Ozzy Osbourne is “That Thing at the Door”

June 16, 2026June 16, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

“There’s this thing at the door asking for you?” the brother of Terence Michael Joseph “Geezer” Butler informed him.

“What do you mean this thing?” Geezer asked.

“You’ll see.”

Geezer didn’t get the joke, until he answered the door, and he saw a rain-drenched man with no hair on his head standing on his family’s doorstop. The man at the door had no shoes or socks on his feet, and he was wearing a gown that Geezer assumed was a pair of overalls that the man’s dad probably wore at a factory job. The man also had a chimney brush over his shoulder and a single sneaker on a dog leash. “I’m Ozzy,” the man at the door said. Geezer would later say he thought the man “was not the full shilling. (AKA off his rocker/crazy)” Yet he invited him in anyway — and changed rock history forever.

We can only guess how this interaction proceeded from there, as the two men tried to feel each other out, but Geezer was intrigued enough to invite this disheveled man into his rock band Rare Breed. The thing standing at Geezer’s door posted an ad in the Birmingham musical instruments store that read “Ozzy Zig Needs a Gig.” Geezer saw the ad, went to Ozzy’s house, Ozzy wasn’t home, so Geezer left his home address — and John “Ozzy Zig” Osbourne, or as we now know him Ozzy Osbourne, showed up later as that thing at Geezer’s door.

Geezer, like Ozzy, grew up in a low income, working class neighborhood, and they both had six siblings, but the Butlers did not experience the level of poverty the Osbourne’s had. Those of us who grew up in similar neighborhoods know that we don’t meet many who are lower on the socioeconomic totem pole, and when we did, we looked down on them. Geezer and the Butlers were poor, but Ozzy grew up without basic comforts like indoor plumbing, and he and his siblings often used coats for bedding. As Geezer’s brother alluded, the Butlers probably viewed Ozzy as a lower life form. His appearance suggested he couldn’t even afford a decent pair of shoes.

When Geezer met Ozzy, he had a predicament. He had always been an avid reader with a strong background in English literature, especially Shakespeare, so writing song lyrics came easily for him, but he was not a strong, confident singer. He needed someone to deliver his lyrics to an audience. He had a message, in other words, but he needed a messenger to sell it properly. When Geezer imagined his messenger, he probably dreamt up a Robert Plant, Rod Stewart rock-god type who could seduce listeners into falling in love with Geezer’s lyrics. Every songwriter who can’t sing, dreams up bullet points for the singer of their songs, and we have to imagine that an overwhelming majority of them would’ve rejected “that thing at the door” on appearance alone. Is that what intrigued Geezer? As we now know, Geezer was not what we call a conventional songwriter, so Geezer may have thought that this thing at the door might have been able to attract an audience in the manner the lobster boy and the bearded lady attract an audience to the county fair?

We could say that Geezer was desperate, but by historical accounts, Geezer only had one other lead singer prior to Ozzy, and that man quit Rare Breed once he heard how bad the band was. So, Geezer didn’t exactly exhaust all possibilities before meeting Ozzy. Geezer dresses this decision up by saying he was blown away by Ozzy’s audition, and that might be a fact, but it’s more likely that Geezer didn’t think he’d find a better lead singer in Birmingham, and his aspirations likely didn’t extend beyond the city at the time. He probably enjoyed seeing Ozzy’s unfiltered confidence and he suspected that Ozzy’s economic limitations and resultant gratitude meant that Ozzy would show up and help Geezer build and grow, regardless how bad the rest of the band was. Geezer’s suggestion that he could see Ozzy’s talent from the very beginning not only compliments his lifelong friend, but it suggests Geezer was gifted at spotting talent. My guess is Geezer wasn’t lying, but he’s rewritten this memory in his mind so thoroughly that this is how he genuinely remembers it. We can speculate further, but at the end of that debate we’d be forced to acknowledge that Geezer obviously made the right choice, as the two of them joined forces to create something no one else tried before, and it worked so well that we still talk about them almost sixty years later.

Within two years of meeting the “thing at the door”, Geezer and Ozzy would be joined by two members of a band called Mythology, a guitarist missing the tips of his middle and ring fingers, named Tony Iommi, and an anatomically complete and relatively well groomed drummer named Bill Ward. They would change the band name from Rare Breed to Polka Tulk Blues Band, Polka Tulk, then Earth, and then Black Sabbath.

In case you don’t know the four of them would go on to sell roughly 60–68 million albums (including pure sales, streams, etc.) when they were all in Black Sabbath together. The music of Black Sabbath would also influence the creation of heavy metal and later the heavy, sludge side of the Seattle sound sometimes called grunge. They’ve also been called one of the influential rock bands of all time, and it all started with Geezer meeting “this thing” at the door.

***

“So, this Geezer Butler fella got lucky,” you might say. “He had one of the most influential front men in rock music history just show up at his door one day. That’s luck.” It’s true, undeniably true, that luck and/or chance played a role, but how often do these chance meetings happen in music? We could also say that it wasn’t exactly a chance meeting, as Ozzy posted an ad, and they both met before as fanatical fans of The Beatles. Still, it can be frustrating to learn that luck, and right place/right time elements play a role in defining history, but it happens. The counterpoint to this argument is that we have to be good to get lucky.

They, Ozzy and Geezer, also got lucky that their band, Rare Breed, broke up when it did, because another band named Mythology broke up at around the same time. The guitarist and the drummer, of that band, Tony Iommi and Bill Ward, were looking for another band to join at the same time that Ozzy and Geezer were looking for a guitarist and a drummer. (Geezer switched to bass when he saw how talented Iommi was.) Ozzy and Geezer just happened to find a guitarist who is now considered a master of riff‑craft, creating heavy, memorable guitar lines that became the blueprint for metal, and they happened to land a drummer who was a jazz‑trained, gig‑tested drummer whose unique style became a core part of the band’s identity.

For all of the talent that existed in Black Sabbath, Geezer Butler was the conceptual architect and the primary lyricist behind the dark themes that defined early heavy metal. His style was heavy and melodic at the same time, and he was considered unusually expressive for the era. His bass lines often acted as a second lead instrument, weaving around Tony Iommi’s riffs rather than simply following them. Geezer also developed a rhythmic partnership with drummer Bill Ward to create the distinctive “swing” that underpinned many of the early Sabbath classics.

As Geezer described the relationship that would develop between he and Ozzy, Ozzy created vocal melodies during the band’s jam‑based writing sessions, and Geezer would write the lyrics to those vocal melodies. So, they used their talents, gifts, and creative energy to land in the right place and right time of music history.

If we examine Black Sabbath on an historical timeline, we could also say they got lucky to land in a right time/right place hole in time where no one had ever tried to make gloomy and depressing, as opposed to sad, music before. Yet, when we read the quotes from the members, they didn’t seek out a different form of music to carve out their own niche in the industry, and they didn’t plan on being pioneers, it was just who they were, where they came from, and what they knew. (All of the members of Black Sabbath grew up in the aftermath of WWII, and the war-torn, devastation influenced the gloomy themes of their sound and music that just happened to appeal to a large contingent in war-torn Brits of that era.)

In the era of upbeat harmonies, sunny melodies, and that breezy optimism sunshine pop, sunny melodies, and harmony‑rich 60s pop of The Beach Boys, The Monkees, and The Mamas & The Papas, Black Sabbath was viewed as a dumb idea by the fourteen labels who rejected them. The market is so stratified that we usually accept the idea that there’s no such thing as a dumb idea, but those labels all agreed that the gloomy, bleak, slow, and depressing music of Black Sabbath was a stretch too far. The basic sales pitch behind Geezer Butler’s presentation was that in a world that wants to listen to music that makes them smile, we have created a form of music that is so depressing we might lose a percentage of our fanbase to manic depression. In a world of feel-good music, we’ve created feel-bad. So, whaddya think?

For all of the luck, the right time/right place elements, and everything else that defined them, Black Sabbath shouldn’t have worked, not to the degree that some relatively anonymous writer would be writing about them nearly sixty years later. Even a qualified, quality writer would have trouble properly capturing how unlikely their success was. These were four kids who grew up in various levels of poverty who believed that the pinnacle of success would involve them playing in local pubs that would hopefully pay them enough for them to be able to afford a decent meal and a couple of beers to follow. These guys had no formal musical training, absolutely no industry connections, and they decided to play a style of music that didn’t exist yet — slow, heavy, ominous, and socially bleak and depressing.

We can imagine that their immediate success shocked the 14 major labels who rejected Black Sabbath before their first album was recorded and everyone else who worked with Sabbath before their first album was completed, but no one more surprised than the four members of the group. They knew they worked well together, and they gelled to create the type of sound they were seeking, but the idea that it clicked and/or appealed to listeners to the point that it reached #8 on 13 on the UK Albums Chart and #23 on the US Billboard Top LPs shortly after its US release stunned the four fellas. They didn’t really have to “pay their dues” in a relative sense. They compiled a selection of five songs for their first album Black Sabbath, recorded them in one 12-hour session, and they released it. They were just happy that a label signed them, and they were actually able to record an album. That, to that point, was beyond their expectations. The idea that it would chart with no radio play, combined with the critics dismissing it as a crude, simplistic, or derivative effort was beyond their comprehension. Another source notes that Black Sabbath remained on the charts for over a year and sold one million copies in its first run (US + UK combined).

All four members have said, in various ways, that they couldn’t believe it when some people initially started treating them like a real band, then when their album charted it scared them a little, because they didn’t know what to do with that. When they were asked to tour the United States of America, it wasn’t mild surprise, as none of them knew enough to know logical progressions of this sort. They were genuinely stunned. Ozzy described his genuine reaction to this insanity by saying he was constantly waiting for someone to tap him on the shoulder and say “There’s been a mistake, a huge mistake.” Tony Iommi said, “We never thought it would go anywhere. Our goal was to avoid factory work, and we thought we could do so with a few gigs here and there.” Ozzy said that their goal was to eventually get in pubs, so that the pubs would pay them enough to drink their beer. “We never thought we’d get out of Birmingham,” Ozzy added. Bill Ward said, “We didn’t know what we were doing — and suddenly it worked.” Geezer said, “We were just four poor kids. We didn’t think it would last.” All four members were from lower class to absolute poverty, as Geezer said, and that probably led to the level of desperation necessary to make whatever they did work.

Anyone who has ever read anything about the recording industry of this era, knows how this chapter of the Black Sabbath saga ends. As poor and uneducated as the four fellas who comprised this band were, in general, they probably knew less about the recording industry, recording industry contracts, and the manner in which their management team should be handling their financial matters. They wanted to focus on creating the music and let management take care of the financial matters, and their creations 4.9 million copies of the first album, and the second album, Paranoid, sold between 10-12 million copies, by global sales estimates, they were almost as broke as they were before they recorded their first album. They signed a horrible contract, because they were so elated that someone wanted them to sign them that they probably thought if they haggled over the details of the contract, the management team might not sign them.

“We were one of the biggest bands in the world,” Geezer said, “and we were penniless.” One example cited stated that Black Sabbath were paid $250,000 to play at a 1974 California Jam festival, and each member ended up receiving $1,000. As stated, management teams and recording labels ripped off most of the artists of the era, including the Rolling Stones and The Beatles, but music historians suggest that Black Sabbath’s management disputes were some of the ugliest and most damaging in rock history. When the fog cleared, the members discovered that not only were they almost as broke as they were when they started, but their cars, homes, and other personal possessions weren’t theirs. In the most crushing blow, they then discovered that their music, that which they worked their tails off to create, hone, and perfect wasn’t even theirs. After years of litigation and lawsuits, it is suspected that the four members may have recovered 10-20% of the money their manager stole.

Black Sabbath worked for a whole host of reasons, of course, but they were dumb enough and desperate enough to make it work on a certain level. They had a Beatles-obsessed lead singer, who learned the art of melody from his beloved mop tops, a Shakespeare-obsessed lyricist, a guitarist who was missing the most important finger tips required to play guitar, and a jazz drummer who helped develop a new form of musical expression. Their eventual success suggest that some ideas are such a load of crap that if it’s gathered together, it could be used as fertilizer. The four members didn’t know enough about the system to know how to succeed in it, and they got lucky. The fact that they got so lucky that they’re unicorns, should not be discounted here. Most of us should spend most of our young life trying to figure out the system works to see how we can succeed in it, but some of us weren’t built like that, and some of the ideas we have might appear like “that thing at the door” to others, but the question that we should ask ourselves, is a question I’m sure Geezer Butler asked himself on the day he met Ozzy Osbourne, ‘what would happen if I invited this man in?’ What would happen if we invited that weird, strange, and just plain different idea in and explored the possibilities? If we drop an adamant no to all of that, we’ll never know. The story of Black Sabbath teaches us that some of the times it’s better to say no, unless...

Dead and Gone: The Rock Stars of Yesteryear

August 20, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

Some of my favorite artists are dead now, and some of them are just gone. What do we do when one of our favorite artists die. When they die at twenty-nine-years-old, it’s a time for mourning, and a time to think of what they could’ve been. When they’ve already been, and they haven’t been relevant for over forty years, and we learn that they had grandchildren, and in some cases great-grandchildren, it feels a little odd to mourn their passing. They gave us some great music, and perhaps the greatest homage is to simply listen to what they did and appreciate it for what it was way back then. It’s also weird to go back to their catalog and realize they haven’t come out with new music in thirty years. When we listen to them often enough, or they manage to keep their name out there is various ways, it can seem like they were putting out music as far back as a couple years ago.

Before dying, or finally leaving the stage after their fourth or fifth reunion tour, some of them braved “the age thing” and put out a new album. We went to their concert, because we loved them so much at one time, and we knew they were going to play their new songs, because they wanted to sell their last gasp album, but we wanted to hear their classics … until we heard them, and saw them sing that song we loved so much forty years ago. The reason that song was so compelling is that it was fun, obviously immature, and a rock-your-buns off classic. After the euphoria of hearing our favorite song from them died out, we realized that the man onstage is a seventy-year-old trying to recapture what made them “special” in their twenties.

***

Dating back to an era so long ago that I now feel so old writing about it, I played the song Toys in the Attic in my car so often that my girlfriend’s three-year-old daughter could sing the refrain. She probably had a vocabulary of less than 300 words, but she knew those lyrics from that song. I also named my first dog Tyler. Seeing as how this was between their creative peak, the Toys in the Attic and Rocks era, and their Permanent Vacation commercial peak, I might have been one of the few who had Aerosmith in his tape deck nonstop. Now that they’re done as artists, we can look back and think they should’ve been so much more. Would their creative output have doubled if they decided not to experiment with drugs? That’s impossible to know and probably unfair. Even if they stayed clean throughout, they probably would’ve experienced creative highs and lows, and how many relatively clean artists came out with five straight top-to-bottom incredible albums? I can think of two. There was a time when I thought Aerosmith might be one of them, the elite of the elite. They weren’t, but I still think they could’ve been so much better if they didn’t fall prey to chasing the dragon. Yet, that was the nature of the beast, back then.

*******

Was there a rock artist who did more with less than John Michael “Ozzy” Osborne? We all know the icon that Ozzy became, the charismatic frontman who could put on some theatrical shows, but when we strip those elements away, we have a relatively untalented man who ruled rock music for over 50 years. He didn’t have great vocal range. Even his most ardent fans would admit that while Ozzy could sing, and he had one of the most distinctive voices in rock, his vocal range was extremely limited. His appearance, though suited for the role of a “Prince of Darkness”, was not what anyone would call pin-up material. According to his primary lyric writer early on in his solo career, Bob Daisley, Ozzy Osborne came up with melodies, but he didn’t write lyrics. Even with all that, I had friends and family who were diehard fans, and they said, “There’s Ozzy, and then there’s everyone else.”

There was no one quite like Ozzy Osbourne before he became “Ozzy!” He basically created this character, embellished it, and built it into something that no one will ever try to do again.

He was a one-of-a-kind, charismatic showman who could dwarf just about anyone who stood on stage with him, but if we strip away the legendary aura that surrounds him, we have a giant in the industry who wasn’t very talented.

As a young man, Ozzy met a gifted lyricist named Terence Michael Joseph “Geezer” Butler, and they invited a guitarist named Tommy Iommi to join them in a band they eventually called Black Sabbath. Tommy ended up writing the music for the band, and Geezer Butler wrote 95% of the lyrics for the Black Sabbath songs. Ozzy did, according to those who’ve worked with him, have a gift for creating melodies for the songs that others wrote, and some say these melodies were often one of the reasons the songs and albums proved so successful. He’d often hum to the music, and his writers would write accordingly. So, John Michael “Ozzy” Osborne didn’t have dynamic vocal range, he couldn’t write lyrics, and wasn’t very good looking, but he ended up playing a prominent role in music that sold over 100 million albums. He was inducted in the U.S. and UK Hall of Fame, and he was honored with stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and the Birmingham Walk of Stars. No one will deny that Ozzy was charismatic and a great showman, but he and his wife Sharon’s greatest talents may have involved spotting talented individuals and collaborating with them. To this day, I look at the man, listen to him talk, and consider his oeuvre, and I still cannot believe that he succeeded to the degree he did.

***

One of Ozzy Osbourne’s writers, Ian Fraser Kilmister, AKA Lemmy, would go onto form his own bands, Hawkwind and Motorhead. Lemmy Kilmister was another shouldn’t have been. As he proved with Ozzy, Lemmy could write lyrics. Other than that, he may have been further removed from pin-up boy than Ozzy. Those of us who try to figure out what women find an attractive man are often incorrect, but my guess is that few women would ever find Lemmy Kilmister an attractive man.

The music of Motorhead had harmonies, but they would never be confused with the pleasing harmonies of The Beatles or an Air Supply. When we hear him sing, we imagine that that’s probably what zombies would sound like, if they existed. This is probably the sound that vocal cords, damaged by death, might sound like. If the listener prefers the pleasing sounds of a David Bowie or Thom Yorke harmoniously developing a relationship with the music, they probably wouldn’t understand how others could prefer Lemmy.

He has the type of voice, similar in some ways to Tom Waits, though Waits found a way to make his gravel, growl, and guttural vocals harmonious and beautiful. We could also compare Lemmy’s gargling motor oil vocals with Captain Beefheart’s fragmented expressive vocal stylings, but Lemmy was more about brutish attitude and utter defiance than artistic technique.

“What is that?” is our reaction to hearing Lemmy sing for the first time. We might even consider it so bad as to be a joke, but Lemmy carved out an ever-expanding fanbase that put him in a relatively successful level that I doubt anyone would’ve predicted at the nascent of his career. He was also not a great interview for the softhearted types who favor artists that say wonderful and nice things.

There were no A&R guys in Lemmy’s camp early on in his career, and he had to almost do it all himself. I’m sure he had some undocumented assistance throughout his career, but by almost all accounts, Lemmy had to do it all himself. He was a self-made man. He expressed his disappointment in this regard when his career was eventually commemorated, and company men lined his audience. Lemmy did the opposite of thanking them for being there. “Where were you guys?” he asked them. We have to have some sympathy for those A&R guys though, because how could they sell this man to the public? If Lemmy wasn’t the most original and unique musical artists you’ve ever heard/seen, then you know far more about this world than I do. If Lemmy wasn’t an original, he gave new meaning to the Oscar Wilde quote, “Be yourself, everyone else is taken.”

*******

Billy Joel was Billy Joel for those of us who were young in the 70s and 80s. He was so ubiquitous that we never really considered him a man who just happened to be an artist. We’ve all heard about how many records the man sold, and we just kind of yawned. Every time he cranked out another song, we all heard too often on the radio, it was but another Billy Joel song that we loved, but it left you with a “What do you want me to do with this?” response. When we’re there, in the moment, we don’t recognize how hard it is to keep creating great songs. We all thought it was just something Billy Joel did. Some men wash dishes for a living, others prepare taxes for others, and Billy Joel writes songs that stick in your head like peanut butter.

Seeing these songs chronicled in the And So it Goes documentary on Billy Joel, as opposed to hearing it in yet another greatest hits compilation, gave us a new perspective on this man. We watched it with a “I forgot about that song” and “That’s right, he wrote that one too” reaction that struck me as if I never considered that he wrote all of those songs. Billy Joel was so prolific for about twenty-two years, at a near album a year pace, that he defined a generation.

Billy Joel was also trapped in the 70s and 80s when we could say there were so many great artists coming out with new music nearly every year. Even in that vein, Billy Joel was one of the few pillars of commercial dominance. He is the fourth bestselling solo artist in U.S. history, his Greatest Hits I and II still ranks as one of the bestselling albums of all time, and he’s in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The market was so stratified back then that we were all satisfied; the pop fans, rock fans, punk rockers, new wavers, etc., all had their favorite artists. It was such a prolific era that we can only appreciate in hindsight. I loved it at the time, but it also felt like it was just that way, and it always would be. At the risk of sounding like an old man, I think it’s just different now.

Even after watching And So It Goes, I still wouldn’t put Billy Joel in my personal pantheon of greatest musical artists of all time, but the magnitude of his discography, as displayed in And So it Goes, makes a compelling argument that he was one of the best of his generation, and if you told me you thought that before I saw this documentary, I probably would’ve scoffed at you. My biggest takeaway from this documentary was that this 70s/80s era was just packed with so many great artists coming up with song after song and album after album that we thought this was just the way things would be forever. It hasn’t worked out that way, but what an incredible time it was to be a kid listening to all of that incredible music for the first time. Those artists seemed like machines, but documentaries like this one, and others, remind us that real humans did this, and that we should cherish them for what did for us back then.

Mike Patton: Maestro del Differente

May 16, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

You want to get weird? I’m not talking about the weird music our aunts and uncles might chuckle at or say, “Hey, that’s kinda neat-o.” I’m talking about a strain so close to normal that they might be a little concerned about our mental health when they hear it. “If you think that’s quality music, then I’m probably going to have to edit my perception of you.” I’m talking about a definition of different carved out in a band called Mr. Bungle, then chiseled into with Fantômas, and ultimately destroyed and reconstructed in a project called Moonchild. If you don’t know who I’m talking about, let me introduce you to the outlandish innovations of a bizarre brainchild named Mike Patton. “Isn’t he a one-hit wonder?” a friend of mine asked, decades after Mike Patton became Mike Patton. “Isn’t he the “It’s it what is it?” guy?” I was so stunned that I couldn’t think up an appropriate term for cluelessness. Then, VH1 went ahead and confirmed his uninformed characterization, by listing the band Patton fronted, Faith No More as one of their one-hit wonders of the 80s. I knew most didn’t follow the career of Mike Patton as much as I had, but I was stunned to learn how even those with purported knowledge in the industry could dismiss him in such a manner. I had to adjust my idealistic vision of the world to reconcile it with the reality that if Billboard is your primary resource, Mike Patton and Faith No More were one-hit wonders. To those of us who live in the outer layer, seeking the sometimes freakishly different, “It’s it what is it?” or the single Epic, was only the beginning. Mike Patton discovered he had a talent at a young age, he could mimic bird calls. He found that he could also perform some odd vocal exercises on a flexi disc that his parents gave him. The idea that he could do that probably didn’t separate him much from the four-to-five billion on the planet at the time, and I only include that note to suggest that Mike Patton probably didn’t even know how talented he was at the time either. Yet, the young Mike Patton knew he loved music. He loved it so much that he and his buddies in school, including Trey Spruance and Trevor Dunn, decided to form a band they called Mr. Bungle. They were all around fifteen at the time, and anyone who listens to their early self-produced demos, Bowel of Chiley (1987) and The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny(1986) can hear how young and inexperienced they were. These demos were a chaotic blend of metal, funk, and juvenile humor. It’s so chaotic that it’s as difficult to categorize as it is to listen to, but suffice it to say whatever general definition we might have of traditional music, the music found on those demos is likely the opposite. While devoting himself to Mr. Bungle, and studying English literature at Humboldt State University, Patton worked at a local record store, immersing himself in everything from punk to classical. He obviously kept himself busy during this period, and we can only guess that he was probably as surprised as anyone else when, in 1988, a man named Jim Martin invited Patton to audition for the role of lead singer in Martin’s band Faith No More, after seeing Patton perform in a local gig as the lead singer of Mr. Bungle. Patton won the job after displaying his raw energy and his vocal range for the band. If this were one of those always disappointing biodocs, the moviemakers would depict Martin and the other members of Faith No More as being blown away by Patton’s audition, and they would say something like, “This is obviously the man to lead us into the 90s.” I understand that these movies are often constrained by formulas and time constraints, and they often take shortcuts just to get a point across. I was all prepared to dispel that movie trope by writing that while the members of the band, their management, and the execs thought his audition was great, they heard the demos, and they didn’t think his talent would translate to Faith No More’s furthered success. It turns out, they were so blown away by the talent he displayed in that audition that they did consider him the man to lead them into the 90s. After hearing Mr. Bungle’s early demos, firsthand, all I can say is that must’ve been one hell of an audition.

When he first “discovered” Patton, I imagine Martin returned to his FNM bandmates and said, “I found the guy!” and he handed them the demos. As musicians themselves, I imagine they heard Patton’s talent, but they couldn’t reconcile it with Faith No More’s sound and image, until he auditioned for them. Again, that must’ve been one hell of an audition to blow them away like that. When Patton joined FNM, the music for The Real Thing (1989) was 80-90% written, primarily by keyboardist Roddy Bottum, guitarist Jim Martin, bassist Billy Gould, and drummer Mike Bordin, but Patton wrote all of the lyrics for the original tracks on what happened to be Faith No More’s third album, often crafting those lyrics quickly to fit pre-existing music. Patton contributed vocal melodies and arrangements, that ended up shaping the songs’ final sound. Patton’s contributions transformed the album, and some suggest his input proved instrumental in this album’s eventual success. As popular as FNM’s The Real Thing proved, there’s evidence to suggest that at least some of Patton’s motivations for joining this Epic band was to expand and amplify his beloved Bungle’s reach. If we stop right here, we all have to thank Jim Martin for taking a chance on this nineteen-to-twenty-year-old singer, because at the time, Mr. Bungle was nothing more than a local act in Eureka, California. They had a couple of almost unlistenable self-produced demos to their name, but how many starving artists had that in late-80s California? How many of those same starving artists dreamed of Billboard Top 100 hits, stardom, and vast amounts of money to follow? Anyone who says this is what motivated Mike Patton doesn’t know his ethos or his outlook, yet he was quite proud of what he and his Bungle bros created, and he wanted us all to hear it. In a 1992 Kerrang! interview, Patton admitted he initially viewed Faith No More as a “means to an end,” hoping their success would open doors for Mr. Bungle. As evidence of that, Patton wore a Mr. Bungle T-shirt in the video for Epic, and he handed a Bungle demo to Faith No More’s label, which led to Warner Bros signing Mr. Bungle to a deal in 1989. Again, those of us who heard those demos, in their raw form, would have a tough time believing Warner Brothers would’ve signed Mr. Bungle if Patton didn’t have some standing as the frontman for Faith No More.

This isn’t to suggest that Mike Patton didn’t devote himself to Faith No More, as he devoted an overwhelming amount of his time and energy to the band during their recording and touring of The Real Thing and Angel Dust (1992). He wrote the lyrics and melodies for both albums, toured extensively (over 200 shows for The Real Thing alone), and handled media duties. Mr. Bungle, meanwhile, was more of a side project during this period. Their self-titled debut (1991) was recorded in gaps between Faith No More’s schedule, with Patton contributing vocals, lyrics, and some production alongside bandmates Trey Spruance and Trevor Dunn. In 1995, Mike Patton basically proved that a man could toggle between two bands and produce two great albums for each outfit. He played a pivotal role in both Faith No More’s King for a Day and Mr. Bungle’s Disco Volante. Patton wasn’t the first to play in two bands at once, by any means, but it wasn’t commonly done in this era. He stated that his daily routine consisted of recording King for a Day at Bearsville Studios, during the day, then driving down to record Disco Volante late into the night and repeating the same process the next day. “It was insane,” he told the Alternative Press in a 1996 interview. He admitted he barely slept while juggling both bands’ demands. Patton never claimed to be a trailblazer in this regard, but he’s acknowledged the strain. In a 2001 Kerrang! interview, he called 1995 “a blur,” saying Mr. Bungle was his “heart” while Faith No More paid the bills. If you haven’t heard him interviewed, this is Mike Patton. He is a humble man who often downplays moments the rest of us consider groundbreaking. King for a Day was another great FNM album, not as good as Angel Dust, but better than The Real Thing, in my humble estimation. Disco Volante was, and is, an incredible album that any serious artist would consider a career achievement, better than the self-titled disc but not as great as California. Most Bungle fans disagree on the latter. After spreading himself so thin in 1995, Patton went and got bored after Faith No More’s 1998 breakup, which the band “officially” stated was due to the fact that Faith No More had run its course creatively. Anyone who thinks that Patton would devote himself entirely to Mr. Bungle at this point just isn’t following along. He gets so bored that he ventures out and creates other artistic enterprises that take that definition of weird out to “Here, there be Dragons” locations on the map. He takes it to the ‘if you think Faith No More was outlandish in places, you should check out Mr. Bungle, and if you think Mr. Bungle stretches the boundaries of genre, you should check out a band he created called Fantômas.’ Fantômas became Patton’s new passion project while devoting an overwhelming amount of his time to what I consider the Mr. Bungle masterpiece 1999’s California. We write all of this, and we don’t even get to Patton’s role as the lead vocalist in the five albums of Tomahawk, and then there’s his varying roles in the bands Peeping Tom, Dead Cross, Lovage, and the killer role he played in one of The Dillinger Escape Plan’s albums. He has two proper solo albums, two works with Kaada, various film scores, and over 60 collaborative efforts, various ensembles, and guest appearances on other artists’ albums, including John Zorn and Björk. The overall brilliant catalog this “one-hit wonder” has amassed can be so overwhelming to the uninitiated that they may not even know where to start. 1989’s The Real Thing might, in fact, be the place to start, but I am so far past that starting point that I can’t even see it any more. That’s the problem with true fans of artists, they’ve listened to the artist for so long that they don’t know where to tell you where to start. Those who like Mike Patton, but don’t have an unusual, almost concerning adoration of him, tell me that Faith No More’s Angel Dust is probably the best starting point, as they say it’s probably the best, most mainstream album he took part in. If that’s the case, I would add Mr. Bungle’s California, Tomahawk Mit Gas, and Patton’s work with the X-Ecutioners as the second class of the Mike Patton beginner’s course. If you make it past that point, and you might not, I would submit Tomahawk’s Anonymous, Fantômas’s Suspended Animation, and Disco Volante as great second-level albums. A trend in Patton’s music I’ve noted, is the 2^nd album trend. The first albums are great, but they seem to set a template from which to explore the dynamic further, and Patton and his various crews seem to peak with the ideas germinating around in their heads concerning what more can be done with this band. He helps build on the base idea of that first album, and they usually create something of a creative peak with those second albums. Don’t get me wrong, I love the third albums, as in King for a Day, Suspended Animation and Anonymous, and as I wrote I think California is better than Disco Volante, but the second album peak seems to be a standard for most of Patton’s ventures. (Most true Bungle fans would say Disco Volante is superior to California.) I imagine those with some authority in the conventional music world might begrudgingly admit that they once considered Mike Patton one of the most talented singers in rock music. They probably all acknowledged that he possessed one of the most versatile and dynamic voices in modern music, characterized by an extraordinary vocal range, stylistic adaptability, and emotive depth. His voice spans six octaves, reportedly from E1 to E7, though some sources conservatively estimate around five octaves (approximately C2 to C7). This range allows him to seamlessly shift from guttural growls and primal screams to operatic falsettos and silky crooning, often within a single song. The experts who admitted all that might also add, “At some point, it didn’t matter how talented he was, because he wasted that incredible voice on music so abrasive that he basically alienated so many of us. In 1995, we all loved the underappreciated King for a Day, but when he hit us with Disco Volante, we shook our heads trying to figure out what he was doing. Most of us dismissed the initial Bungle album a one-off side project, then he doubled down with an even weirder album, and he topped it all off with an album we considered career suicide with the vocal experiments on Adult Themes for Voice (1996). That led us to dismiss him, because we realized he had no interest in becoming a marketable talent.” If you’ve read the writings of mainstream rock critics for as long as I have, you know that they have a difficult time understanding why someone would pick up a pencil and musical instrument and not try to do everything they could to sound like Springsteen, Dylan, or Joey Ramone. They don’t understand why someone would use vocal effects, as opposed to writing meaningful and important social commentary to help us reshape our world. We could excuse this with the idea that musical tastes are relative, but their blanket dismissal of anything different led me to start reading periodicals like Alternative Press and Decibel, who recognized what artists like Patton were trying to do. They praised Patton for his risk-taking, and they hailed his fearless innovation. As for the “marketable talent” comments we’ve heard, some fans and critics note that while he abandoned whatever mainstream potential awaited him, Mike Patton did develop a substantial cult following with each progression into the weird, strange, and just plain different. The next question any gifted artist must ask themselves soon after they discover they have a talent for something is what do I do with this? Patton, and Faith No More, could’ve followed up 1989’s The Real Thing with some version of The Real Thing Part Deux, and they could’ve gone onto develop a template, or a formula, in the ZZ Top, AC/DC vein. The mainstream music critics often eat up commodification of a brand as a cash grab. Mike Patton, and all of the musicians he chose to surround himself with in his numerous ventures, could’ve made a whole lot of money, enjoyed all the trappings of fame as rock stars. We can saw all we want about artistic integrity and all that, but it can’t be easy to turn away from the prospect of making truckloads of money. Contrary to what detractors say, money and fame can bring a us whole lot of happiness … if we love what we’re doing. If Mike Patton, and all of the musicians he chose to surround himself with in his numerous ventures, followed the formula of “building trust” with listeners, they would’ve been so bored and unsatisfied artistically. Patton obviously chose to use whatever gifts and talent he had to confound us and obliterate our boundaries in his pursuit of his version of artistic purity, and he chose projects and players who shared his philosophy. If the young Patton had a career path, or a place he “wanted to be in twenty years,” he obviously grew so bored with the “current” direction of his career so many times that he needed to do something decidedly different and out of his comfort zone so often that I don’t think he has any comfort zones left to destroy.