Found at: http://www.musicmanic.com/reportage/reportage.asp?ID=236

Bungle Mania
by Stefanie Kalem/Tampa Weekly Planet
8/11/99 1:06:54 PM

A tour rider is the part of an act's contract in which they demand
whatever it is that they need to make their stay comfortable. Anything is
possible, from the lowliest of underage garage bands requesting free
soda-pop to the notorious tales of Van Halen's "no brown M&Ms" ultimatum.
You can tell a lot about a band by its tour rider, too. Wilco requests a
puppy at every gig; For Brian Setzer's recent Performing Arts Center
appearance, the former Stray Cat required several packs of white wife-beater
undershirts (size large) and a sampling of the local microbrew. 
What rider requirements accompany avant-rockers Mr. Bungle, who've been
known to perform dressed as vegetables, performing half of their set in
Spanish? Beef jerky? Livestock? Perhaps a deck of cards, with all the aces and
eights removed beforehand?

"It's more of a subtractive rider than an additive one," says Mr. Bungle
guitarist Trey Spruance. "...We just demand tons of technical things that
are sort of unreasonable, and use the typical sort of creature comforts of a
rock band to barter ... As long as we can have U47s (vintage tube-condenser
microphones) at the front of the stage, we'll eat fuckin' dog food."

The U47 is a very expensive piece of equipment, but Mr. Bungle is the
Cinderella story of experimental music. Though many folks assume the band is
a side project of Faith No More vocalist Mike Patton, the truth is that Mr.
Bungle formed in Eureka, California, in 1985, four years prior to Patton's
joining FNM; in fact, it was a Mr. Bungle demo that got him the gig.
 
At the time, Mr. Bungle consisted of Spruance, Patton, bassist Trevor
Dunn and drummer Jed Watts. Since then, the band has gone through a number
of personnel changes, but the core of Dunn, Spruance and Patton has remained
constant, completing the current lineup in 1989 with the addition of drummer
Danny Heifetz & tenor sax player Clinton 'Bär' McKinnon. Shortly after Faith
No More's chart-topping success with The Real Thing, Mr. Bungle was signed
to Warner Bros., partly on the strength of its Northern California
following, partly because of Patton's association with FNM. And that's how a
group of California post-adolescents with a jones for slicing, dicing, and
reconfiguring anything and everything from heavy metal to polka music ended
up with a self-titled, major label debut, co-produced by avant-jazzer John
Zorn.

That debut, a heavy-metal mindfuck garnished with ska, swing, and funk,
was creepy from the core on out to the cover art, which featured an
old-timey fairgrounds rendering of a rather sinister-looking clown. This
carnival of horrors theme has been picked up in recent years, from Stephen
King's It right up to those white-boy jesters of rap-metal shtick, Insane
Clown Posse.

"I won't detract and say they're ripping us off," says Spruance of the
Posse, "because if they are, it's something that happened to us 10 years
ago. I don't feel particularly violated or anything ... like, what, did we
corner the market on macabre clowns?"

Mr. Bungle's second official full-length release, the self-produced,
deep sea-themed Disco Volante, was four years in the making. More focused,
yet still more schizophrenic than ever, Disco Volante was a critical smash,
an all-out noise record with its fingers in every musical pie imaginable,
and tongue planted firmly cheek. The boundaries between musical styles had
officially melted for Mr. Bungle, and more and more fingers pointed at
Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa as the band's forefathers.

The latest release, California, is a different story entirely. This ain't
no Eagles record, but the theme is obvious, and the opener 'Sweet Charity'
sounds like the brothers Wilson covering 'Miserlou,' backed by Martin Denny.

One could say that California is a bit more, well, listenable, but there's a
distinct possibility that it may be the audience who's changed, not the
band.

"It depends on who's listening," Spruance says with a laugh. "It's just
sort of easier for us now to get away with stuff. In a way, ... for us, this
was a pop record. But as it is filtered through us, naturally, it¹s not
going to come out as a typical idea of pop music. ... I figured it was more
challenging to go in a kind of more melodic and super-overproduced
direction. That would be more challenging to our fans, I think, than a
half-hour of static."

Indeed, Mr. Bungle had opted to limit its psychopathic gear-shifting to
two or three genres per song. The band is letting its subtle side show,
allowing for each item in the arsenal - noise, doo-wop, lounge, metal,
be-bop jazz, big band jazz, Zappa jazz, hip-hop, funk, disco, pop,
all-over-the-world beat, rockabilly - to take a bow and get a round of applause. 
Nowhere is this new sophistication more apparent than on 'Pink 
Cigarette,' a melancholy, doo-wop confection with a Top 40 feel - think
Wham's 'Careless Whisper' - and a touch of snake-charmer flute. The catch?
The lovelorn narrator ends the song in suicide, as the toot of a clown horn
sounds spasmodically, terminating in the flatline of a heart monitor.
 
Mike Patton also showcases his formidable pipes in a different way 
whereas previously, most of his vocal duties consisted of grunts, groans,
and other stripes of extraordinary noisemaking, he now croons more often
than not, thus making the lyrics more easily discernible. And though none of
the band's lyricists quite reach the loose-limbed poetic height of its
musical ancestor, Captain Beefheart, the ironically Esquivelian space-lounge
joint 'The Holy Filament,' features a nicely minimalist, anti-tech rant:
The legend of modernity
The phosphenes explode
God's eternal strobe
Through the holy filament
Graven image

As usual, the release of this latest record has critics scrambling for
their music maps, trying to come up with a formula for a band that has none.

By Spruance's admission, the band's individual tastes are so eclectic, they
hardly even agree among themselves. For example, he's been listening to
"French electro-acoustic music ... mostly sounds of things like rain, and
little girls giving speeches while bats' wings are flapping in the
background ... It's not everybody's cup of tea, not even our band members'."

In addition, Mr. Bungle avoids listening to bands, as they are
traditionally thought of, as much as possible, adhering to the same
subtractive principles as guide the drafting of their tour riders.

"You end up with a lot more once you start subtracting," says Spruance. "There's 
so much fuckin' music! God, you cut out the bands, and a whole
world of music opens up."