Episode 20: Bill Gould (Faith No More)
The Who Cares Anyway Podcast ·
00:00:00
00:00:00
Transcript
SPEAKER_01
00:00:00
I personally think the best part of Faith No More is what we picked up from San Francisco, from the Papa Pies and from that era.
SPEAKER_00
00:00:16
Hello and welcome to episode 20 of the Who Cares Anyway podcast. My guest is Bill Gould, founding member and bassist of Faith No More. I first met Bill back in 2003 when I was working on an article about the Pop -O -Pies for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and a mutual friend and former co -worker of mine put us in touch and it turned out that I lived basically right around the corner from Bill and so I had the opportunity to interview him for that article on the Pop -O -Pies and that article in turn really helped get the ball rolling on what would eventually become this book. And then fast -forwarding into 2005, when I first began the actual interviews for the book, Bill was one of the first people who I sat down with. I brought a copy of Wiring Department, the zine, and we sort of flipped through it and made some early attempts to get at what this thing was that I was after. And now Fast forwarding again, this time to last year, I got an email from Bill in July that was a big morale boost at a time when I guess I was in need of such a thing. At one point he said, and I'm going to quote this one little bit, he said, this is a book about American Zen, attachment, non -attachment, intention, repetition, enlightenment, existence, and nothingness. And I thought well, that's very nicely put so I thank him for that and I wanted to hear him Maybe elaborate on that a little bit and so in this I'm asking my last I promise my last favor of Bill who has been very supportive over the years
SPEAKER_00
00:02:01
But having him on to not only talk a little bit more about American Zen and whatnot Which we get to at the very end But also some other things that came to mind that I hadn't asked him about before and that includes you know his early days in the Bay Area when he moved up to go to college over at UC Berkeley and Then also some questions about influences Particularly killing joke and this interview was done just a couple of weeks after Geordie Walker Passed away and then also flipper and some other odds and ends along the way So again a big thank you to Bill Gould for all of his support over the years And I hope you enjoy this interview with him, the one and only Bill Gould.
SPEAKER_01
00:03:01
I mean, I started playing when I was about 13, 14, and I played with these guys in LA, Believe it or not, I had somebody I knew from my Boy Scout troop. But oddly enough, they ended up hooked up, you know, he ended up, you know, attracting a really eclectic group of guys who, one was Chuck, our singer in Faith No More. And another guy was Mark, who's known as Stu. He has a band called The Negro Problem.
SPEAKER_01
00:03:29
And you know, I'm talking about 15, 16 years old, and we started writing songs together. And I got into playing, we played a lot of clubs and did a lot of stuff in L .A. But L .A. was a really weird place, I mean, you know, this is probably late 70s and, you know, the punk scene was kind of happening in L .A. It was right when this Orange County scene was just kind of arriving and it became very, like, jock -like, you know, like, L .A. is a weird place. I mean, to be a musician, it was kind of like, I was kind of a little kid. I mean, I looked like a little kid. When I was 18, I probably looked like I was about 14.
SPEAKER_01
00:04:07
I wasn't a big fighter, you know, because I wasn't very big. I wasn't a really loud, obnoxious person. So L .A. was the kind of place where... It's funny, even like in the punk scene, in this alternative and underground scene, it was still L .A. Like, it was all about who you knew, how you could make a name for yourself. Like, even people in the punk scene, it all about, like, there's a certain amount of self -promotion that everybody did that I kind of really wasn't very good at and wasn't very comfortable with and and I got accepted to Berkeley and I was really excited about coming up to San Francisco because it was kind of like You know just getting out of LA LA had a lot going on but it culturally speaking it wasn't really, you know, it wasn't really doing it for me and
SPEAKER_01
00:04:55
And so I came up here with my bass, and I brought my amp up, and I stayed in the dorms in Berkeley. And the first thing I did when I basically got to Berkeley was I went down the street. There was a record store called Universal Records, and they had a bulletin board. And I just started looking for people, you know, that were looking for a bass player in bands. I just wanted to be in a band, like, right away. And probably the first two weeks of theirs,
SPEAKER_01
00:05:21
when I met Mike Borden and this guy Mike Morris, in Wade Worthington. They had a place in a garage in Castor Valley and I just started playing with them. So I kind of jumped right into a band. And in fact, I kind of went up north to be in a band more than to really go to school. And I mean, so I got to San Francisco and Roddy was, I knew him from grammar school. He was going to San Francisco State. So I would take the BART across from Berkeley to State. His crowd was a lot more fun than my crowd. In Berkeley, there was a lot of engineering students, a lot of chemical engineering, a lot of computer science. This was also in the Reagan era, a lot of frat boys. Not my people, really.
SPEAKER_01
00:06:08
And Berkeley was just this hippie thing that just wasn't my thing either. State was a lot of really eclectic kids. They had a film core run by Augusta Coppola and just a lot of fun people, all the cool bands and music stuff that was happening in San Francisco where people were going to state. So I was just going over to the city a lot and just hanging out with Roddy and his friends and going to parties and staying out in the city. And it got to a point where I moved to San Francisco and was just commuting to Berkeley, which didn't happen that often. And this was like around 1981 and I mean, there was just so much going in San Francisco at that time. I mean, it's funny because when we did your book showing and some guys that were, you
SPEAKER_01
00:06:55
know, going a couple years before I got there, you know, we're talking about how it was pretty much dead by then. But for me, from where I was coming from, it wasn't dead at all. I mean, you know, again, like San Francisco, there wasn't really an economy, so to speak. like, there was no tech boom. There there was, it was just, I think, banking. And it was a lot of, like, old money in Pacific Heights. But the rest of the city was, I mean, it was a little closer, probably to Detroit than what you'd recognize now as San Francisco. And I mean, I lived in the Mission District. And it was kind of like, with, say, with police, for example, like, you know, if you don't kill anybody, be pretty hard to get arrested. I mean, they didn't really care what anybody did.
SPEAKER_01
00:07:40
I I would see all kinds of heinous things happen. Like I look out my window, like when I lived in this place on 16th street and I would saw once I heard some screaming, I looked out my window and there's a car, big Cadillac driving the street with a lady on top of the hood screaming and the car is just driving on the street. And I was just like, there's another night, you know? Right.
SPEAKER_00
00:08:00
Yeah,
SPEAKER_00
00:08:01
yeah. So yeah, I think that idea of, you know, things being over, uh, that's always a matter of somebody's perspective and kind of...
SPEAKER_00
00:08:09
Yes.
SPEAKER_01
00:08:09
And I'm sure it was for them. And I, I would love to have lived in the city that they lived in, uh, honestly, but you know, at the same time there were these clubs, like I can't remember the names of them, but, um, you know, they, they would just basically be a storefront that they would just sell alcohol and just put on parties and they would go on all night long until like six in the morning and there was no license or anything like that. And there was really not any real fear of getting shut down or anything. Also I mean, I didn't have a problem when I was 18, and like I said, I looked really young for my age. I had no problem getting drinks in bars or buying drinks in liquor stores like at all.
SPEAKER_01
00:08:47
No problem.
SPEAKER_00
00:08:54
This period where, you know, early 80s, before you all are really even called Faith No More, you're developing this sound. And I'm curious, was there, I don't know, if you think back on it, was there any sort of light bulb moment? Or was it a really more a matter of trial and error, research and development?
SPEAKER_01
00:09:14
You know, it's really strange. I mean, everybody's idiosyncratic on how they do things, right? I mean, I have a kind of, I have my strengths and weaknesses, you know, as Ike St. Borden does on drums, for example. But really, I think what, there was a spark for us. And I think it was a certain point of time where we hit a real, we were, you know, what, 19. We weren't too happy with our situation with Faith No Man, there was just some chemistry level that really wasn't clicking. And I was probably the youngest of the crowd, so I kind of maybe got it worse. But the upshot of that was, we didn't know what we wanted to do. We just didn't, we weren't happy with where we were. And then there was a period where I had, I was going out with someone and we split up and Borden split up with his girlfriend.
SPEAKER_01
00:10:07
And that doesn't seem like such a big deal, but when you're 18, it's a bigger deal. We just found ourselves with like no guide, like nowhere to go and kind of like, we can do anything we want. And basically, I think we started just playing like as a kind of sort of therapy, just like getting a bunch of weed and just like locking ourselves in a room and just making noise just because it felt good to do. That was the thing I think that it was how we kind of stumbled upon what we ended up building on what we did later. It was that we just kind of, like, quieted our minds a little bit and stopped thinking too much and just started playing. And I think that the path kind of found itself. I mean, when we did that, we knew at the time that something was waking up. And I don't know if we've ever been back in that headspace since then. So I think a lot of what we do now, we owe to that period of time, really, when there's just a certain kind of thing that happened that we kind of discovered.
SPEAKER_00
00:11:10
Yeah, and in that same time, the killing joke thing, you know, I pulled up this quote going way back to, you know, wiring department, and I'm just going to quote it here. I think this was 84, it's sort of been 84, 85. But he said, the thing I like most about them was, was not that they were a group to imitate, but more that they opened up a whole new genre of music, a whole new possibility for playing. And, uh, you know, were they or other stuff that y 'all were hearing, uh, part of that process too, or as far as like figuring out what y 'all were doing?
SPEAKER_01
00:11:43
Yeah. Okay.
SPEAKER_01
00:11:44
So let me give you our thought process and how that kind of came about. I mean, so I, you know, I grew up, you know, and I was kind of got into punk rock and, and, and the punk thing. And then like, you know, late seventies with this post -punk thing with this Joy Division stuff and Susie and the Banshees. And by the time I moved to San Francisco, I was well into that. And you know, having come from L .A. and a certain kind of aggression with punk, there was something about post -punk music that had a lack of aggression where there was a lot of really interesting musical things happening, and they were breaking a lot of boundaries. But I wasn't getting that impact that an 18, 19 -year -old, you know, skateboard kid wanted. And Joke and Borden at the same time, he was into punk stuff, But he also grew up kind of with Black Sabbath as a kid, where he was kind of into heavy music already. Hearing Killing Joke was kind of the first time I got some of this, like, forward -thinking -ness musically of, like, post -punk, right? Where it was taking something forward, but it still had this really physicality to it. And that really made a mark for me, because it's like, yeah, you can do both.
SPEAKER_01
00:12:58
It doesn't have to be one or the other. You don't have to sound like you too. You can go past a 1 -4 -5 chord progression, but still have some animal power to it. So that was really what got for me. It was just this kind of like bringing Menace back into that world. And then Metallica, we heard about probably two years later, 1983 -84. And, you know, they get a lot of credit for kind of like bridging punk rock and metal together. I mean, I remember because Cliff grew up with with Borden and he brought Cliff's record over. He's like, look at my friend Cliff's record, you know, and I like the music, but I couldn't get over the fact that it had long hair and like Cliff had bell -bottoms and stuff. I was like, what the hell is this? It took me a while to admit that I kind of liked it. It took me about a week. But get credited a lot for bringing this kind of like both worlds together. But I actually think Killing Joke kind of did. It did for us. It kind of like, we always had a certain tension in everything we did
SPEAKER_01
00:14:08
after that, no matter where we went with our music. And think that was the way they influenced us, really.
SPEAKER_00
00:14:14
Yeah, yeah. It's funny how they don't really fit in anywhere. They are kind of their own genre. It's like, they are post -punk, they're pre -industrial, they're kind of, they influenced a lot of metal, but they're really, you try to put them in any of those categories, goth even, they're not really, not really any of those things. And plus they didn't, you know, they weren't using, yeah, they weren't generally using any sort of conventional chord progressions.
SPEAKER_01
00:14:37
Not at all. And, you know, as people, they were unconventional. I mean, you know, they were going like they were recording in, you pyramids in Egypt, they were living in Iceland, like, they were doing the romantic stuff. Like, they weren't just walking around with fishnets and makeup on and acting gloomy, like they were actually going out doing stuff. There was a real proactiveness about them. That was really inspiring. I think.
SPEAKER_00
00:15:00
Yeah, yeah. And you know, I was going to ask you, I wanted to ask you about them, even before majority a couple of weeks ago. And I know you've told the story, and this is jumping ahead in the timeline, but the story about when he came and rehearsed with, or I don't know if it was an audition or if you could even call it an audition in the early 90s.
SPEAKER_00
00:15:20
But I don't know, how much did you actually talk with him, like about music, or - He was out here for
SPEAKER_01
00:15:28
about a week, a lot, a lot. We spent a lot of time together for about a week. I really liked him. He was a pretty interesting guy. I liked him. The way he was was really the way he was. So it came out of him naturally. I don't think he was really trying to sell anything. I think he just was the guy he was. And he was a really interesting guy, and he was a really musical guy. It just came out of him.
SPEAKER_01
00:15:56
So he had an approach to how he did things. uh you know he liked things i mean like with music you know he listened to all kinds of stuff as far as i knew you know like he liked things that were you know i think that we shared in common was like things that people just taking a bit of a different approach to a a well -known thing uh like you know take bands that maybe making a pop song but just taking it somewhere just a little bit different like that was interesting i i think that he was always trying to do something a little bit interesting with what he did, you know, and still make it feel natural. So that part of it, I think, um, that part I definitely got and I, I gravitated towards.
SPEAKER_00
00:16:38
Yeah. You know, there was something I, you know, I've seen from other interviews where you talked about that, uh, encounter and the fact that you love playing with him, but it wasn't right for the band just because it would have kind of overpowered the band or, or made you all into a killing joke cover band. And it's interesting just because like his, yeah, his style is so identifiable with that band as opposed to somebody who's going to jump in and play this style over here and this other style over there. But you know, when I was looking back over that, I think that was quoted in a, in one of the kind of a tribute or obituary type articles, not obituary, but you know, after he died and it kind of dawned on me that you could say the same thing about, about your playing in a lot of ways in that it evolved in the context of and made this particular band distinctive, but it's hard to, not hard to imagine because you've certainly done other stuff, including the recent soundtrack and other things, but it's so, it's part of the DNA of that, of, of a particular band and the way that it fits together.
SPEAKER_00
00:17:38
I don't know if that's something that ever crossed your mind. It's
SPEAKER_01
00:17:40
true. Yeah, absolutely. And that was the kind of, that was the big conversation we were having was like, you So that, we can't do that with this, like, these two worlds, like, he liked us, you know, and we liked him, obviously, you know, he was an influence for us, you know, but, like, we couldn't go there, but he couldn't come here either, like, we would have been telling him what to do, if that makes any sense, we were kind of, you know, we'd already been doing what we've been doing for about, you know, what was it, it's probably 95? 94?
SPEAKER_00
00:18:14
So,
SPEAKER_01
00:18:15
you know, over 10 years, right, we kind of built a language of our own that that was pretty established, and that we were very comfortable with, because it was ours. And, you know, what we were looking for was something that fit with that. So it's just the way it was, it was just, it was just wasn't meant to be. But I think that that's, you know, it's, it's unfortunate. I mean, but I I really know how anything really could have come that would have been really that, somebody would have suffered.
SPEAKER_00
00:18:51
I'm trying to picture you all, you know, maybe 1983, you're over there in the vats. At the same time in San Francisco, there's certainly a lot of hardcore going on and you've got Flipper still being pretty active, But maybe, and that's another component where I was just kind of thinking recently that I don't hear a lot of contemporary, you know, early, mid 80s, San Francisco in what you all were doing sonically. But there was something that seeped in, whether it was by, you know, your, your sort of internship in the Pop -O -Pies or whatever else. But yeah, I don't know. How do you sort of square that or what?
SPEAKER_00
00:19:28
I mean,
SPEAKER_01
00:19:28
I still was going to punk shows all the time, you know, I mean, if you're talking in early 80s, the Fats time. I mean, there was a bunch of punks, the MDC was living there, you know, there was a lot. We were probably, if you look at it on a social side, kind of like a punk band, it's just that our music didn't sound like it. And they didn't really come to our shows or anything, but we'd go to those shows, and we went to Tool & Die all the time. I don't know, I don't know. I mean, really, I mean, it was really strange. I mean, when we got into the vats and, you know, that period we were talking about earlier where we were just like, you know, smoking some weed and just playing over and over again. I remember we were just making these grooves that were like these, they would go on for like 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and then some kids down the hall would just come in and hang out and sit down in the room, just listening.
SPEAKER_01
00:20:21
And I was like, these would be like hardcore kids, and we're like, whoa, like, what are we doing to tame the wild beast, you know, like, they're coming in and they're picking up on something and it's not like anything they listen to, you know, so, um, I don't know. I mean, we were a product of our environment, I think. I think that there was a lot in San Francisco that we did pick up on, it's just maybe you don't hear it so much at the music, but I definitely think with our, our mentality and our approach to things, for sure we did.
SPEAKER_00
00:20:53
Yeah, yeah, that's kind of where I was thinking, you know, again, going back to the very first time I interviewed you for the Pop -O -Pies article for the Bay Guardian, you threw out Killing Joke and Flipper and a few other things as reference points in different ways, but it's like the musical side of it would have a lot more in common with Killing Joke in terms of the precision, whereas if you listen to Flipper, a lot of those records, you listen to even the studio versions, yeah, it's a repetitive bass line, but it'll shift around in terms of where the accents are, and sometimes they're not necessarily doing it on purpose.
SPEAKER_00
00:21:31
They will lose their place, somebody will lose their place, and they'll keep playing through it. And they'll eventually wind up back in the same place. That's a different thing than what you all were doing. I think you all were always way more together.
SPEAKER_01
00:21:45
Well, you know, I mean, like I said, I played in bands since I was like 13, 14 years old and boarded and did two, so we kind of approached ourselves like rhythm musicians, you know, That was the core of what made us excited. And mean, Flipper obviously is a huge influence, but I think that they are a little more, really, it's really about the guitar. The bass has the tone, the bass is the pulse, but the guitar is kind of the most strongest vibe in Flipper to me. That's the real like mojo. Even though, yeah, the bass is really recognized. It's just a little more fluid and just a different, I don't know, let me think about that. I think it just feels more like guitar based than rhythm based, if that makes any sense
SPEAKER_01
00:22:38
whatsoever.
SPEAKER_00
00:22:39
Yeah. No, that's, yeah. I think that they weren't nearly as methodical as far as the accents and the placement of where that lead is going to go in the - Definition, yeah.
SPEAKER_01
00:22:54
But that suited them. That suited them. I think that for what they were doing, I think that was the way to go, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00
00:23:01
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to imagine a Will or Bruce being that precise about anything like that. And it's just, it's not - And
SPEAKER_01
00:23:07
actually being that precise is really against the point, really,
SPEAKER_00
00:23:11
to Brian Flipper. Yeah, it's such a different -
SPEAKER_01
00:23:15
It's antithetical.
SPEAKER_00
00:23:17
Somewhere in here, you had you had already met Matt Wallace over in the East Bay and doing stuff with him. And I think done some recording with him. Then with with Joe, that would have been like spring of 84. You're over there at Malin studio. But But I don't know, were you already had you already kind of established a working relationship with Matt Wallace? Or did you have any? Did you have any memories of Tom Malin studio or thinking? And maybe this would be a good guy, or Matt Wallace is a better fit, or...
SPEAKER_01
00:23:47
Matt Wallace, I met at the same time I met the other guys in Faith No Man, I guess at the time. I went to the record store, same record store, and there was like, I'll record your band for $12 a day or something like that.
SPEAKER_01
00:24:04
And so we went up to do a demo at his place up in Orinda, which turned out to be his, he lived with his parents and their garage was converted into a makeshift studio. And I just really liked him. So every time, and he was cheap, so I just kept coming back to him and he always like, oh, I sound much better now. I got much better at what I'm doing. And oh, I got this new like reverb unit. And so, you know, I never thought about working with anybody else really, because he was so much fun. It's funny too, though, you mentioned though, I guess that the Papa Pies record was 1984, because I met Joe in 81. And I don't know why, I just thought it was much earlier that we did that record. Because we spent a lot of time together. I mean, I guess I was just a fan of Papa Pies for a couple years. But I don't see, even when I wasn't in the band, I feel like I was in the band, if that makes any sense.
SPEAKER_00
00:25:02
Yeah, there, you know, I did a lot of, you know, forensic work in terms of figuring out these timelines. So like that worst band in California review, that was from a show like October 19th, 1983. And then 12 days before that, the first Faith period no more show, the one with Joe on vocals at the on Broadway was just 12 days before then.
SPEAKER_01
00:25:26
Really,
SPEAKER_00
00:25:27
really interesting. But I mean that would that must have been just an incredible time as far as oh It
SPEAKER_01
00:25:33
was and there was no rules and actually being called the worst band was an amazing thing It was a great credit, especially LA because I left LA and I kind of like, you know, I kind of had like You know a kind of love and hate thing about LA because LA I was a nobody in LA and I was gonna I mean Maybe I wasn't but I felt like if LA if you're not somebody you're nobody. It's just the way it is there Maybe not now, I don't know. But it was then and just coming back and saying that it was a guy who was like this LA, like, you know, literati thing with the worst band was like, it was fantastic. It was like a really like, okay, I'm definitely on the right path.
SPEAKER_00
00:26:14
Yeah. And then, and then, you know, two years later, it was the same writer, Craig Lee, Craig Lee formerly of the Bags and who, and I'm just grateful that he wrote these things because they're great quotes, but he said at the end of the review of the first Faith No More album, he said, as soon as these guys forget about San Francisco Flipper and the Pop -O -Pies, they may even be great. And I am, decades on, trying to emphasize that, well, at one point, these were, they did come from the same place. It was part of, you know, what went into what y 'all were doing.
SPEAKER_01
00:26:48
I don't know if everybody else in my group can agree with me, but I personally think
SPEAKER_01
00:26:52
the best part of Faith No More is what we picked up from San Francisco, from the Papa Pies and from that era. I that really was the best part of what we became later that we've kept from that period of time. So yeah, maybe, you know, we did lose some things that, you know, that Craig Lee didn't like. And by the way, I met him and he was a really nice guy, you know, so I don't wanna feel negative towards him. Yeah, absolutely. He's
SPEAKER_00
00:27:18
a good writer, yeah.
SPEAKER_01
00:27:19
But I mean, what he said, and I get it, And also LA, like, I mean, this is weird, that town, there's just so much business in that town that it's hard to imagine doing something that doesn't elevate your status or give you, like, business opportunities. It's just such an ambitious city. And I read your book, I realized, you know, like, we for San Franciscoans were pretty ambitious, actually, as far as bands go. And that probably comes from the fact, you know, Roddy and I had some of that L .A. baggage that we probably brought up with us. But, um, I got a little bit on a tangent here.
SPEAKER_00
00:27:57
No, no. No, it's fine.
SPEAKER_01
00:27:57
The fact, the fact, you know, really, it was, that wasn't the part that I think that really we brought that was special, that made us special. I think what we picked up in San Francisco is really what made us special, that we maintain.
SPEAKER_00
00:28:10
Yeah, and you probably would have been an odd fit in either place. Like if you had somehow been, you know, migrated back to L .A., yeah, people would have said, yeah, what's this other thing going on here? This self -sabotagey thing, or...
SPEAKER_01
00:28:23
So here's a real difference. So L .A., we could have gone back and we could have done the self -sabotaging thing, and that would have been our stick, right? Where San Francisco, we would do it and... it was just what we did. Like, self -sabotage was just, was normal. Lots of people were doing it, you know? It was more like the culture here, you know? It was just an approach towards music and towards being in a band where LA would be kind of like a tactic to carve a niche for yourself. I think we were much less self -sabotaging and nihilistic than a lot of other bands in San Francisco that
SPEAKER_00
00:29:03
did it much
SPEAKER_01
00:29:04
better. But I liked those bands too. I liked them and I appreciate them. There was a certain nobility about it. They were definitely like, uh, you know, they kind of were going on a path and they were taking the responsibility for that path.
SPEAKER_00
00:29:34
The videos are funny, uh, like the We Care A Lot video in particular. And, you know, So in I think The Replacements had come out with an album the year before, maybe also 87, where they had a video that it's just a speaker. And it's just sitting there still, and it's like, it's like a three, it was kind of like their way of sort of, yeah, we'll do a video, but we're not, we're not one of these commercial bands. And so we're gonna, we're gonna kind of pout, and then you all, in your own way, are poking fun at the idea of making a video with all the different gestures and sort of poses that you're doing.
SPEAKER_00
00:30:12
But at the same time, it's entertaining because there's more going into it than just, you know, a still shot of a speaker. But what it kind of occurred to me was, you know, it's the same generation and the same kind of tension that, you know, here's, you know, you have a band that you're working on and you want to, in some sense, be successful, reach audiences. But there's also that feeling of, we don't want to do it in this gross way and just completely sell our souls and try to, the different ways that you navigated it, that as opposed to sort of the more, I don't know.
SPEAKER_01
00:30:48
Okay, so you've got to think about it like this. This is MTV, 1983, 1984, okay? And we lived in this house, me and Roddy, we wouldn't clean anything. This is a horrible pit, but a lot of people crashed there. And Joe would talk about crashing there. And had a little TV, and we watched MTV like friggin' 12 hours a day.
SPEAKER_01
00:31:09
It was always on. And we became obsessed because our world we were living in was so far away from this world of MTV. And we started kind of like flirting with this idea because it was such a contrast to where we actually were that we were kind of like we would play Van Halen's Jump because it was just like, we were bringing that into this world that was repulsed by it, but at the same time, it was something just so alien. And we made that Slash video, we would kind of flirt with that a little bit because to us, it was like doing something really kind of radical. Maybe it wasn't, but seeing that to us, and one indication was like, Jim, like if Jim would start getting kind of uncomfortable, then we knew we were on the right track. Like, I wanted to do a dance move where we all did these dance moves. And it was so cheesy. And he was just like, fuck that. I'm not gonna do that. Like, now we have to do it, you know. So it was kind of like a gauge, like how uncomfortable can we make ourselves be, you know, and do this thing where it didn't really, I don't know. I mean, I you know, you're talking about cooking, right? You're talking about elements and what you're bringing into the soup.
SPEAKER_01
00:32:26
And was just a really like borderline offensive element to bring into something that we were doing. So we didn't really have a problem with it. And I think that the more that that fit into that genre, I think the more of a success kind of it was for us in our weird little way we were looking at the time. Did that make any sense, what I just kind of explained?
SPEAKER_00
00:32:51
Yeah. Yeah, well, as I was just kind of looking back on some of what people would be talking about at the time, say, 86, 87, you know, independent bands getting signed by major labels and major labels trying to make them work in different ways, I mean, that you all were in that era, as different as this stuff was. No, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00
00:33:12
We were. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, you know, so I, it was kind of like, they hadn't figured it out the same way they would figure it out in the early nineties, as terms of like how to really make that into a new mainstream, uh, form of, you know, alternative rock and everything. And we talked about that before, about how strange that was that, you know, there you are end of 89 or early 90. These magazines will be saying the future of rock. Then two years later, you're coming out with Angel Dust and so much has changed in the meantime that it's almost as if they were treating you like dinosaurs and then, you know, adding fuel to the fire. There you all are on that tour with Metallica and Guns N' Roses. And I just wondering, you know, there must have been points when you sort of, you know, at first you're playing with these ideas, like, you know, what would it be like to be on MTV or to make a video or to use this?
SPEAKER_00
00:34:12
And then at another point, it's like, wait, wait, are we playing with this? Or have we become this? Or did this happen against our will? It was
SPEAKER_01
00:34:21
a really, we walked that fine line. And there's no way to walk that line without crossing over on either side at certain points. It's a balancing act, definitely. It got to become a weird balancing act because, well, like if you talk about that Metallica Guns N' Roses tour, there was zero appreciation for that one side. There was zero recognition of it. I mean, our weirdness did not make it over the net on anybody. That was just perceived as a negative, flat out. And then the part that we flirted with, people weren't seeing the irony in it at all. So yeah, that was a little weird. That was like, how do deal with this? How do we reclaim ourselves? How do we control our own lives? How could we express ourselves the way we are and do it in a way that, I don't know. I can't say do it in a that wasn't self -destructive because we were self -destructive.
SPEAKER_00
00:35:26
Yeah. The risk is what makes it
SPEAKER_00
00:35:27
And it's not just interesting to me that that tightrope act or that walking that line is sort of what makes the band for me. I mean, people could point to this sound, you know, oh, they invented or influenced this sound of music. And certainly, like, rhythmically and sonically, there are those signatures. But a lot of the bands that picked up on those elements aren't picking up on this other more intangible quality. And so, like, I think if there could have been all kinds of safer decisions that would have not offended these people or not irritated these people, but then it wouldn't have been the same band.
SPEAKER_00
00:36:09
It wouldn't have had the tension.
SPEAKER_01
00:36:12
Exactly. And it wasn't, wouldn't be playing to the strengths of what we do best. And that's what we were doing. You know, we, that was where we found ourselves and there's a certain point, you know, you have to be who you are. You have to, because that's your strength. it's your weakness and it's your strength. I have a lot of respect for people who can find a way to temper that and just kind of, you know, go along and make it work for them. And there have been a lot of really successful people that can do that. I just, it's hard to imagine. It's hard to imagine.
SPEAKER_00
00:36:49
I mean, you eventually, I mean, you navigate through all this stuff, And then eventually, you find yourself kind of in the belly of the beast, whether it was... At a certain point, you can't
SPEAKER_01
00:36:58
win.
SPEAKER_01
00:36:59
But it's interesting to say as an observer, that that's the part that you find interesting. That's good. I mean, I don't know if I got any of that out of it. I I'm just doing what I... We just are where we are, and the good and the bad, whatever, that's just gonna come. But an observer to say that makes it more interesting, that's good. That's good. I think then we did something good there.
SPEAKER_00
00:37:19
Great.
SPEAKER_00
00:37:20
I mean, I think to like, to, you know, bring it back into the context of the book, I mean, I know I'm coming from a, uh, all along with Faith No More, it's been kind of a different kind of relationship that I've had to the band in the sense that, you know, I was certainly aware of, and, you know, I saw you all on Saturday Night Live when I was in ninth grade, but then really my path into it was, I met Joe, I heard about the Pop -O -Pies, I interviewed you, I was like, I want to hear what that early Faith No More sounds like, and you gave that demo tape that I borrowed before you could just get this stuff online in a split second. And then I kind of heard, as you and Joe told me, about Flipper, and I started learning about Subterranean. So that's kind of how I understood the band. And I certainly know, though, that that's not how the music industry is going to understand it, or for that matter, probably the majority of Faith No More fans, and that's fine too. I think it also speaks well that you have something that that lends itself to these different interpretations. But at least I wanted to bring out one, you know, had you all just been a big band from San Francisco, but with no connection to the underground stuff that was happening, especially early on, then it wouldn't have made sense to put you in this book. But as it was, it was kind of like, well, here's the one, I mean, in a lot of ways, at least during that era, the one thing that also became part of popular culture.
SPEAKER_01
00:38:45
I
SPEAKER_01
00:38:46
mean, I don't know. Again, I'm speaking for myself. I mean, the story of my life is kind of walking around in this foreign country, which is rock industry,
SPEAKER_00
00:38:56
being
SPEAKER_01
00:38:56
a guy who came out of San Francisco. And kind of like, and I just, you know, be honest with you, before I read your book, I'd kind of forgotten about it this big period of time. And when I went to your book signing thing, I had to think about it for a couple days, because it brought back a lot of things that I had kind of buried. And, you know, I just gotten resigned to the fact that I'm just kind of a weird guy with a kind of weird attitude that doesn't make sense to a lot of peers in the business where I make my living. And actually, I kind of reconnected to the fact that actually, you know, that is really kind of my formative period where I kind of became who I am and it's just that that world isn't around me anymore, but but um, I Am still here
SPEAKER_01
00:39:43
Yeah, I mean, I really I really feel like we belong more to that world than this world. I really do
SPEAKER_00
00:39:50
Yeah, but I and then at the same time, you know You would there were a lot of people who different artists in there who were gonna be outcasts in whatever world They were in and so maybe that's part of it as well. Yeah, you know
SPEAKER_01
00:40:03
Actually, that's true. That's true. That's true as well. But it's just the way that you express yourself and the way it gets taken. I'm sure a lot of people thought we were idiots back then in San Francisco, but there were a lot of idiots. We weren't the only ones, right? where sometimes if I'm going – sometimes I feel like I'm the only idiot now. I know if that makes any sense. It's just that there isn't a culture of this kind of like randomness. Things are very niched out and very – everybody belongs to a certain kind of group and is pushing a certain formula that it's like, it's very hard to find space for things
SPEAKER_01
00:40:56
that don't fall into the rigid categories now, to me.
SPEAKER_00
00:41:00
Oh yeah, yeah. That was another thing that I had in my mind that I had forgotten to write down. Yeah, which is that, yeah, thinking about how at that time that you all were making your albums, there was still a divide between underground culture, zines, college radio, and mainstream culture. Whereas now it's so flattened out that it's hard to, you know, somebody in their basement with a computer could make something that sounds more or less like what somebody in a expensive recording studio could make, and they could get it out through the same basic distribution channels that somebody in a And so, like, those distinctions, like, the idea of there being a pop culture and an underground is sort of broken down, and I think that's so much of what you all did that was interesting was that the tension between those and kind of that tightrope between those different worlds where, yeah, it's like, those two worlds don't really exist in the same way. So it would be kind of hard to, hard to do that.
SPEAKER_01
00:41:58
Well, you know what I would say, and back into San Francisco, you know, we, I got here and you know, at 81, that's 10 years after 71. So there were still hippies here, you know, it was really a generational thing. It was like, there was the old guard here, the, you know, Bechtel Corporation and the Wells Fargo Bank, and they're the people who lived in Pacific Heights and those big houses that you'd never see. And then there was the youth who ran the city and did whatever the hell they wanted. And we were kind of on the side of the youth and the government was this, you know, FBI were squares, you CIA were, you know, doing nasty things all over the world. And things were very clear cut, you know, and as long as we were on this side of things, we were kind of underground, we were just part of that world. And think nowadays, I think definitely the definitions of society are not that clean cut. I you know, nowadays, people are asking for the FBI to come help them against Donald Trump, you know, the underground guys are MAGA guys, you know, doing podcasting, you know, in their mom's basement. You know, I mean, it's everything has become blurred, you know, there is there is no distinctions, It wasn't just music that kept people together, it was a certain mentality, and were part of this world and not that world. That old world was dying. Everything right now, it's very hard to find what... I think that everybody is a piece of something, and it's not consistently go across the board as much as it did before.
SPEAKER_01
00:43:27
You can have elements of some things and elements of other things. You can be really anti -Republican, but have different gender issues than somebody else, say, who's a Democrat. You can have different views on Israel. You can have different views. It's really not defined. It's a big, big soup and mess right now. And it's very hard to see where anything can really work with anyone if it isn't just completely based on commercial purposes. That's the one equalizer, that's the one, the unifier is how successful something is commercially, I think.
SPEAKER_00
00:44:25
Something that came up in the email you sent over the summer, you said, American Zen. And I love that. And again, it makes me think back to the first, maybe the first or the second time, because there was a second time I interviewed you. They were both at the cafe, but the second time I said, yeah, I think I'm going to try to do this book. And I brought these issues of wiring department and we're looking at these things and you were aware that I was trying to figure out something that it wasn't. And I was trying to figure out like, yeah, what are these connections? What is this thing? But when you said American Zen, I thought, well, that's as close as anything else that I could have thought of as a sort of like, what is this philosophy here or this thing? But anyway, I don't know.
SPEAKER_01
00:45:11
Well, I would say anywhere besides New York in this country, where music, kind of alternative music kind of came out of, this probably city in New York were probably the two nihilistic elements that they brought into art. I think that's safe to say. I can't think of any other places that really had this feeling in the
SPEAKER_01
00:45:36
same way. And, you know, I mean, when I was in school, you know, I studied philosophy, and was really interesting is I studied nihilism, and the guy who actually is known for bringing that term into philosophy, his name is Schopenhauer, and so he was a pretty bitter guy. And writing is, you know, he was a precursor to Friedrich Nietzsche, and he's a little, you know, as you can imagine, he'd probably be like. But the interesting thing about him was that what he was actually trying to do, there was a real renaissance and discovering of Eastern religion. And nihilism to him meant kind of like this impermanence of life, imperfection of life, and how existence is not perfect. It's perfect and imperfect at the same time. And how, as a German, he kind of filtered into this idea of the will. And the will is this thing that in existence will never be achieved. It'll never – it's a futile, futile effort. But it isn't the fact that life sucks and everything goes to hell. It's more like, you know, nothing really works out in existence and yet it works out at the same time.
SPEAKER_01
00:46:56
It really was a much more Zen approach. And I really think that in San Francisco, without making it like a credo, I think that there was a certain kind of – there was no roadmap. Flipper did not have a roadmap. I mean, when the first time I saw Flipper, when I came up to San Francisco and they played it, I think it was the on Broadway, I just, they were playing and I think the wheel and I just walked up on stage, like, I think, I think Will Chatter actually was like, here, play this guitar, you know, like, and it was just, there was, there was really zero rules. And there was also was zero judgment. It experiential. It very much about experience. And whatever good and bad came out of it was irrelevant. It was the experience. And was very, very zen. And couldn't define flipper and you couldn't really, you know, you could put labels on them. You sure, they were self -destructive. Absolutely. And can you hear that in their music? Definitely. But that wasn't the driving force necessarily. I that maybe that's what I meant about Zen was it was more like just kind of experiencing something without guardrails, without safeguards, without maps and rules. And maybe that came from the 60s and what had happened here earlier. I that, you know, like the Zen Center here was very early with Zen thought in San Francisco. And I think that, you know, there were a lot up, I mean, I don't know, moving up here in 81, there was a lot of really interesting people doing a lot of interesting things. I could talk to people on the BART train and have really deep, interesting conversations. It was from all different walks of life. So it attracted a lot of weird people. And I think that there's no doubt that these people got into the music world and they kind of pervaded all of the city. So I think that's
SPEAKER_01
00:48:55
kind of what I'm thinking about more. You know, it's just more like, we don't know where we're going, you know, we don't know what this is, but this is what it is and this is real. And there was something just really cool about it, you know, and coming out of LA, I mean, for me, it's like, you know, it's not about who you are in society and how you fit in and what you're trying to, you know, what is the angle you're trying to sell? It was just, you are who you are doing this thing, you know, when I go back to that flipper show And I walked up and Will was like, take my guitar. He didn't know who I was. I was just some kid. And it was like, it didn't matter. Nothing mattered. You are just you doing your thing.
SPEAKER_01
00:49:34
And I don't know. For me, that was a big revelation. And think it was really important. And I don't think there was a lot of places in this country that were doing things like that. Actually, I can't think of it even in the world, actually, you know, where there was something done in the way that it was done here. I'm really glad, actually, that you wrote this book just to kind of record some of that, because like I said, I'd forgotten about a lot of it, but it was there and it happened and I think it was very unique. I think it was very unique to a lot of places and I think that there was something that kind of, there's something you can trace things now that go back to that period of time.
SPEAKER_01
00:50:19
and I think that you kind of pull the curtain back on just kind of an element that kind of makes American culture, you know, and music culture, that it just kind of reveals a little more and it was really interesting to me.
SPEAKER_00
00:50:49
♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ And I know that you'll never find your love And I know that find your love Never find your love you