By Wesley Joost

In the town of Eureka there is nothing but boredom and desert. That boredom produced today's most lyrically perverted and musically schizophrenic band Mr. Bungle. With production and arranging assistance from the avant garde composer John Zorn, Mr. Bungle combines all known forms of rock music (with a little jazz and classical thrown in) into a genius surreal swirl the world has not seen the likes of since Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention. The songs subject matters are as eclectic as the musical styles, ranging from dead pet dogs to the joys of masturbation. One gem from the album, Squeeze me Macaroni features lead singer Vlad Drac (aka Mike Patton of Faith No More) rapping a paddy whack with the glee of a homicidal clown:

"I wanna lock Betty Crocker in the kitchen/ And knock her upper during supper/ clutter up her butter gutter/ Hostess Ding Dong wrapped an egg roll around my wong/ While Dolly Madison proceeded to ping my pong."

In an interview taken before the completion of Mr. Bungle's next album (Disco Volante -- coming in October) and his brief stint with Faith No More, Trey Spruance took time off his side project the Three Doctors (featuring members of the Zip Code Rapists) to answer a few questions.

Why has it been so long since your last album?
We're all really confused. We have a lot of material we're sifting through, trying to find a way to present it. We're having a hard time with presentation but it's slowly picking up steam. The floodgates were open and we spent a month just putting tapes together. We have at least five or six albums worth of stuff, we just haven't made anything out of it. I feel that after we record this we aren't going to waste as much time as we have, because there's so much stuff that's on the brink of getting ready to go.

What musical directions were you planning on going? Were you planning on going in the John Zorn direction or are you going to do something more primitive?
There's going to be some music that sound like a video game track -- that goes sort of backwards. Other music sounds like the soundtrack to a horror movie, like UFO invasions. Some parts will be hard to listen to. Then there's going to be some straight music, not exactly straight but straight if you hang in Pizza joints that have pipe organs going all the time. It's almost a pop culture revelry. I don't know if it's even pop culture, because video games have more significance than existentialist novels as far as I'm concerned. I guess it's just a matter of values.

How is that?
Existentialist novels seem to blither on, spiraling tornadoes of crap, while video games take you to an imaginary scenario where you can win something. And when you do, what kind of pay off do you get? You get a bunch of credits at the end. That has more significance to me then a nauseating journey through someone else's psychosis.

Does Mr. Bungle purposely piss people off? You put on a lackluster performance when you opened for Primus a couple of years ago.
Part of that had to do with how we had an hour of sound check while Primus had two days of sound check. Then a sampler blew up and the keyboard died. We didn't get to sound check. There was a lot of political stuff involved that affected our performance. On the other hand I thought it was the best thing we could do under the circumstances. We're not a stadium rock band, basically, and far be it from anyone who plays anything other then stadium music to be able to play a show that's worth listening to.

How do you feel about the music Faith No More make?
It depends. There's so many eras in Faith No More's history. I remember being a kid in Eureka ten years ago and hearing them really blew my mind. It was inspiring. It's hard to be objective, obviously, because Mike's in the group. I've just being watching all this stuff unfold and every time I heard their music I've thought I could bring different things out to make it better. Now I've got this chance to do that, though I don't have a whole lot of pull.

Where is the really experimental music going to go?
It's going where it should go. I don't know what to say. How do you tell a poet like William Blake: where are you going to go to make yourself a better poet? It doesn't work that way. You don't think about audience reaction. You don't think about where you're going to pigeonhole yourself. Subsequently, other people can't do that so it becomes hard for them to understand where you're going, and people feel alienated by it, and won't invest their money in it. It's all slogans, catch phrases, hype, words of the moment, that's all fame is. And that's fine is you want to make your Godamned money and get the hell out of there. If you put your artistic legs into something like that then you might as well be licking the devil's asshole. Look at me, joining Faith No More for the money, I'm simultaneous bullshit.

I've been told from many sources that people in Eureka don't like to have sex. Maybe it's something in the water supply but that corresponds with Mr. Bungle's masturbation lyrics.
Let me tell you something. Have you checked your statistics on child molestation, domestic violence, corporal injury? The highest numbers come from Eureka and they have for years and years. A place like Santa Cruz probably has more sexual repression that ends up in fist fights at bars, but Eureka thrives on, not exactly inbreeding, but unspoken sexual tensions that come out behind closed doors. You can fight that, it's not hard to walk around with your dick hanging out or whatever. Actually, it's those kinds of acts that gives girls weird feelings about it. It's a very cock heavy sort of thing. And most of the hippies in Eureka are basically redneck's in sheep's clothing. Everything, as in everywhere, is driven by this sick motivation. People love sex, that's why they screw all the time. There's rape up there all the time and it's unfortunate it's so one-sided.