"My People are Poor!
They Have No TP For Their Bungholes"

Their music was already starting to stretch out into an uncharted territory that mixed eerie movie soundtracks with every conceivable form of rock. Band members had spasmic orgasms on the floor and danced around with the frenzy of clowns whose asses have been lit on fire. Their lead singer (known as Vlad Drac, aka Mike Patton) led the crowd in humorous dirty sing alongs before diving into the audience and almost getting himself killed by an insanely fascinated bunch of adoring fans and groupies. Mr. Bungle's virtuoso thrashing and funking is what had attracted the audience originally. At this point they started stretching out into serious compositions and experimentations -- yet were met still with ridiculous screaming and insane mosh pits as if there was no difference. Impatient with their low-brow audience, Mr. Bungle contemptuously played tediously long and repetitive ballads. "Good by, my friend, goodbye . . ." Patton crooned to the audience for what seemed an eternity. "Let's just keep doin' this all night, whaddya say guys? You people are just soooo good."

"Go for it faggot!"

"That's right, the doors are locked, you can't leave. Too fuckin' bad," he patronized to a bunch of young girls in the crowd who kept screaming at the top of their lungs as if they were on a roller coaster. Getting angry, the entire theater flipped off the band. (Patton's day job is with funk/metal combo Faith No More, who had a platinum selling hit "Epic" in 1991 - regrettably a huge portion of Mr. Bungle's audience came from cross-over mainstream rock fans).

Bungle would then segue into an obscure piece of music that was pure brilliance (usually a cover of some modern European composer) and then followed that with a bunch of God-awful banging on their instruments, unbearable noodling and generic thrash. This decade has not seen a more perverse, frustrating live act.

Mr. Bungle today are a different story. Looking at their music from their sloppy heavy metal high school demo, on through their different periods from ska to funk, to eclectic, up to their latest album of composition-based-jazz-genre-jumping Disco Volante, shows an incredible musical growth. They have even composed a piece for the Kronos Quartet.

Now the six 28 year old members of Mr. Bungle have finally arrived. Under the influence of John Zorn ("John Zorn has influenced the two visionaries in the group compositionally" drummer Danny Heifetz says, yet he stresses Zorn never helped them write any songs) they have taken the concept of changing the music every thirty seconds, which was always close to their hearts, to its highest plateau. The Latin themed Disco Volante is a spooky barrage of stuff you've just never heard before; the closest to new music around.

Heifetz says, "It's not new music, it's just new to people who haven't heard it. We're making it accessible to a larger audience so they can explore it.

"We have a unique structure with how we get things done. But there's definitely elements of our music that can be found elsewhere. We're just lucky that we get enough money to put something like this together. There's definitely a couple of visionaries in the band and when they compose something they really know what they want. Sometimes they don't know what they want and after the rest of the band works on it it comes out better than they ever hoped.

"There are people like that all over the place but they're stuck on their four tracks at home because their ideas are not accessible to the general public and Mr. Record Exec. I feel like our music is pretty goddamn "poppy" compared to . . . Well, take a band like Smashing Pumpkins . . . that's pretty good, it's got nice chords, it's got a catch, but it's very simple and they're never going to do what we're doing. Then we're never going to so some stuff that people a few levels away from us are doing. There's a guy named John Oswald who makes music with eight samples a second and you just get blown away by it."

"We're influenced by a lot of film composers. I know Trey (Spruance) listens to a lot of Armenian contemporary, some so-called classical twelve-tone music. Even in part to John Cage, not as a whole but just part of Cage's music. We listen to a lot of Eastern European 50's through 80's composers."

Disco Volante treats its listeners with a psychedelic Arabic Disco number, Desert Search For Techno Allah which rocks with twisted omniscience From there it delves into the world of Ennio Morricone (Composer of The Good, The Bad, The Ugly) in Violenza Domestica an Italian tale of abuse and horror. A song in which Patton, who seems to be somewhat of a linguist these days (most of the album isn't even in English) pops with his lips and whispers "Ascolta."* with operatic grace and mystery. Following this tract is After School Special, a depressing ditty sung from the voice of an over-pampered boy who insists his mom is better than everyone else's mom. It concludes with the most brilliant imitation of a child molestation victim ever put to record. "ha ha ha ha ha, good, no no no no, stop tickling me, stop tickling me, why are you touching me, ha ha ha ha ha, why are you touching me, ha ha ha ha . . . hey, where are you going?" This a sentiment coming from their home town Eureka, a place that lead guitarist Trey Spruance says has the highest rates of rape and child abuse in the country.

Volante also goes into some spacey esoteric realms, which can try the patience of even their new more matured and focused audience. "Play Something!" some dude yelled in the midst of Patton droning , "ooooohahhhhwaaaaweeehooo . . ." at their most recent San Francisco performance.

Heifetz says of their last tour, "I'm just glad people are coming to our shows and not dancing. People need to think a little bit when they go to a show. Sure, there are shows that are great for people to get fucked up and bounce around to. We're not trying to make everyone feel so much more mature and above everybody else, it's just a different element. It's the element of going to the theaters without actors on stage. Like watching an orchestra pit getting raised up to stage level. There should be a big sheet raised above us. We want the show to have no emphasis on us, that's why we wear masks, because there's no reason for the audience to see our faces.

"We shouldn't block people from seeing the instruments but I wish we could wear costumes that black us out completely. I love watching people watch us just because they looked really confused most of the time."

The desire to eliminate the distracting mosh pit factor is only part of the reason they will no longer play favorites like Girls Of Porn, and Squeeze Me Macaroni. "They're old and dumb and boring." saxophonist Theo Lengyel says. "People just want to hear some funky bullshit and so they're pissed, but they haven't aged or matured with us. It' an illusion in their own mind."

Heifetz says, "It doesn't have anything to do with the fans it's just that we're tired of those songs. We're empowered to a new age in music." There is no desire, as there once was to mess with an audience they felt weren't paying close enough attention. Yet, the audience at that same San Francisco show at the Fillmore must have felt very much shit upon, when Mr. Bungle closed their show with a half-hour long, tedious, ear-damaging noise piece -- an experimentation the band now regrets.

"That was horrible, I have to admit that was really fucking horrible. After that I thought, well, if some people didn't like us before they sure don't like us now. One person was supposed to to cue it but he didn't realize it, and we were supposed to enter the song about twenty minutes before we did and nobody knew who . . . well, I'm not going to name name's . . . but Mike was supposed to start that song and he didn't."

Which brings us to the subject of Mike Patton. Patton, who was an ego-driven rock star in Faith No More just a few years back, (acually still sort of is in Europe where they have an enduring fan base) leaping around, climbing up amplifiers and theater graftings, stage-diving, pissing on himself, and giving himself the occasional enema if you were lucky. Quite aware of the audience's fascination with him Patton has grown a reputation, off stage and on, for being obnoxious and smug. "He has a New York fuck-you attitude," one of his band mates says.

But the former pin-up boy has all but abandoned this persona and become a humble team player, tastefully playing his 1/6 part of Mr. Bungle to the best of his virtuoso skill. His voice, which in the past was nasal and whiny, can now display a startling range of voices and dissonant jazz/scat scales, as can be heard on his solo album Adult Themes For Voice. He is now only exploring places where the human voice has never gone before (see Juggernauts Of Irrationalism article). The weird thing is why, Patton, who is by nature a crooner (check out his Tom Jones imitations with Faith No More), now refuses to allow a single beautiful or sustained note out of his mouth. "His artistic expression is that he made something that sounded like that and people buy the fucking shit. Because it's him," Heifetz explains.

Also noteworthy is how he has toned down his stage movements to the most minimal level. "Yeah, now he has shin splints, he's got a bad back, he's going bald, a lot of things, he's having a rough life. I told him, "Mike, why don't you stop being such a fucking star." We got in a big fight, and he said, "Why don't you stop being such a fucking star. Why don't you take a couple cymbals away?" And I got pissed and broke the cymbal over his jaw and that's why he can't walk. Then we made out. No, we never really had a talk about what he should do. There had been three years between shows and in that time things change."

Mr. Bungle, who are now closely in consorts with John Zorn (see Zorn article) and make up five members of his San Francisco incarnation of Cobra, have become honorary members of the truly avant-garde scene. Something they have ambivalent feelings about and are very skeptical about the scene arising from the Knitting Factory.

Heifetz explains: "I can predict exactly what's going to happen with a lot of that stuff. There's going to be a smooth transition, harsh transition, funny transition, and it ends up being a formula just like everything else. Not every time but a lot of people end up making it a pop song. It ends up being an AABA, BCD format. They're not always through composed, I think they work best when they are. But I think that's more fun to play than to listen to. When I'm a member of the audience I say, 'wow, I sure wish I was up there. I wish I could fill in this little part up here.' But that's from the point of view as a musician, for other people I don't know . . .

"As far as the Zappa angle goes, because most people consider us a Zappa cover band. I consider Zappa sometimes to be way more difficult to listen to than many twentieth century composers. Even though it's avant-garde and difficult technically; I think, well this sure is amazing, these are great musicians and I sure don't want to listen to this music 'cause it's such a drag. It's like a workshop, a seminar. He also wrote some great melodic stuff that I would consider pop music."

Referring to the esoteric nature of this new music Goblin asked Lengyel if he thinks the human ear wants to hear a certain amount of catchy tunes and construction; as there are certain chords that the human ear responds to more than others.

"That's all a matter of conditioning. I heard that too. But there are certain pitches that Chinese children sing that are equivalent to middle C, so there's some pseudological preference you're saying. But I think once you get past Kindergardeners that all gets thrown out the window, because you get so conditioned by what you're hearing and seeing around you and what people are saying is good . . ."

"If you're out in Mongolia," Heifetz says, "you're going to be hearing sounds like the wind blowing over the hilltops (he whistles and blows) then those are the notes you know, and then a tree falls down. It's all relative, whatever you hear, just we in the western world will hear a twelve tone scale. We've been conditioned from our first sound impulse on the eardrum to like those particular sounds."

Indeed, these serious composers have come a long way from pooping on stage just to get attention.

"Theo took a shit in a fish bowl on stage once," Danny says. "There was that one little girl he was trying to freak out."

"I was staring right at her too, trying to squeeze out that little turd."

"And it was little too, and skinny."

"You know in the urinals when there's a person right next to you. I can't pee 'til he leaves! You can imagine how I was in front of hundreds of people with a fish bowl!"

*Ascolta -- An operatic Clichˇ, "Wait!" Meaning a tuneful aria is about to commence -- pay attention audience, the recitative is over now.