The Mike Patton Corner: Mr. Bungle’s Goddammit I Love America!!!$ɫ!!
Oh hell yeah, now this is more like it.
It is foolish to go into any Mr. Bungle project expecting to know what it will sound like. Between their four demo tapes and three studio albums, Mr. Bungle never stopped evolving, moving on to more ambitious sounds, and seeing what they could get away with. Their first tape, though compositionally sound, was just weird enough to avoid being cut-rate. Their second was a necessary growing pain where they fairly successfully tried their hand at actually being dynamic. Their 1988 tape, Goddammit I Love America!!!$ɫ!!, was where their genre-bending grew from mere pastiche into an unmistakable sound, one they would immediately abandon after their debut record.
Much like Bowel of Chiley, the fidelity of this tape is incrementally higher than their last, and the band actually get to mix some of these songs in a creative way without having to worry about one instrument becoming inaudible. From the tape’s first song, Bloody Mary, the Bungle sound is pretty locked in. There are funky shots of horns, dexterous slap bass lines, and vocals both sung and rapped. Many of Bungle’s songs have cryptic and almost poetic lyrics which describe twisted and haunting scenarios, and this is not really one of them; Bloody Mary is pretty explicitly about menstruation. Patton is hitting notes in his chest voice that show he’s definitely been practicing his technique, though he still needs some time to hone his talent. He sings very graphically about the pain and discomfort of menstruation, as well as using sanitary pads to wipe his mouth, with the crude enthusiasm only a bunch of teenage boys could muster. According to the lore Mr. Bungle present, periods exist because one day God had to walk into his kitchen and pour his own drink, presumably because a woman wouldn’t do it for him. If God is as much a sleazeball as this lyric suggests, then Mr. Bungle is certainly made in his image. Their suggestion for dealing with the pain?
“Drink hard, drink deep!”
Timeless advice. Switching between funk and metal, Bungle are much more structurally focused on this song than on previous efforts, and the hard rock guitar solo is the cherry on top of this pretty fun and well-built track.
Next is the first demo for one of my all-time favorite Mr. Bungle songs, Egg, written by bassist Trevor Dunn. It begins with an intro which, according to a 1988 radio interview, is provided by friend of the band Rob Green. Dunn has said that Green was obsessed with David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet and would play it constantly in the studio lounge while Bungle recorded, which may have led to the film being sampled on the track My Ass Is On Fire. I first suspected the intro may have been done by Mike Patton, because it features a high-pitched shriek, a vocal technique Patton would employ throughout his career. Ultimately it sounds less like Patton’s fearsome pterodactyl screams and more like a prepubescent scream of terror, and it wasn’t a shock to learn it was someone else. There are a few differences between this and the studio version of Egg, the main one being that the outro is much shorter. On this version, it’s only about a minute, whereas the album version stretches it out to a comedically patience-testing length. The horn hooks and “la la la” vocals are catchy as hell, and the song jumps between genres in typical Bungle fashion, but there are a lot less bells and whistles than on the album version, though it does mark the first appearance of keyboards on a Bungle recording. This is a pretty vocally demanding song as well, and Patton is pushing his limits on this one, which means sometimes he does end up being a little flat. It’s not much of a problem though, especially on the catchiest refrain:
“Ohhh an egg comes out of a chicken/
Ohhh a chicken comes out of an egg!”
I like the mix of electric and acoustic guitar on this recording, but much like many songs on their demos, the ambition of the studio version brings out something in this song it definitely needed to reach its full potential.
The next track is the villainous Goosebumps, a dub-tinged love song that almost sounds like it could be sung by a Disney antagonist. After a swarthy hard rock opening, sinister horn riffs and hits of clean, delayed guitar ring out underneath Patton’s lovesick wails, but the eeriest thing about this track has to be how similar the chorus sounds to Poison’s hit song Nothing But A Good Time. There’s some interesting things going on with the drums, and it’s funny to hear what a Mr. Bungle love song sounds like, but it’s not hard to see why this one didn’t cut the mustard for their debut album. It’s one of the less adventurous songs, both musically and lyrically, and Patton sounds like he’s struggling a bit to hit some of the high notes. Still, it manages to be a pretty fun listen for most of its five minute runtime.
The tempo and time signature changes reach their peak on Waltz For Grandma’s Sake, a song about having contempt for the elderly, which Trevor Dunn has said was influenced by the older women he’d meet in his days as a bar band bassist. Giving one of the wildest and weirdest vocal performances on the whole tape, Patton sings with raging intensity about the gross and annoying aspects of having a personal relationship with an old person built on obligation, and I laugh every time I hear him shout “MY LEARNATION IS GOING TO BE DESTROYOYOYOYOYOYOYED.” Bungle make ample use of 3/4 on this track, which does technically make this a song you can waltz to, even though 4/4 funk and hard rock dominate most of the song. One downside is that the horns mostly just fulfill their role of beefing up the sound rather than providing memorable hooks like they do on tracks like Egg and Goosebumps, and Patton’s vocals and the lyrics really outshine everything else that’s going on. I wouldn’t call it a weak moment in the tracklist, but it did take me a number of listens to really get into.
Next we have the second appearance of Carousel on a Bungle project, and aside from the better recording and much more skillful vocals from Patton, not much has changed from the version found on Bowel of Chiley. One thing it does have that the last version didn’t is some pretty nice synth strings, which go over really well, but aside from that it’s basically just better performed and engineered.
The last proper song on the tape is Definition of Shapes, which has some thought-provoking lyrics and bass and guitar hits that trade off during the verses, but to me it’s most notable for its interpolation of Need You Tonight by INXS, the token example on this tape of Bungle sampling another artist. By a wild coincidence, a radio interview with Mike Patton revealed that years after he hit it big with Faith No More, INXS actually reached out to him in an attempt to recruit him as their touring singer. Considering the way Patton has sung about love and sex over the years, the idea of him fronting INXS is frankly hilarious, especially after hearing him sneer his way through this semi-cover. This is another song which contains wild hard rock soloing from Trey Spruance, and it’s great to hear him adding new tricks to his arsenal with every Bungle release. There are some air drum-worthy moments on this track, some excellent grooves, and all of Bungle’s tricks culminate on this song to make it a pretty satisfying wrap-up.
The final track on the tape is Incoherence, which appeared as an interlude on Bowel of Chiley but now serves as this tape’s outro. This re-recorded version has been somewhat expanded on, it sounds much more hellish and twisted this time around and features more high pitched shrieks from Rob Green. There’s a breakdown towards the end that sounds a bit like Middle Eastern folk, before it devolves into chaos and finally fizzles out. It’s not a fleshed out song, it feels more like one last goof to cap everything off, but that’s to be expected at this point.
For a Mr. Bungle fan, there’s a lot to love about Goddammit I Love America!!!$ɫ!!, it’s the first project where they seem to have honed in on a signature sound, and it’s interesting to hear which songs they ended up bringing to Warner and which ones they left on the cutting room floor. It’s a bit of silly fun, a lighthearted sound which Bungle would mold into the darker, more sinister vibe of their first album.
I give Mr. Bungle’s Goddammit I Love America!!!$ɫ!! a patriotic 6/10
Best Tracks: Egg, Carousel, Definition of Shapes
Best Tracks: Egg, Carousel, Definition of Shapes
P.S. Since Mr. Bungle’s fourth and final demo tape OU818 is almost exclusively comprised of material that ended up on their debut album, I won’t be doing a full review and instead I’ll be giving my thoughts down here in brief.
After a pretty amusing intro track that’s supposed to be a parody of the intros to hip-hop albums, we get rough versions of four classic Bungle tunes: Squeeze Me Macaroni, Slowly Growing Deaf, The Girls of Porn, and Love Is A Fist. Patton’s singing has once again improved, he sounds a lot less strained on the higher notes and he’s started singing in his lower register to great effect on songs like Slowly Growing Deaf. The songs aren’t dramatically different structurally from the way they would appear on the first Bungle album, the only obvious difference is the recording quality. Which is not to say it sounds bad, even if there’s a bit too much reverb on the drums for my taste, the recording is very competent and probably the best out of all their demos (according to Trevor Dunn, the tape was engineered by future Counting Crows guitarist David Bryson). Girls of Porn also contains a sample of the adult film Raw Footage, which would later end up being used on My Ass Is On Fire. This is the first example I can find of Bungle sampling other media directly, something they would do much more on their debut. The final track, Mr. Nice Guy, is some infectious funk rock that almost sounds like it could be a Faith No More demo, were it not for the juvenile and perverted lyrics. The vocal melody is a definite old school funk throwback, and Patton’s rapping over the meaty hard rock riffs is definitely predictive of the kind of stuff he’d be doing on The Real Thing. Aside from the songs that ended up on their debut, it’s possibly the best song on any of the Mr. Bungle demos, and it’s a genuinely great showcase for every member’s talents. Patton on this track earns his title as the “Man of 1000 Voices” for sure, and on this tape he nearly completes his transition from ambitious hardcore vocalist to all-around skilled singer. Listening to all of Mr. Bungle’s demos has made it much more bizarre to me that Mike Patton was the man chosen to front Faith No More, and yet tracks like Mr. Nice Guy sort of showcase why their style seemed to fit him like a glove. I’m looking forward to giving my thoughts on the first Patton-led Faith No More album in the next installment.
