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Mr. Bungle

I remember sitting in the dark in my parents basement, thirteen or fourteen years old, staying up late and watching the french-canadian equivalent of MTV (MusiquePlus). They used to have an alternative music show playing at midnight back then called Nu Musik. They would play some incredibly obscure stuff and I remember seeing the video for Mr. Bungle's Travolta (or Quote Unquote as it would later be called to avoid legal issues). This was the first time I heard the name and it stuck with me. I remember thinking it was quite weird, leather zipper masks, black lights and fluorescent colors, but I quickly forgot the name of the song. I loved strange indie music already back then, but my musical tastes were still in their formative years. I made a mental note and promised myself to find it again one day. It was only three years later during a field trip to Washington DC that this band came back into my life with a serious impact. Some other student on the bus knew I liked weird things and wanted to out-weird me and pulled out Mr. Bungle's first eponymous album, the one with the creepy clown face lighting a match (from Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children by Louapre and Sweetman). I immediately recognized the name and told him of the video I had seen and that I wanted to make sure it was on this album. Surely enough it was the first track there. My friend went ahead and related the story that his smaller cousin loved the recording, calling it the cassette with the farting man (he thought it was hilarious and was the only part he wanted to hear). I found a music store in Washington during our trip and I managed to find the album on cassette. I listened to it non-stop on the way back to Montreal and can pretty much say it was the soundtrack to my life for the next couple of years. I listened to it so much the tape eventually disintegrated.

I loved the way the tunes would relentlessly switch from one style to the other every second or so. It was my first experience with songs longer than five minutes. I loved everything about them, the samples, the dirty lyrics, the surreal imagery, the carnival mood, Patton's vocal ability (the way he could go from beautiful to ugly in a split second has always amazed me) even the more experimental field recordings. I never once skipped the long train sounds at the end of side one! Not once! I remember confusing producer John Zorn (his Naked City, I would later find out was a huge influence on Mr. Bungle and pretty much all of Mike Patton's projects) for Frank Zappa (both names started with a "Z" ok!? What did I know!?).

Me and my friends at the time started obsessing about this band, we would analyze the songs and spotted all the smallest details, heck we could probably have written a thesis about them had we wanted to (instead of boasting about our knowledge of all things Bungle - the moment I found out Patton was also the lead singer behind Faith No More was such a revelation it bordered on an epiphany)! But by the time we knew the record inside out, we truly started believing they would never put out anything else ever again. So when Disco Volante finally came out, it felt like a godsend. Unwrapping the tape (yup, no CDs for me yet) and placing it into my stereo system was almost a religious event for me. As time went by, my fascination slowly died out, the release of California almost had the same effect on me as the first two releases, but Patton slowly started being much more productive at the time and the quality of his work started to vary greatly. I loved most of it, but the initial charm he and Mr. Bungle had slowly disappeared as many new bands came into my life. I even sold all their records when I moved to Sweden back in 2003 (and would only buy Disco Volante two years later while on vacation and finding it new for under ten bucks in a store). Mr. Bungle however, along with the Pixies and The Residents, will always hold a special place in my heart. I don't listen to these albums very often anymore, once or twice a year at the most, but every time I do, the weirdness that once assaulted my ears and opened me up to a whole new world of sound now inspire nostalgia.

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