Faith No More had already finished the music for their third album when they fired their singer, hired a 19-year-old kid from Eureka and gave him about a fortnight to come up with every lyric and every melody on the record. The kid was Mike Patton. The album was The Real Thing. The result was a Bay Area funk-metal record with a falsetto rap single that went to number one in Australia, peaked at number nine on the Billboard Hot 100, and quietly invented the genre that Korn, Deftones and Slipknot would all spend the next decade trying to live up to.
None of that was supposed to happen. Producer Matt Wallace, who had cut the band''s earliest demos on a home eight-track in his parents'' garage, has admitted he nearly quit during the sessions, convinced he was in over his head. The label, Slash via Reprise, had low expectations for the lead single. And the album sat dead in the water for the best part of seven months after release until MTV decided that a slow-motion fish, a hailstorm-soaked piano and a kid in a Mr. Bungle T-shirt rapping about not getting what he wanted were exactly what 1990 was waiting for.
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Faith No More |
| Album | The Real Thing |
| Release Date | 20 June 1989 |
| Label | Slash, Reprise |
| Producer(s) | Matt Wallace; Faith No More |
| Studio | Studio D, Sausalito, California |
| Recording Dates | December 1988 to January 1989 |
| Genre / Subgenre | Alternative metal, funk metal, rap metal |
| Track Count | 11 (CD/cassette); 9 (LP) |
| Total Runtime | 54:58 (CD/cassette); 43:22 (LP) |
| Billboard 200 Peak | 11 (October 1990) |
| UK Albums Chart Peak | 30 |
| Other Notable Chart Peaks | ARIA 2; New Zealand 3; Canada 10; Germany 37; Sweden 38; Netherlands 56 |
| Certifications | Platinum (US, Canada, Australia); Silver (UK) |
| Estimated Sales | 4 million-plus worldwide |
| Key Singles | "From Out of Nowhere", "Epic", "Falling to Pieces", "Surprise! You''re Dead!", "Edge of the World" |
Cultural Context
The summer of 1989 was not a quiet one for rock music. Within weeks of The Real Thing landing in record-shop racks, Mötley Crüe''s Dr. Feelgood was on its way to four million US sales, the Cure''s Disintegration was on its way to becoming the gothic high-water mark of the decade, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers were finishing Mother''s Milk in a Hollywood studio not many miles from where Faith No More had signed their deal. Nine Inch Nails were about to make their Pretty Hate Machine debut. Nirvana, on a tiny Seattle label called Sub Pop, had just shipped Bleach.
None of those records sounded much like each other. That, more than anything, is the cultural backdrop The Real Thing slid into: a moment when the airwaves were still owned by glam metal, college radio was already inching towards grunge, MTV was looking for something new, and the boundaries between funk, hip-hop and metal were thin enough that a determined band could just walk through them. Faith No More, a quintet from San Francisco who had been kicking around the Bay Area scene since 1979, were about to do exactly that.
The world outside music was shifting fast as well. The Berlin Wall came down five months after the album dropped. The Tiananmen Square protests were on every front page that summer. In cinemas, Tim Burton''s Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade were dividing the year''s blockbuster takings. Ronald Reagan had just been replaced by George H. W. Bush. The Real Thing did not address any of this directly, and that is part of why it lasted: it sounded like a record made by people too busy chasing their own ideas to bother with the prevailing ones.
Bay Area Roots
Faith No More''s history before The Real Thing reads less like a band biography than a sequence of wrong turns and lucky breaks. Bassist Billy Gould, keyboardist Roddy Bottum and drummer Mike Bordin were the original core, formed out of the wreckage of an earlier project called Faith. No Man., itself a splinter from a Bay Area post-punk group called Sharp Young Men. By the time the trio settled on the name Faith No More in September 1983, they had already cycled through Mark Bowen on guitar, the singers Joe Pop-o-Pie and Paula Frazer, and a young Courtney Love, who fronted the band briefly in early 1984 before being asked to leave.
Guitarist Jim Martin and vocalist Chuck Mosley arrived later in 1984. Martin, a Berkeley kid, had previously played in a band called EZ Street alongside future Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, and the two also briefly ran a thrash side-project called Vicious Hatred. That connection mattered more than it looked at the time: when Martin reached for material for The Real Thing, he reached back into Burton-era riffs.
The first two Faith No More albums, We Care a Lot (1985) on the tiny Mordam label and Introduce Yourself (1987) for Slash, established the basic shape: Bordin''s tribal drum-circle drumming, Gould''s funk-trained low end, Bottum''s arena-pop keyboard hooks, Martin''s widescreen metal guitar, and a singer (Mosley) who half-rapped, half-droned over the top. The combination was already unusual. The execution was patchy. By 1988, Mosley''s on-stage behaviour, including allegedly punching Gould mid-set and falling asleep at his own album launch party, had finally exhausted the rest of the band''s patience.
"There was a certain point when I went to rehearsal, and Chuck wanted to do all acoustic guitar songs. It was just so far off the mark. The upshot was that I got up, walked out and quit the band. The same day, I talked to Bordin, and he said: ''Well, I still want to play with you''. Bottum did the same thing. It was another one of these ''firing somebody without firing them'' scenarios."
Billy Gould, quoted in Team Rock''s "Faith No More: The Real Story", 2014
Enter Mike Patton
The replacement came from the unlikeliest place. Jim Martin had been handed a demo cassette by an avant-garde high-school band from Eureka called Mr. Bungle. The tape was titled The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny, and the singer was 19-year-old Mike Patton. Martin took it back to the rest of the band and made the case. They listened. They flew Patton down. They hired him.
By the time Patton arrived, however, most of the music for The Real Thing was already written and largely tracked. The four instrumentalists had spent the second half of 1988 working up the album in rehearsal rooms after the Introduce Yourself tour, and Jim Martin''s eight-minute monster "Surprise! You''re Dead!" had already been cut in December 1988, before Patton was even on the payroll. Patton''s job was to vault into a moving train and write everything that goes on top of the music: every lyric, every vocal melody, every rap, every scream.
He did it in roughly two weeks.
"Mike Patton wrote every lyric and melody to that record over a ten to twelve day period. And it is stunning, because he was nineteen or twenty, and pulled all that out of the air, and put together an incredible record."
Matt Wallace, quoted in Adrian Harte, Small Victories: The True Story of Faith No More, Jawbone Press, 2018
Wallace''s only meaningful contribution to the lyrics was a quiet word over coffee in San Francisco, gently encouraging Patton to soften some of the bleaker images with metaphor. Patton took it in. The themes that ended up on the record (the murder narrative of "The Morning After", the necrophilia gag of "Surprise! You''re Dead!", the Vincent Price dread of "Underwater Love") are dark enough that British music magazine Q would later devote a 1995 retrospective to noting how many of the album''s songs are essentially about killing people. They are also funny enough, often, that you do not always notice.
Creating the Album
The bulk of The Real Thing was tracked at Studio D in Sausalito, California, between December 1988 and January 1989, with Matt Wallace producing alongside the band. Studio D was not the obvious choice for a major-label rock record. It sat across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco in a sleepy waterfront enclave better known for houseboats than guitar amplifiers, and its big draw was a tunable live room that could be deadened or opened up depending on the kit being recorded.
Wallace''s history with Faith No More went all the way back to those Sharp Young Men and Faith. No Man. days. He had recorded the band''s 1983 debut single, "Quiet in Heaven / Song of Liberty", in his parents'' garage on a home eight-track. He had produced We Care a Lot and Introduce Yourself. By the time the band stepped into Studio D, he had cut more Faith No More music than anyone alive. He has also been candid since about how badly he doubted himself during the sessions and how close he came to walking away.
The recording was patchwork in a way that ended up serving the record. The band tracked the music as a four-piece, then waited for Patton to write his lyrics, then dropped him into the booth in January 1989 to lay vocals over takes that, on songs like "Epic", had been composed without any specific singer in mind. Engineer Jim "Watts" Vereecke and assistant Craig Doubet ran the desk. Mastering was handled by John Golden. Roddy Bottum''s and Billy Gould''s shared E-mu Emax sampler did much of the heavy lifting on "Epic".
A few of the practical things to know about how the album was put together:
- "Surprise! You''re Dead!" was a Jim Martin riff he had carried around since the 1970s, written when he was still in Agents of Misfortune with a teenage Cliff Burton.
- "Epic" was built up from a riff that Gould, Bottum and Bordin had jammed during a rehearsal break, then fleshed out into a song while the tape was already rolling.
- The record was tracked predominantly to analogue tape, with the Emax used both for sampled keys and for some of the song''s high-end sparkle.
- Mike Patton recorded most of his lead vocals in single-day pushes per song, often without having heard the final mixes of any of the other tracks.
- The band and Wallace co-produced; the liner-note credit reads "Matt Wallace / Faith No More".
Personnel and Credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Faith No More | ||
| Lead vocals | Mike Patton | Joined late 1988; wrote all lyrics and melodies in 10-12 days; recorded vocals January 1989 |
| Guitars | Jim "Big Sick Ugly" Martin | Liner credit "James Martin"; brought in "Surprise! You''re Dead!" from a 1970s Cliff Burton-era riff |
| Bass | Billy Gould | Also played E-mu Emax keyboard on "Epic"; designer of the band''s eight-pointed star logo |
| Keyboards | Roddy Bottum | E-mu Emax and acoustic piano; Bottum''s outro on "Epic" became the song''s signature |
| Drums | Mike Bordin | Founding member; tribal kit setup with extensive toms |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producer | Matt Wallace; Faith No More | Wallace''s third Faith No More album as producer |
| Engineer | Matt Wallace | Doubled as producer and engineer |
| Engineer / assistant | Jim "Watts" Vereecke | Studio D house engineer |
| Assistant engineer | Craig Doubet | Studio D |
| Mastering | John Golden | Independent mastering engineer |
| Artwork and visuals | ||
| Cover artwork | Jeff Price | Burning man / sea of fire concept |
| Photography | Lendon Flanagon | Band photography |
| CD design | Terry Robertson | CD packaging and layout |
| Music video direction | ||
| Director, "Epic" | Ralph Ziman | South African; designed the upright-piano explosion finale |
| Director, "Surprise! You''re Dead!" | Billy Gould | Footage shot in Chile during the 1991 South American tour; never officially released as a single |
One thing worth noting: there are vanishingly few credited guests on this record. The Real Thing is, in personnel terms, an unusually closed-room album. There is no guest singer, no string section, no famous-name producer cameo. The five band members and Wallace did the entire job. This was deliberate. Coming off the patchier Introduce Yourself, the band wanted a record that sounded like one band playing live and well, and they got it.
The Songs
Eleven tracks on the CD and cassette; nine on the original vinyl, which dropped the Black Sabbath cover and the closer. The writing credit is the same on every song: Faith No More, meaning Bordin, Bottum, Gould, Martin and Patton split the publishing five ways, regardless of who actually wrote which part.
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | From Out of Nowhere | Faith No More | 3:22 | Yes (single 1) | Reissued April 1990, UK 23 |
| 2 | Epic | Faith No More | 4:53 | Yes (single 2) | US 9, Australia 1, the breakout |
| 3 | Falling to Pieces | Faith No More | 5:15 | Yes (single 3) | US Hot 100 92; later in Black Hawk Down (2001) |
| 4 | Surprise! You''re Dead! | Faith No More | 2:27 | Yes (single 4, promo) | Jim Martin riff from a 1970s Agents of Misfortune demo with Cliff Burton |
| 5 | Zombie Eaters | Faith No More | 5:58 | No | Acoustic intro into thrash payoff |
| 6 | The Real Thing | Faith No More | 8:13 | No | Title track, the album''s prog-metal centrepiece |
| 7 | Underwater Love | Faith No More | 3:51 | No | Upbeat groove over a darkly suggestive lyric |
| 8 | The Morning After | Faith No More | 3:43 | No | Originally a Mosley-era track called "New Improved Song" |
| 9 | Woodpecker from Mars | Faith No More | 5:40 | No | Instrumental |
| 10 | War Pigs (Black Sabbath cover) | Butler, Iommi, Osbourne, Ward | 7:45 | No (CD/cassette only) | Live staple of every tour since |
| 11 | Edge of the World | Faith No More | 4:10 | Yes (Brazil promo, 1991) | Patton in lounge-singer mode |
"From Out of Nowhere" is the album''s sprint of an opener, two and a half minutes of Bordin''s tom-driven groove and a chorus designed to be screamed into a windscreen. It came and went on its first release in October 1989 without making the UK chart at all; reissued in April 1990 once "Epic" had broken the band, it climbed to number 23.
"Epic" is the song everyone knows. The riff, written in a rehearsal break, is built around Bordin''s half-time stomp and a Roddy Bottum keyboard hook. The chorus is huge and obvious. The verses are rapped. The outro is two minutes of upright piano played by Bottum, which the music video famously concludes by exploding in slow motion. Patton''s lyric, all flailing pronouns and frustrated demands, has been parsed for thirty years. Patton, asked, has consistently refused to explain it.
"It was conceived naturally as a riff in the studio between Roddy, myself and Mike Bordin during rehearsal that later got fleshed out into an entire song. After the disappointing performance of the album''s first single, the record label had low expectations and let the band pick whatever song they wanted as the next music video. So we picked ''Epic'' because it just felt the most natural at the time. We had very little expectations of it becoming a commercial hit."
Billy Gould, interviewed by Songfacts, 29 November 2012
"Falling to Pieces" is the album''s most conventionally pop song, and in some ways the most underrated, all major-key hooks pinned to a slightly menacing lyric about losing your grip. "Surprise! You''re Dead!" is the album''s rawest moment, two and a half minutes of Jim Martin thrash that Patton tops with a Sabbath-via-Bungle horror-comic vocal. "Zombie Eaters" sneaks in on Bottum''s lullaby keyboards before kicking the door open. The eight-minute title track is the band trying to write a Pink Floyd suite using the parts of a Slayer record. "Underwater Love" smuggles a stalker''s monologue inside an unreasonably catchy chorus. "The Morning After" is a murder ballad disguised as a pop song, originally tracked in a different form during Mosley''s tenure and released as a 1989 freebie EP under the title "New Improved Song" before being reborn here with Patton''s lyric.
"Woodpecker from Mars" is the instrumental that everyone forgets and then loves. "War Pigs" is the album''s great live trick: a faithful, surprisingly straight Black Sabbath cover that doesn''t need to be ironic. Faith No More played it well, knew it, and treated the song like the totem it is. It became a staple of the tour and turns up on virtually every live recording the band has issued since. "Edge of the World" closes the CD on a deeply uneasy lounge-piano number, Patton playing a predator over Bottum''s late-night cocktail-bar chords. It is the album''s strangest moment, and arguably its bravest.
B-sides and Outtakes
The Studio D sessions yielded more than the album itself. Two songs, "Cowboy Song" and "The Grade", were left off The Real Thing and instead released as B-sides on the 12-inch of "From Out of Nowhere" in October 1989. Both were later folded onto CD editions of the 1991 live album You Fat Bastards: Live at the Brixton Academy as bonus tracks.
A third outtake, "Sweet Emotion" (no relation to the Aerosmith song), was given away on a Kerrang!-magazine flexi-disc called Flexible Fiend 3 in September 1989. The band were not done with it. Two years later, with new lyrics and a new title, it resurfaced on the Bill & Ted''s Bogus Journey soundtrack as "The Perfect Crime", which became one of the most-played Faith No More songs on US rock radio in 1991. Jim Martin even appears in the film itself, playing "Sir James Martin" in a brief cameo during a sequence set at the "Faith No More Spiritual and Theological Center".
The 2015 Rhino remaster of The Real Thing finally rounded these up on disc and threw in extras: an Epic radio remix, the "Falling to Pieces" video version, an extended mix of "From Out of Nowhere", and live performances of "War Pigs" (Berlin 1989), "Surprise! You''re Dead!" and "Chinese Arithmetic" (Sheffield, January 1990) and "Underwater Love" and "As the Worm Turns" from the Brixton Academy show in 1990.
Album Artwork and Packaging
The cover, by artist Jeff Price, shows a falling figure in flames diving into a sea of fire under a fractured sky. It is one of those covers that splits opinion: too literal for some, instantly iconic for others. The vinyl original used the full uncropped image; the CD release cropped it to a tighter, hotter frame. Photography on the inner sleeve was by Lendon Flanagon, with CD design by Terry Robertson. The whole package is unmistakably late-1980s Slash Records: airbrushed, slightly pulpy, more Heavy Metal magazine than Roger Dean.
The vinyl edition of The Real Thing has nine tracks; the CD and cassette versions have eleven, the difference being the Black Sabbath cover "War Pigs" and the closer "Edge of the World". This is one of those quiet historical accidents that ended up shaping the album''s reputation: a generation of vinyl-only listeners spent the early 1990s wondering what the fuss about Faith No More''s "War Pigs" was.
Release and Reception
The Real Thing was released on 20 June 1989. In the UK, Kerrang! gave it five out of five and put it at number one on its end-of-year Albums of the Year list. Sounds magazine put it at twenty. The Village Voice, which would later give the band a B-minus from its lead critic, included it at number 27 on its own albums-of-the-year list. Entertainment Weekly graded it an A. NME, marching to its own drum, gave it a four out of ten.
And then nothing happened.
For the rest of the summer and most of the autumn, The Real Thing sat well outside the Billboard 200 entirely. The first single, "From Out of Nowhere", failed to chart in either the US or the UK on its initial October 1989 release. It took the second single, "Epic", launched on 29 January 1990, with a Ralph Ziman-directed video that MTV started rotating heavily, to drag the album back to life. The Real Thing finally entered the Billboard 200 in February 1990, and only reached its peak of number eleven in October 1990, almost sixteen months after release, after "Epic" was reissued.
"Mike Patton is the new vocal presence, and seizes the moment with precision rap and a raging soul that claims its rightful place in the power mix. The band draw from reggae, rap and metal circles and melt the sound into a rhythmic state that practically incites an anthem riot."
The Hard Report, US metal trade journal, July 1989
Retrospectives have been kinder, and more interesting, than contemporary write-ups. Pitchfork''s Stuart Berman, reviewing the 2015 reissue, awarded it 7.6 out of 10 and described it as an "alt-rock trailblazer". Stereogum''s Joseph Schafer ranked it second in the Faith No More catalogue and made the most quotable case for it of any retrospective:
"The amount of diversity Faith No More crammed into 1989''s The Real Thing seemed to be a middle finger to arena rock."
Joseph Schafer, "Faith No More Albums From Worst To Best", Stereogum, 4 June 2015
Year-end and lifetime list placings have been more generous still. Kerrang! later included it in its 1998 "Albums You Must Hear Before You Die" list at number 50. Classic Rock placed it at number 64 on the magazine''s "100 Greatest Rock Albums Ever" in 2001. Rolling Stone Germany ranked it 105 on its 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2005. Robert Dimery''s 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die includes it. The 200 Greatest Albums of the 80s in Classic Rock''s sister magazine Metal Hammer carried it as well.
The album''s sole Grammy nod was a 1990 nomination for Best Metal Performance, lost to Metallica''s "One". "Epic" was nominated for Best Hard Rock Performance the following year, again losing to Living Colour. "Falling to Pieces" picked up Best Visual Effects in a Video at the 1991 MTV VMAs and was nominated for Best Heavy Metal/Hard Rock Video at the same ceremony.
Singles and Music Videos
| Single | Release | B-sides / format extras | Director | Chart peaks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| From Out of Nowhere | 30 October 1989; reissued 2 April 1990 | "Cowboy Song", "The Grade", extended mix | Jeff Stein (live shoot at the I-Beam, San Francisco) | UK 23 (reissue) |
| Epic | 29 January 1990; reissued 28 August 1990 | Live "War Pigs" (Berlin 1989), "Surprise! You''re Dead!" (Sheffield 1990) | Ralph Ziman | US Hot 100 9; ARIA 1; NZ 2; UK 25 |
| Falling to Pieces | 2 July 1990 | Live tracks from Brixton Academy | Walt Stickel | US Hot 100 92; UK 27 |
| Surprise! You''re Dead! | 1990 (promo only) | Album cut | Billy Gould (footage shot in Chile, 1991) | Did not chart |
| Edge of the World | 1991 (Brazil promo only) | Brixton live version | None official | Did not chart |
The "Epic" video was filmed on a sound stage with the band soaked by an artificial hailstorm-and-rain rig, intercut with surreal images including the now-infamous slow-motion shot of a fish flopping out of water. Animal-rights activists were furious. Director Ralph Ziman would clarify in 2010 that several fish were used, none for very long, and all were released afterwards. The fish itself became a Faith No More running gag for years; the band variously claimed it had been stolen from Björk, who at the time fronted the Sugarcubes, after a poetry reading in San Francisco. Björk, in a rare on-record comment, defended them.
"I know those guys, I know they wouldn''t do anything to harm him. But I know, if I had gone home with my fish, which was given to me, none of this would have ever happened."
Björk, quoted on her own bjork.com website (Linear Soul Child, archived 2011)
Two further details from the "Epic" video are worth noting. Jim Martin spends the entire shoot wearing a T-shirt with a photo of Cliff Burton and the words "A Tribute to Cliff Burton", a public memorial to the friend with whom he had played in EZ Street and Vicious Hatred a decade earlier. Patton wears a Mr. Bungle T-shirt with the slogan "There''s A Tractor In My Balls Again", an in-joke for fans of his other band that arguably did more for Mr. Bungle''s eventual Warner Bros. signing than any A&R memo.
The video for "Falling to Pieces", set in a series of surreal painted dioramas, won Best Visual Effects in a Video at the 1991 VMAs. The unreleased "Surprise! You''re Dead!" video, directed by Billy Gould himself in Chile during the 1991 leg of the tour, eventually surfaced on the Video Croissant home-video compilation rather than as a single in its own right.
Embedded below is the official "Epic" music video, which is almost certainly the entry point for everyone who came to Faith No More after 1989. It is also a useful reminder of how much of the song''s shape, the falsetto chorus, the keyboard outro, the abrupt mood shifts, was already locked in by a band and producer who had no expectations that anyone would care.
Touring and Live
The Real Thing tour ran from mid-1989 through to mid-1991 across North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South America. Faith No More opened for Metallica on the tail end of the Damaged Justice tour from September 1989, supported Billy Idol on his Charmed Life tour through the spring of 1990, and shared bills with Soundgarden, Voivod, Sacred Reich, Forbidden, Primus, Babes in Toyland and, through gritted teeth, Poison.
The Poison shows on the 1990 European leg are the stuff of legend, mainly because Mike Patton spent his stage time visibly mocking them. At a Monsters of Rock show in Italy that summer he asked the crowd to nominate which member of Poison could perform an anatomically improbable solo act on himself, then turned his attention to Aerosmith, accusing them of being the most drug-addled band on the bill. Faith No More were later scheduled to support Aerosmith on a 1998 European tour. They split up before they could make it.
The shows themselves were anchored by The Real Thing material but routinely included covers and snippets from the most unlikely places. On the 1989-1990 leg the band were known to drop in lines from Milli Vanilli''s "Girl I''m Gonna Miss You" and "Baby Don''t Forget My Number", Neneh Cherry''s "Buffalo Stance", Young MC''s "Bust a Move", "Don''t Dream It''s Over" by Crowded House, "Don''t Let the Sun Go Down on Me" by Elton John, and the German Haribo TV jingle. Patton later said the cover snippets were partly an antidote to the boredom of having only three studio albums to draw from. By the end of the tour he was itching to make something stranger, which would directly produce the chaos of Angel Dust two years later.
The most-bootlegged show on the tour is the 30 April 1990 Brixton Academy date in London, which the band recorded for the live release You Fat Bastards: Live at the Brixton Academy in February 1991, and which has provided the bulk of officially released live Real Thing material in the decades since. The band also performed "Epic" on the 1990 MTV Video Music Awards on 6 September 1990 (a performance Corey Taylor of Slipknot has cited as the moment that pulled him out of suicidal depression as a teenager and back into music) and on Saturday Night Live on 1 December 1990, becoming one of the heaviest acts SNL had booked at that point.
One on-tour incident lingers in the band''s history. At the second show of the tour in 1989, filmed for the music video to "From Out of Nowhere" at San Francisco''s I-Beam nightclub, a beer bottle was smashed over Mike Patton''s right hand. The lacerations cut tendons. He has the use of the hand back. He has not, by his own account, fully had feeling in it since.
In TV, Film and Media
The Real Thing has had a far longer screen life than its initial chart performance suggested it would. The most-cited placements:
- "Surprise! You''re Dead!" appeared in the Joe Dante horror-comedy Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990).
- "Falling to Pieces" anchors a key sequence in Ridley Scott''s Black Hawk Down (2001).
- "Epic" features in The Disaster Artist (2017), Yes Day (2021) and the Twisted Metal TV series (2023).
- "Epic" and "Falling to Pieces" both turned up in the 1993 Beavis and Butt-head episode that effectively introduced the band to a generation of MTV viewers.
- "Zombie Eaters" was used in DC''s Titans (2018).
The Beavis and Butt-head episode is significant for non-comic reasons. Mike Judge''s show was, for a window in the early 1990s, an actual taste-maker on MTV; bands it endorsed sold records. Faith No More were one of the show''s favoured acts, mainly for the reasons you would expect: Patton''s vocal delivery was inherently quotable.
Controversy and Feuds
The album''s only major controversy at release was the "Epic" video and its slow-motion fish, which generated complaints from animal-rights groups in the UK and US. The longer-running drama was the feud between Mike Patton and Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which started shortly after The Real Thing''s release.
Kiedis''s complaint was specific: he believed Patton had cribbed his stage mannerisms, his off-rhythm rapping style and his general image for the "Epic" music video. Faith No More had toured with the Chili Peppers as recently as the Uplift Mofo Party Tour, when Chuck Mosley was still the band''s singer, and the Bay Area / Los Angeles funk-metal scene was small enough that everyone knew everyone. The tension boiled over publicly through the early 1990s and was kept alive for years by the music press, who found it funnier than it actually was. Chili Peppers bassist Flea later put it on the record that, from his perspective, the whole row had been overblown by the media. He went out of his way to call Faith No More "a good band" and the members "nice people". Faith No More mostly let the joke run.
Outside the Kiedis row, The Real Thing avoided the censorship and Parents Music Resource Center sticker drama that surrounded heavier 1989 records. The lyrical content of "Surprise! You''re Dead!", "The Morning After" and "Underwater Love" is as bleak as anything on the year''s metal albums, but the album was packaged and marketed quietly enough that it largely escaped the moral panic that hounded the year''s thrash records.
Covers, Samples and Tributes
The Real Thing has been covered widely, and in some unexpected directions. "From Out of Nowhere" has been covered by The Birthday Massacre, Apocalyptica (on 1998''s Inquisition Symphony), Helloween (on Metal Jukebox, 1999), Five Finger Death Punch and Danish band Raunchy. "Surprise! You''re Dead!" was covered by Jim Martin himself on his 1997 solo record Milk and Blood, by Belgian death-metal band Aborted on 2007''s Slaughter & Apparatus, and by US technical death-metal band Revocation. "Zombie Eaters" was tackled by Ill Niño in 2006 with Chino Moreno of Deftones on lead vocals. "The Real Thing" itself was covered by US prog-metal band Redemption on a 2005 bonus track. "Epic" has been covered repeatedly: by Welsh rockers The Automatic for a Kerrang! 2007 covers compilation, by Swedish rap-metal band Clawfinger and hip-hop act Just D in 1992-93, by Atreyu on 2007''s Lead Sails Paper Anchor, and reimagined as "Sweet Toof" in 2023 by The Lucid alongside Insane Clown Posse''s Violent J.
The "Epic" entrance music has shown up in places that even the band did not see coming. Lady Gaga told MTV in 2009 that she had used the song as her entrance music when she worked as a burlesque dancer in New York. The song has been performed live by Sugar Ray''s Mark McGrath. It was ranked number thirty on VH1''s 40 Greatest Metal Songs and 67 on the network''s 100 Greatest One-hit Wonders, the latter ranking that has irritated Faith No More fans for nearly two decades.
Tribute records have proved harder to land. A high-profile Faith No More tribute album was attempted in 2000-2001 by then-manager Warren Entner, with confirmed contributions from Korn (covering "Surprise! You''re Dead!"), Disturbed (covering "Midlife Crisis"), Deftones, Papa Roach, Taproot, Primer 55 and System of a Down. It never came out, in part because Patton himself rubbished the idea on his Ipecac Recordings website in February 2001. A different tribute record, Tribute of the Year: A Tribute to Faith No More, did eventually appear in 2002 via Underground Inc., with thirty Faith No More songs covered by smaller industrial, hardcore and alternative-metal acts.
Reissues and Remasters
The Real Thing has had three meaningful reissues. The 2009 Greatest Hits package, The Very Best Definitive Ultimate Greatest Hits Collection, included a remastered "Sweet Emotion" outtake. The 2015 Rhino Records deluxe edition is the definitive treatment: the original album remastered, plus a bonus disc of B-sides, alt mixes and live recordings drawn from Berlin, Sheffield and Brixton; a double-vinyl pressing followed for the gatefold-loving end of the market. Streaming services carry the remastered audio.
The band also have an unusually long history of full-album live performances of Real Thing-era material. In November 2011 they performed the entire King for a Day record live at Maquinaria Festival in Chile with Trey Spruance on guitar, but Real Thing favourites including "War Pigs" and "Epic" remained in setlists for every leg of every tour the band did from 2009 onwards.
Legacy and Influence
The case for The Real Thing as the album that invented alternative metal is now mainstream. The case for it as a direct influence on nu-metal is, if anything, even stronger.
Most of Korn have credited The Real Thing as foundational. Singer Jonathan Davis, guitarist Brian "Head" Welch and guitarist James "Munky" Shaffer have all named the record in interviews; Welch and Shaffer have specifically pointed to Bordin''s drumming and Gould''s bass-and-drum lock as the template they were trying to replicate when Korn wrote their 1994 self-titled debut. Greg Puciato of The Dillinger Escape Plan has called it one of the albums that changed his life. Mushroomhead, Lostprophets, American Head Charge, Dog Fashion Disco and Vex Red have all listed Faith No More as a major influence in interviews with the rock press. Tobias Forge of Ghost has gone on the record about not really being able to classify Faith No More and meaning that as a compliment.
"Faith No More paved the way for Nirvana."
Krist Novoselic, Nirvana co-founder, interviewed by Digital Spy, 11 March 2009
Corey Taylor of Slipknot and Stone Sour has cited the band''s 1990 MTV Video Music Awards performance of "Epic" as the moment that pulled him out of a suicide attempt at his grandmother''s house and back into making music. Robert Plant told Rolling Stone in 1988 that Faith No More were one of his favourite then-current bands. Axl Rose described them in 1990 as the only band he was "jealous of". Scott Ian of Anthrax has named them as one of his all-time favourites repeatedly across thirty years of interviews.
For Faith No More themselves, The Real Thing was a launchpad and, eventually, a millstone. The band''s next record, Angel Dust (1992), was deliberately weirder, more uncompromising, and took the seemingly suicidal step of consciously alienating the audience that had bought The Real Thing. Some of those listeners followed; many did not. Angel Dust outsold The Real Thing in much of the world but lost ground in the US. Jim Martin left after the Angel Dust tour in 1993, by his own account, fired by fax according to Roddy Bottum. King for a Day, Fool for a Lifetime arrived in 1995 with Trey Spruance from Mr. Bungle on guitar; Album of the Year followed in 1997 with Jon Hudson. The band split in 1998. They reformed in 2009, released Sol Invictus in 2015, and have been on what keyboardist Roddy Bottum has described as a "semi-permanent hiatus" since the COVID-19 cancellations of 2020-2021.
Through every one of those phases, The Real Thing kept selling. Its worldwide total has crept past four million copies. It is the album the casual listener still names when asked about Faith No More. And it is, by a significant margin, the most influential record nobody at Reprise expected to chart at all.
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Patton''s ten days | Mike Patton wrote every lyric and every vocal melody on The Real Thing in roughly ten to twelve days, after the rest of the band had already finished tracking the music in his absence. |
| The garage producer | Matt Wallace recorded Faith No More''s very first single, the 1983 "Quiet in Heaven / Song of Liberty" 7-inch as Faith. No Man., on a home eight-track in his parents'' garage. |
| The Mosley track | "The Morning After" was originally written and tracked during the Chuck Mosley era under the title "New Improved Song", and given away on a Sounds magazine flexi-disc on 12 March 1989, three months before the album dropped. |
| Cliff Burton''s riff | "Surprise! You''re Dead!" is built on a riff Jim Martin wrote in the 1970s while playing in Agents of Misfortune, a Berkeley band that also featured a teenage Cliff Burton on bass. |
| The fish | The fish in the "Epic" video became a long-running band gag; Faith No More variously claimed they had stolen it from Björk after a poetry reading in San Francisco. Björk publicly defended them. |
| Gould directed too | Bassist Billy Gould directed the unreleased music video for "Surprise! You''re Dead!" himself, shooting the footage in Chile during the band''s 1991 South American tour. |
| The Bogus Journey re-write | An outtake titled "Sweet Emotion" was given away on a Kerrang! flexi-disc in September 1989, then re-recorded with new lyrics in 1991 as "The Perfect Crime" for the Bill & Ted''s Bogus Journey soundtrack, which Jim Martin appears in as "Sir James Martin". |
| Patton''s tractor | The "There''s A Tractor In My Balls Again" Mr. Bungle T-shirt that Mike Patton wears throughout the "Epic" video helped Mr. Bungle land their Warner Bros. deal in 1991, off the back of The Real Thing''s success. |
| The bottle and the hand | Mike Patton had a beer bottle smashed over his right hand at the I-Beam in San Francisco during a 1989 video shoot; he says he has not had full feeling in it since. |
| The seven-month nothing | The Real Thing did not enter the Billboard 200 until February 1990, almost eight months after its June 1989 release, and only peaked at number eleven in October 1990 after the reissue of "Epic". |
| Wallace nearly walked | Producer Matt Wallace has said publicly that he nearly quit during the sessions for The Real Thing, convinced he was the wrong producer for the job. |
| Axl''s jealousy | Axl Rose told Car Audio Electronics magazine in August 1990 that Faith No More were the only band he was "jealous of", which is part of why Guns N'' Roses later took them on the 1992 stadium tour with Metallica. |
| The Corey Taylor story | Corey Taylor of Slipknot has said that watching Faith No More perform "Epic" on the 1990 MTV Video Music Awards while recovering from a suicide attempt at his grandmother''s house pulled him back into making music. |
| One-hit-wonder rage | Despite Patton''s reputation in metal circles and a 30-year touring career, "Epic" appears at number 67 on VH1''s 100 Greatest One-hit Wonders list, an inclusion Faith No More fans have been complaining about ever since. |
Listen to the Riffology Podcast
If everything in this piece sounds like a record that deserves a long, opinionated, two-hosts-and-a-bottle-of-something dissection, that is exactly what episode RIFF032 of the Riffology podcast is. Two Gen X mates pick apart the producer chaos, the Patton arrival, the Bay Area scene, the Cliff Burton link and the song that turned up on Beavis and Butt-head, all in roughly sixty-nine minutes. The Riffology podcast is available on every major podcast platform: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast, Amazon Music and the rest, with new episodes weekly. Subscribe, listen back through the catalogue and let us know which album we should tackle next.
Comments