little more creative. So we just stopped and started writing our own style of music, which was influenced by bands like Camper Van Beethoven, Oingo Boingo, Bad Manners and kind of funky, ska-oriented stuff. Then we added a two-piece horn section and a new drummer, so now we don’t really have any kind of limit on the music we play.”
By 1988, Patton had joined Faith No More as a replacement for their vocalist Chuck Moseley, yet continued to record demos with Mr. Bungle when time would allow. Then following the success of The Real Thing, the band relocated to San Francisco and joined Warner Brothers.
“We felt… why stifle his passion for that band, because if you try to stifle things, they just explode,” Entner told Los Angeles Times. “It is an unusual situation – and Mike is biting off a lot by doing two separate projects at the same time. But he’s totally committed to Faith No More.
“I think everyone wanted Mike to realize that this is an unusual juncture in a band’s career – just when Faith No More is establishing its overall identity–for the lead singer to commit himself to another group,” he continued. “But if Mr. Bungle can establish its identity while Mike stays committed to Faith No More, we’re hopeful it will all work out.”
In an early interview with Sounds, Patton appeared rankled when asked whether he could continue fronting both bands in tandem.
“Why the fuck not?” he replied. “It’s all the traditions people have in their heads. You can’t do this, you can’t do that. These things can be arranged. It hasn’t reached that stage yet, and I’m not the type to worry about it before it happens. I’m not going to say I’m not serious about Mr. Bungle, because I am. If I wasn’t serious about it I wouldn’t be doing this interview, or insist on still playing with them – because that in itself gets people riled up. It’s a totally separate thing, it’s nothing to do with Faith No More. It’s not my goddamn art project.”
Faith No More took some time off following the Real Thing tour, which allowed Patton to focus on Mr. Bungle until it was time to write what would be their 1992 album Angel Dust.
Between 1990 and 1991, Mr. Bungle recruited avant-garde saxophonist John Zorn to produce the sessions recorded at Different Fur Studios in San Francisco’s Mission District.
“I think it was Danny and Trey who approached Zorn when he was in SF and handed him a cassette tape of some songs and improv sessions we had made in Eureka,” remembers Dunn. “He tried to convince us that he wasn’t ‘commercial’ and we might find a more apt producer somewhere else, but we were persistent as we felt that – due to his understanding of many genres – that he would understand us.
“In essence, he helped us mix the album. Scheduling meant he couldn’t make the actual recording sessions. Later, he had us re-do some things and gave us a general guidance. Essentially he put the brakes on a bunch of hyper and overly-excited small town kids who tried, almost successfully to fill up every nano-second of space will some kind of sound. He kept us true to our spirit, however, always deferring to our desires, which was encouraging.”
The frenzied self-titled debut is a melting pot of myriad styles and allowed Patton to explore the furthest reaches of the human condition across the 10 songs.
There’s a song on there called Love Is a Fist that’s fucking crushing – that set the tone for us and what we went on to do creatively.
Munky, Korn
Squeeze Me Macaroni, The Girls of Porn and Dead Goon have strong sexual and often comedic themes. Quote Unquote – previously named Travolta before some nervous lawyers ordered the change of title – imagines what it might like to be robbed of their limbs and their senses – bar smell – and thrown onto a trampoline. Sprinkled throughout the 75-minute album were samples from adverts, porn and video games. There was a lot going on, to be fair.
Some critics didn’t know what to make of this hellish ska carnival – skarnival, if you will – soundtrack, which was advertised by Warner Brothers as Mike Patton’s “seriously weird new project”. Entertainment Weekly seemed positively irritated by the whole recording, noting, ‘adjectives like puerile and unlistenable take on entirely new dimensions when applied to Mr. Bungle.”
Kerrang!’s Don Kaye gave it a glowing review, saying ‘the entire album crackles with weird electricity and the air of a rock ‘n’ roll circus gone insane’. And its influence can still be keenly felt 35 years later, with members of Korn and Avenged Sevenfold praising its sheer ambition and scope.
“Their self-titled debut had the biggest impact on me,” says Korn guitarist James ‘Munky’ Shaffer. “There’s a song on there called Love Is a Fist that’s fucking crushing. That set the tone for us and what we went on to do creatively. They were completely outside the box and just didn’t care – they satisfied only themselves.”
