Small Victories

Adrian Harte

Description

‘When I first heard about this Faith No More biography, I didn’t know what to think. But I have to give credit where it is due, it’s a quality piece. The man has done his research and it shows. It provided me with more than a few revelations … and I’m in the band.’ – Bill Gould, Faith No More

Small Victories: The True Story of Faith No More is the definitive biography of one of the most intriguing bands of the late twentieth century. Written with the participation of the group’s key members, it tells how such a heterogeneous group formed, flourished, and fractured, and how Faith No More helped redefine rock, metal and alternative music. The book chronicles the creative and personal tensions that defined and fuelled the band, forensically examines the band’s beginnings in San Francisco’s post-punk wasteland, and charts the factors behind the group’s ascent to MTV-era stardom.

Small Victories strips away the mythology and misinformation behind their misanthropic masterpiece Angel Dust, explores the rationale behind the frequent hiring and firing of band members, and traces the unraveling of the band in the mid-1990s. It also examines the band’s breakup and hiatus, explores their unwelcome legacy as nu-metal godfathers, and gives a behind-the-scenes view of their rebirth.

Based on meticulous research and hundreds of interviews with current and former band members and other key figures, Small Victories combines a fan’s passion with a reporter’s perspicacity.

Sujets

• Musique
• Culture musicale
• Histoire de la musique
• Styles
• Genres
• Rock
• Music

Informations

• Publié par: Jawbone Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781911036388
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

Contents
Introduction
Part One
1 Introduce Yourself
2 New Beginnings
3 Introducing Mike Bordin
4 Sharp Young Men
5 Faith. No Man
6 The First Faith No More Show
7 Search For A Singer, Seeking Guitarist
8 ‘Chuck’s Cool, Chuck Doesn’t Give A Shit.’
9 We Care A Lot
10 Faith No More Signed
11 On The Road
12 The Making Of Introduce Yourself
13 Starting From Scratch
14 Further Down The Road
15 Blow It All Away
Part Two
16 Finding Patton
17 From Out Of Nowhere
18 ‘War Pigs’ And Other Covers
19 The Real Thing
20 The Morning After
21 These Walls Won’t Keep Them Out
22 What Is It?—The Making Of ‘Epic’
23 The Unseen Glitter Of Life
24 MTV Plugged
25 The Split Second Of Divinity
26 Bungle Grind
27 Faith No More And Genre Fluidity
28 The Chile Connection
29 Not Funny Anymore
Part Three
30 The World Expects A Pose
31 The Patton Effect
32 Sex, Drugs, And Roddy Bottum
33 ‘Jizzlobber’ And Jim
34 ‘Commercial Suicide’
35 The Making Of ‘Midlife Crisis’
36 The World Is Yours
37 Use Your Disillusion
38 The Cankers And Medallions
39 Everything’s Ruined
40 Exile In Bearsville
41 Another Guitarist Search
42 Running Twice As Fast To Stay In The Same Place
43 Rock, Hudson, Rock
44 Ashes to Ashes
45 Last Cup Of Sorrow
Part Four
46 Before Nu-Metal Was New, It Was Faith No More
47 It Won’t Begin Until You Make It End
48 Absolute Zero
49 We Served You Well, Now We’re Coming Back
50 Rise Of The Fall
51 Unconquered Sun
52 Chuck Mosley
53 Conclusion: The Sigils And The Signs
Plate Section
Acknowledgements
Notes and Sources

Introduction
In 1991, there was a new, pungent taste for coffee connoisseurs in the UK. High-end beverage merchants Taylors of Harrogate imported a kilo of kopi luwak —and the drink proved a hit with coffee drinkers and thrill-seekers, mostly due to the abhorrent appeal of its particular production. The coffee is produced when civets in Indonesia sneak into coffee plantations and eat the choicest berries. These solitary, nocturnal, cat-like creatures cannot fully digest the coffee bean, so they excrete it—and the bean, now enriched by enzymatic reactions and musk from the cat’s anal glands, is collected to make an astringent and wonderfully rare coffee. By the second decade of the new millennium, the popularity and price of the faecally fermented beans was such that production now took place on an industrial scale across Southeast Asia, with civets poached and caged in dreadful conditions and force-fed coffee beans to excrete premium coffee in commercially feasible quantities.
Since 1983, Faith No More have ingested elements of almost every musical style, and flavoured them with their own musical musk to produce seven studio albums—music like no other. Like kopi luwak , the peculiar production method gives their music a dark astringency, a marvellous macabre mordancy. And, as with the coffee beans, attempts since to reproduce Faith No More’s music on a larger scale have resulted in horrible suffering—and some truly terrible music.
Reproducing Faith No More’s music has proved impossible because the circumstances that created it are impossible to replicate. They started out burning incense and burning through singers and guitarists, out of time and out of place in San Francisco’s late hardcore scene. From their early incarnations as Sharp Young Men and then Faith. No Man, the band adopted an anti-rockist ethos, playing concerts as one-off events, playing shows with no singer, playing with different band members from show to show, and playing ten-minute songs, repeating the same cyclical riffs over and over again.
Faith No More, in various incarnations, have had seven vocalists and twelve guitar players, but the band has had a consistent core. Keyboard player Roddy Bottum, drummer Mike Bordin, and bassist Bill Gould have been in place since just before the band’s first show as Faith No More in October 1983.
‘Mike, Billy, and I created something,’ says Bottum. ‘We created a style, a vision, and a sound that was different and unique and really emotional. It came from a friendship and a chemistry we had as kids.’
Others would contribute to the style over almost four decades, including Jim Martin’s guitar crunch and Chuck Mosley’s punk-meets-hip-hop vocals; and then, from 1988, Mike Patton’s vocal versatility, Oulipian lyrics, and musical assuredness gave the band’s kopi luwak an even greater force. But Bottum, Bordin, and Gould remain at the heart of everything they do.
From recording their first album in 1985, Faith No More always strove to do it themselves. ‘We were a bunch who didn’t fit anywhere else,’ says Bordin. ‘We were never going to find a formula and just coast.’
Conflict often ensued. Sometimes the band wanted it both ways. They were indies aligned to a major label, underdogs on the biggest rock tour of the era alongside Guns N’ Roses and Metallica, and moaning about the music industry while all over MTV.
The band’s all-about-the-music ethos did not preclude colourful rock’n’roll decadence and debauchery. Punch-ups between band members, sackings via fax, car crashes, scatological pranks, the hiring and firing of Courtney Love, and heroin addiction all feature in the Faith No More odyssey. Many of these incidents were provoked by a distinct absence of clarity in band communication. Band members aired their grievances in a succession of music magazine interviews, rather than speaking to each other. Faith No More’s musical output could be just as obtuse. ‘We had an anything goes approach. We like to surprise ourselves,’ says Gould.
That approach provoked skirmishes, instability, and a constant state of crisis. It prompted sackings, a split, and a decade of silence. It produced ‘Epic’, Angel Dust , and an unlikely comeback. ‘Even if it wasn’t the right way to go, we used our senses as guides,’ says Gould. ‘We trusted the outcome, and that outcome revealed itself to us in different ways in different stages of our lives.’
The Faith No More journey takes in 1970s suburban Los Angeles ennui, the 80s music underground of San Francisco, and the 90s MTV alternative music gold rush. It is the story of Faith No More as autarkic outsiders, as buzz band, as heavy metal miscasts, as reluctant arena act, as anaphasic relics, and as comeback kings for a day, fools for a lifetime.

1
Introduce Yourself
The first steps of Faith No More’s journey took place far away from the scuzzy San Francisco clubs where they played their early shows. Figuratively far, but literally only a few hundred miles down Highway 101 to Los Angeles, the Faith No More story begins in the city’s gilded Hancock Park neighbourhood. Bill Gould and Roddy Bottum, both the scions of successful legal families, grew up in the affluent enclave where Mae West, Ava Gardner, and Clark Gable had lived in Hollywood’s Golden Age.
As his full name of Roswell Christopher Bottum III suggests, Roddy’s family history was as colourful as that of his childhood neighbourhood. The Bottums arrived in the United States from England before the Revolutionary wars, shortening the name Longbottum on the way. Via the battle of Bunker Hill and spells in Vermont, New York, and Wisconsin, Roddy’s branch of the clan eventually settled in South Dakota in the late nineteenth century. His great-grandfather, Joseph H. Bottum, was practising law when South Dakota was admitted to statehood in 1889, and was then the state’s first register of deeds and a state senator. Roddy’s grandfather, Roswell Christopher Bottum, continued the family business, enjoying a long legal career while also a member of the state legislature, where he served as Speaker Pro Tem of the House of Representatives.
Roswell Christopher Bottum II, known more simply as Ros, studied (and boxed) at the University of Notre Dame before his move to law school in southern California in the late 1950s took the Bottum name west. He later established a successful legal practice specialising in medical malpractice.
It would be tempting to see Roddy’s rock music career as a rebellion against a family lineage of lawyers and legislators, but he grew up largely unaware of the full extent of this aspect of his rich genealogy, taking more pride in the even more unusual achievements in his maternal family history. In 1931, Roddy’s maternal grandparents left Sioux Falls with all their belongings, and Roddy’s infant uncle Billy, and pitched up in the remote 231-person town of Wall. Armed with a $3,000 inheritance, a fresh pharmacy degree, and the desire to set up on his own in a small town with a Catholic church, Ted Hustead bought the town’s only drug store, Wall Drug. It was the intervention of Roddy’s grandmother Dorothy almost five years later, not long after the birth of Roddy’s mother Mary, that sealed the Hustead and Wall Drug names in American tourist folklore. Kept awake during an attempted afternoon nap by the incessant rumble of traffic heading to the newly opened Mount Rushmore monument sixty miles to the west, she alighted on the idea of offering free cups of water to the weary travellers. The real key to the store’s unique success was marketing, and she also came up with the idea for a sign and the slogan, ‘Get a soda, Get a root beer, Turn next corner, Just as near, To Highway 16 & 14, Free Ice Water, Wall Drug.’
The store became a thriving emporium and more signs followed, turning the business into a phenomenon. A family friend brought them to Europe during World War II, and they became a popular remembrance of home for US servicemen stationed worldwide. Soon the store—now run by Roddy’s cousins—was attracting 1.5 million visitors a year. ‘My real legacy is that my mom’s family started Wall Drug, a crazy tourist attraction next to the Badlands that based its advertising structure on the concept of free water,’ he says.
Roddy inherited the Bottum family names, if not the paternal interest in law or