Music / Mr. Bungle

Mr. Bungle is an experimental band from Northern California. The band was formed in 1985 while the members were still in high school, and was named after a children's educational film regarding bad habits which was featured in a Pee-wee Herman HBO special in the early '80s.

The band released four demo tapes in the mid-to-late 1980s before being signed to Warner (Bros.) Records and releasing three full-length studio albums between 1991 and 1999. The band toured in 2000 to support their last album, but disbanded in 2004. Although Mr. Bungle went through several line-up changes early in their career, the longest serving members were vocalist Mike Patton, guitarist Trey Spruance, bassist Trevor Dunn, saxophonist Clinton "Bar" McKinnon, and drummer Danny Heifetz.

Mr. Bungle is also known for their music practically being the sonic embodiment of Genre Roulette. They frequently used unconventional instruments including tenor sax, jaw harp, cimbalom, xylophone, glockenspiel, clarinet, ocarina, piano, organ, bongos, and woodblocks. Furthermore, Mike Patton's vocals were performed in a variety of styles including death growls, crooning, rapping, screeching, gurgling, and whispering. On top of that, the arrangement of their songs often lacked structure and instead rotated through different genres ranging from slow melodies to thrash metal.

Some of the genres they utilized include — *deep breath* — funk, free jazz, Surf Rock, Punk Rock, Heavy Metal, klezmer, ska, kecak, avant-jazz, Folk Music, Noise Rock, pop, doo-wop, Funk Metal, Electronic Music, swing, space-age pop and exotica, rockabilly, bossa nova, Progressive Rock, Country Music, circus music, and even video game and cartoon music.

In late 2019, the band announced that they would reunite for a series of reunion shows in February 2020. Scott Ian and Dave Lombardo joined them in performing the entirety of The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny as well as several cover tunes. The group would go on to rerecord the demo as a professional album for release that October.

Discography:

• The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny (1986, Demo)
• Bowel of Chiley (1987, Demo)
• Goddammit, I Love America! (1988, Demo)
• OU818 (1989, Demo)
• Mr. Bungle (1991)
• Disco volante (1995)
• California (1999)
• The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny (2020)

Not to be confused with the puppet who didn't wash his hands in the Beginning Responsibility: Lunchroom Manners short parodied by RiffTrax.^note Though that is where they got their name, and a clip of the short appears as Spoken Word in Music at the end of "Love Is a Fist"

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Tropes associated with Mr. Bungle:

• Biting-the-Hand Humor: "Carousel" includes the lyric "Will Warner Bros. put our record on the shelf?". It's uncertain whether their Self-Titled Album was actually in danger of becoming a Missing Episode, but they apparently felt they had to censor that lyric, as the album's liner notes don't include it in print, substituting part of "Look at Me, I'm Sandra Dee" from Grease instead.
• Broken Record: In "My Ass Is On Fire", in the last stretches of the song, the word "redundant" is repeated over and over again until everything goes full-on insane. It even has a "Boring!" chant underneath it!
• Careful with That Axe: "The Bends" ends with this, as does "Goodbye Sober Day".
• Celebrity Song: "Travolta" was an example, before the name change to "Quote Unquote".
• Cluster F-Bomb / Precision F-Strike: Their lyrics are pretty salty.
• Coincidence Magnet / Weirdness Magnet: While mixing their debut album, a friend gave Trevor Dunn a copy of the porn starring a character named "Mr. Bungle," bizarrely containing the same name as their band's and the short that inspired it. Further, they HAD a song about porn on the album ("Girls of Porn"), and a sample of the original short already elsewhere on the album. A sample from the porn was immediately decided to be put at the beginning of "Girls".
• Cover Version: Mr. Bungle, like Faith No More, frequently performed covers of songs that did not fit their style during their shows, including 90's pop ballads (like "Vision of Love" by Mariah Carey and "Nothing Compares 2 U" by Sinéad O'Connor), cheesy 80's rock hits (such as "Working for the Weekend" by Loverboy), or lounge pop classics (like "What the World Needs Now" by Burt Bacharach). Their most infamous cover set occurred on Halloween '99; in the midst of Patton's feud with Anthony Kiedis, the band performed a mean-spirited medley of "Around the World" & "Give It Away", and later, "Scar Tissue" & "Under the Bridge" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, while simultaneously pretending to snort cocaine and shoot heroin, making fun of the Chilis' past issues with substance abuse.
• Credits Gag: The inside liner notes to Disco volante credit Danny Heifetz and Theo Lengyel with writing "Nothing", which is a track title that doesn't appear anywhere else on the packaging. Some fans assumed this meant that the noisy jamming at the end of "Merry Go Bye Bye"^note see Throw It In! was officially titled "Nothing". However, the credit was just intended as a joke about the fact that neither Heifetz or Lengyel contributed to the songwriting on that particular album.
  • Also in the Disco volante liner notes, Danny Heifetz is credited with playing "a woodblock" under the pseudonym "I Quit". In an interview, he explained "I wasn't a very happy person back then. Plus I played the fuck out of that woodblock".
• Creepy Circus Music: One of the numerous genres they explore. Songs in this style are usually circus-themed in some way ("Carousel," "Merry Go-Bye-Bye"). Trey Spruance has said this aspect of their music was inspired by him and Mike Patton regularly going to Crappy Carnivals as teens.
• Driven to Suicide: "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare", "Pink Cigarette".
• Epic Rocking: Many of their songs are quite long. The longest on their three studio albums are "Egg" (10:39), "Dead Goon" (10:02), and "The Bends" (10:28). "Merry Go Bye Bye" could be considered to qualify if counted as one song with the Hidden Track (12:58; the song itself is about 6:24 and its hidden track is about 5:37).
• Experimental Metal: Unquestionably on their first demo and first two full-lengths, but elements are present throughout their career.
• Fading into the Next Song: The whole first album, most of the songs on the second, and "None of Them Knew They Were Robots" into "Retrovertigo" on the third.
• Fake Band: Zigzagged. Although always a real band, they initially tried to present themselves as such, with fake names listed on the album for the band members and shows played in costume.
• Fake-Out Fade-Out: "Egg" ends with a repetitive heavy outro, culminating in two of these. The second is especially unexpected, seemingly ad-libbed by the band in-studio, cracking up and stopping halfway through.
• Famous Ancestor: Danny Heifetz's grandfather is violin virtuoso Jascha Heifetz.
• Genre Roulette: To levels only matched by a handful of other artists (Frank Zappa, John Zorn, Gentle Giant, and Sigh are good examples).
• Genre Shift: The band was originally a straight-up Thrash Metal band. By the time they signed and recorded their first album, their Thrash background is only heard in small snippets of their Genre Roulette style.
• Gratuitous Italian: Disco volante translates as Flying Saucer, while "Violenza domestica" translates as "Domestic Violence".
• Gratuitous Latin: "Ars moriendi" translates as "The Art of Dying" in Latin.
• Hidden Track: The appropriately-titled "Secret Song" is unlisted on Disco volante, appearing on the same track as "Carry Stress in the Jaw". The LP version has "Secret Song" on a double groove with "Carry Stress in the Jaw", meaning you have to place the needle on the record a certain way to hear it. Also notable for Trevor Dunn stepping up to the microphone to sing fourth-wall-breaking lyrics about how the rest of the band kept the song a secret from him and didn't let him play on it. ^note  Which is actually true; he added his vocals after stumbling upon the recording.
• Horror Comedy: In many senses, they are the musical equivalent.
• Instrumentals: "Chemical Marriage", "The Bends"
• Last Note Nightmare:
  • "The Bends," "Goodbye Sober Day," and "My Ass Is on Fire."
  • Though not outright scary, the Fake-Out Fade-Out of "Ma Meeshka Mow Skwoz" is a trifle startling: The song fades out, then after a few seconds of silence, the music suddenly comes back in much louder, with Mike Patton doing some rather suggestive grunting over it.
  • "Pink Cigarette", otherwise a Surprisingly Gentle Song of theirs, has the steady beep of a heart monitor enter the mix near the end of the song - the music and lyrics are suddenly interrupted by the heart monitor flat-lining. It doesn't help that up to that point, the lyrics had been counting down the hours "until you find me dead".
• Lighter and Softer: California, in a way. It's more melodic and coherent than the earlier Mr Bungle albums, but still retains their Genre Roulette approach.
• Lyrical Dissonance:
  • "Stubb (A Dub)": Crazed circus mambo metal with lyrics about a dying dog.
  • "Squeeze Me Macaroni" and "The Girls of Porn": Upbeat funk metal with ridiculously explicit lyrics.
  • "Pink Cigarette": Smooth Soul Pop about suicide
  • "Merry Go Bye Bye": A Surf Rock / The Beach Boys pastiche about religious martyrs - it does, however, shift into a Death Metal section near the middle.
• Madness Mantra: The end of "Egg" features Mike Patton repeatedly saying "There's no place like home!", gradually getting more intense each time.
• Man of a Thousand Voices: Mike Patton. It's perhaps worth noting that his vocal range is considered to be the highest on record, being three whole notes past the singer with the second-highest range (Corey Taylor).
• Mood Whiplash: On the first album there is a song, called "The Girls of Porn", which makes fun of the porn industry and how it's gotten increasingly extreme, then the album ends with "Dead Goon", a disturbing song about a kid who dies during a session of auto-erotic asphyxiation and how his family finds him, and the song seems sympathetic.
• New Sound Album: For a group that has basically made their entire career out of jumping through styles at random, they still bizarrely managed to pull this off:
  • Mr. Bungle: incorporates an array of different styles, but mostly sticks to ska, funk, and thrash metal, and features a decent amount of hooks and choruses.
  • Disco volante: a truly avant-garde set wherein practically every minute sounds completely different from the next.
  • California: has much of the same jarring eclecticism as Disco volante, but is heavily influenced by pop from the '50s and '60s, and much like their self-titled debut, has plenty of catchier elements. The overall approach can be summed up as "The Beach Boys burning in hell".
  • The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny Demo is straight-up Thrash Metal, only occasionally dipping into other styles for comedic relief. Considering that it's a re-recording of their first demo, and that it features Scott Ian and Dave Lombardo on guitars and drums, it's not surprising that it sounds more like Stormtroopers of Death than any of Mr. Bungle's other LPs.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: The title of "Quote Unquote" was originally "Travolta." Warner, afraid of a lawsuit, asked that they change it. The result was them taking out the name and leaving the quotes, which were then spelled out. It should be pointed out that Travolta's name is still spoken in the song (as is Patrick Swayze's. And Donald Trump's. And Adolf Hitler's. In fact, all three of the latter are mentioned in the same sentence).
• Number of the Beast: "The Girls of Porn" begins with Mike Patton impersonating a TV host:
  Okay, all you pus-sucking motherfuckers out there: it's time to win a chance to butt-bang your daughter's tight virgin cherry ass. So call our number... SIX SIX SIX!
• Rearrange the Song: While touring California, they started playing a significantly altered version of "My Ass Is on Fire:" drum-n-bass loops and sections of wordless chanting were added, while much of the funk metal feel was gone, and the Overly Long Gag ending was skipped entirely. Their live sets otherwise always stuck to songs from whatever their current album was, rounded out with cover songs — they must have decided that if they were going to start playing an old song again, they should try to make it interesting.
• Record Producer: Even though Disco Volante and California were self-produced by the band, the first album had John Zorn produce it. He even did saxophone for "Love Is a Fist".
• Retraux: A subtle example — California was recorded on analog equipment, rather than digitally, in order to give it a sound more akin to music from the '50s and '60s, which the album sonically nods towards.
• Refuge in Audacity: Both musically and lyrically - see the ridiculously explicit lyrics of "The Girls of Porn" for perhaps the best lyrical example.
• Revisiting the Roots: In 2019, Mr Bungle reunited to tour and re-record the The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny demo as a professional album.
• Rump Roast: "My Ass Is on Fire."
• Rouge Angles of Satin: Deliberately invoked by the title of their early demo Bowel of Chiley. When an unsanctioned re-release of the demo came out, it was mistakenly "corrected" into Bowl of Chiley.
• Sampling: The first album samples oddities such as video games, children's television programming, and porn. Most of the samples occur in between songs.
  • The original demo version of "Anarchy Up Your Anus" included narration from Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House, a Halloween sound effects record released by Disneyland Records, as Spoken Word in Music - rather than have to license the sample from Disney for commercial release, for the 2020 version they had Rhea Perlman recite the same text and imitate the original narrator.
• Self-Plagiarism: The Thrash Metal-style guitar riff that appears in one section of "Love Is A Fist" was originally part of an earlier song of theirs called "Methmatics". "Methmatics" itself didn't see formal release until long after "Love Is A Fist" did, first appearing on the 2020 remake of The Raging Wrath Of The Easter Bunny.
• Sequel Song: "Sleep (Part II): Carry Stress in the Jaw" and "Sleep (Part III): Phlegmatics" are meant to be part of a Thematic Series that they started with "Slowly Growing Deaf," each with lyrics which play physical ailments for Body Horror. The reason "Slowly Growing Deaf" isn't explicitly labeled "Sleep (Part I)" is that Trevor Dunn, who wrote the lyrics for the three songs, didn't initially set out to have a trilogy when he wrote it.
• Siamese Twin Songs: Most of the songs on the first album are connected this way with samples.
• Singing Simlish: Happens from time to time, particularly in Disco volante with "Ma Meeshka Mow Skwoz" and "Chemical Marriage."
• Song Style Shift: All over their entire catalogue.
• Spoonerism: A bootlegged video of an early high school talent show performance has the band playing in front of a banner reading "Bister Mungle."
• Surreal Horror: The musical equivalent.
• Surreal Humour: When they don’t fall into the former, they fall into this instead. Though sometimes they fall into both at the same time.
• Stylistic Suck: "Everyone I Went to High School With Is Dead" was intentionally made to be an uncatchy, unlistenable track. It's the lead-off track of their second album.
• Surprisingly Gentle Song: Several examples from California:
  • The first half of "Retrovertigo," which could almost be called a Power Ballad.
  • "Sweet Charity," "Vanity Fair," and "Pink Cigarette" — all three have moments that could be described as vaguely "sinister," but have nowhere near the amount of heaviness or bizarre left turns you'd otherwise expect from the band.
  • "The Holy Filament" could possibly be the most gentle song they've ever done. While its middle section has some ominous sounds thrown in, the track on a whole is pretty pleasant to listen to.
• Uncommon Time: They have a few examples. "Egg" has a rather prominent section in 7/4. "Love Is a Fist" contains sections in 7/4 and 11/8. "Slowly Growing Deaf" features a riff in 5/4. This undoubtedly isn't all.
• Vomit Discretion Shot: "Carousel", about throwing up on a fairground ride, ends on this.

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