Not unlike most ‘80s thrash metal bands, Mr. Bungle was formed in an impoverished lumber & fishing town by a trio of curious, volatile teenagers. Trey Spruance, Mike Patton & Trevor Dunn created the amorphous “band” in 1985 up in Humboldt County, California, sifting through a variety of members until around 1989 when they settled on a lineup that managed to get signed to Warner Bros Records.
Up until 2000 they released three albums, toured a good portion of the Western hemisphere and avoided any sort of critical acclaim. Some argue that the band subsequently broke up but there is also no proof of this. What is true is that they took 20 years off from performing under said moniker while they pursued various other music that, in contrast, paid the rent.
In 2020, a different iteration of Mr. Bungle emerged, pairing the original trio of Dunn, Patton and Spruance with Anthrax’s Scott Ian and former Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo for a proper release of the Eureka-bred band’s unreleased demo, The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny.
In March 2024, this iteration of Mr. Bungle will hit stages all across Australia for The Raging Wrath of Australia & New Zealand tour. The acclaimed metal experimentalists will play in Auckland, Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth in early March.
It will be the first visit down under for Mr. Bungle since 2000, they will be joined on all dates by proto-grunge & sludge legends The Melvins.
Ahead of the tour, we caught up with guitarist Trey Spruance for a chat. This is The Raging Wrath Of Conversation with Trey Spruance.
Mr. Bungle - The Raging Wrath Of Conversation with Trey Spruance
Maniacs: Trey, Mr. Bungle are coming to Australia for the first time in decades, are you excited to finally be returning down under?
TS: “Yes. I think for me Mr. Bungle it’s the first time since 1999 or something. I've been there with Secret Chiefs since then, but yeah, it's, it's been a long time coming!”
Well, you’re making it up to Australia by bringing the Melvins with you! That’s a great pairing. Do you enjoy touring with them?
“Yeah, I think we've done one tour with them and it works so spectacularly well. They're the best band to tour with the first time we played with them, it was way back in 1992, so we go way back”.
This will be the first time Australia has had a chance to see you with Scott Ian and Dave Lombardo in the band, what has it been like getting to play with those guys in Mr. Bungle?
“It’s been amazing. They’re not just some old guys that you tap on because of their name they are unbelievably good musicians. Since they inspired us when we were much younger, we're all excited about playing with them, but to, you know, to our surprise, they've been very excited about playing with us, too! “It’s been a very natural thing.”
“I don’t know how much you know about myself or Trevor, but we play on a lot of bands and played a lot of very challenging music, so you could run the risk or the danger of playing these songs every night getting a bit repetitive, it could get a bit automatic. But I’ve found that with this experience so far, I get more excited with each show, coz Lombardo is always doing new things, he is improvising as he goes along. He learns the music and then he digests it and by the third song, it’s new and fresh and fun to play again. So for us selfishly, it's quite exciting.”
It seems like a dream scenario for for a band that's been in the game for as long as you have to be able to inject fresh energy without having to sort of throw the kiddy gloves on, is that how it feels to you?
“Yeah, that's true. I mean it was a weird idea to go back and do this [2020’s The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny] You know? To go back and revisit the first demo music that we wrote in 1984. It's a strange experience. It's a bit of a stretch for me. I haven't been playing shredding death metal guitar since I was 15 probably. The unfamiliar territory of the whole thing has been pretty exciting for us. I know for fans who listen to our music and who listened in the ‘90s, it's a very different experience. We're turning a really weird corner for them, but honestly, we kind of did it for ourselves. I think this was about tapping into a dimension of this band that is really the centre of it and maybe has been overlooked. So it felt like the right thing to do.”
As a musician, you play a wild number of instruments. What can we expect you to bring with you when you hit the stage in Australia?
“Just the guitar. That's it. What I am in this band is a guitar player and that's it. Which is weird for me. It’s different to anything I’ve ever done. To just be the guitar player. The only other time that’s been the case was when I played in Faith No More briefly. Now on this iteration of Mr Bungle that’s all I do. I’m just a guitar player, it's totally weird and fun. I love it! It’s so much easier than what I usually do!”
What about from the production sense, do you feel like Mr. Bungle ticks all of the boxes of the way you like to operate?
“No! Not at all. Zero! This is as much of a left turn as I could make. I’m usually obsessive about production stuff, I get super hands-on doing all the detailed work, on this, I did zero, I did some post-production and some kind of stuff away in the background, but I had no real role in the production of the record. I'm just the guitar player and it's great.”
It must be kind of freeing too. To just concentrate on playing one thing and doing it well?
“Exactly. I feel selfish because this feels like the least amount I’ve ever given to an audience. But the audience seems to like it more than what I usually do. So I guess it all evens out in the end. I mean I shouldn't say that because what are there, like eight billion fucking notes? I mean it is a lot. If you count how many notes that Scott and I are playing in the night, it's pretty ridiculous actually. Quantitatively speaking, we’d put most other bands under the table. So I shouldn’t say I’m not giving a lot, because quantitatively I give an awful lot!”
The world is pretty obsessed with nostalgia right now, particularly in the realms of rock and heavy music. Do you feel like this Mr. Bungle tour cycle fits in with that at all?
“This is a totally weird situation because this is nostalgia for us, but it’s not for the audience.
Nobody was listening to this shit. Like everybody was listening to our 90s music. They're not going to get any nostalgia out of what we're doing here. I feel like it's selfish because we get to be nostalgic, but nobody else gets to. We’ve kind of turned the screw on the nostalgia thing. But it’s a nostalgic lineup, that’s why the promoters pick up the gig because they know it’s a sure thing. It’s easy for everybody to signup on, whatever works I guess!”
What’s your current favourite Mr. Bungle song to perform live?
“Yeah, that's a good question. It's so physically demanding. It’s more like a process of elimination for the songs that I dread playing. Like, if you would ask Scott or me, we would say, Sudden Death is a fucking nightmare. It’s really asking a lot. I think there's something like 95 riffs and it never repeats and this is all fast and you know it's it's really physically demanding. So I would say that's my least favourite to play even though it's my favourite song. Sudden Death is my favourite song that we're doing now, but I fucking hate seeing it on the set list and knowing that it's coming. It's a nightmare.”
From a purely selfish point of view, I’ve got to know, you have worked as a producer with Imperial Triumphant, has that been fun, making those records? They’re so wild!
“They’re a lot of fun, it has been fun working on those records, we’re trying to sort out schedules right now to see if we can get to making the next one.”
I didn’t quite expect the style of music they play to be so warmly received!
“Yeah, me either. I felt like it was a very good sign that ‘Holy shit. If people are ready for this, they're pretty much ready for anything because that's that's about as fucking caca as it gets, you know? The fact that it's going over so well has to do with the way that they manage as a live band, to pull it off beautifully. I think that has something to do with it too, but also Century Media, I couldn't believe that they got behind that record, it was really great to see it. To see a major kind of metal label, take a chance on something that crazy and have it work out, it's great.”
You probably can't believe that we've got this far into an interview about Mr. Bungle and I haven't asked you a single question about Mike Patton!
“Oh, that’s true, what the hell is the matter with you?”
Well, allow me to ask a question about Mike Patton.
“So that was like taking me out to breakfast before dumping me, it was a little apology, to soften up the blow?”
Precisely! So my question is, what is it like to work with a vocalist who has no real limitation to what they can do? He has an almost limitless range, especially within the context of rock and metal. Is that a liberating experience as a musician, knowing you can venture into realms with him that others probably can’t?
“I would answer that this way. If we’re talking about Mr. Bungle of the ‘90s I would put Mike, Trevor, Dany and I, we’re all very flexible. We can all bend into any shamanic shape that you want us to in music. That's all very natural for all of us. With Mike what's unique about him as a vocalist is that usually, there's this big division between the musicians and the vocalist. He’s never been like that He’s always been with us, he’s always been one of the musicians, and his voice is one of the instruments. So externally, to the rest of the world, of course, that perception is different, but internally, that’s always been how he has been perceived and how he is. I don't see it changing.”
“Maybe ironically with this cycle of music that we're doing, it doesn’t ask very much from him. It's pretty one-dimensional guitar playing but you know, I mean he's he's doing kind of one-dimensional,, I'm kind of doing one dimensional. It's, it's a fucking cakewalk for all of us. I think in some ways, because it’s not switching. But on the other hand, staying within those goalposts and doing all that super precision stuff is kind of a new challenge for all of us. So To answer your question about him. I have been amazed to see him get better and better as a death metal vocalist. I think he is better now than when we recorded the record. Also, kind of coming back to the more melodic stuff with our cover songs and stuff, it’s just been beautiful. “
“It’s been beautiful and it’s growing, it seems like we started with this very limited language, and now it’s blossoming out from that, almost like the beginning of the band, when started from this death metal shit to begin with and then started exploring other genres. It’s sort of repeating that process. It’s weird.”
That's awesome though. It’s like a reset button for your brain, you get to embrace youth again!
“Exactly, being primitive and just being super fast and crazy, it’s been fun.”
You mentioned some interesting cover choices, does that mean we should expect to see some fresh covers when you hit Australia next year?
“It's very possible like you know every tour that we've been doing, we've been, you know, introducing new material, new covers and stuff and you or even reinterpretations of stuff. So it always happens, I expect it will happen again. It's awesome.”
What would your wrestling entrance or walkout song be? What song would you personally like people to hear play every time you walked into a room?
"There is a Japanese band called The Gerogerigegege and they do a cover of The Cure’s Boys Don’t Cry, from a record called Tokyo Anal Dynamite, it's all cover songs. They last about 10 seconds each and it's just to explosion of noise. The Boys Don’t Cry version on that, that’s perfect walkout music. Boy’s Don’t Cry, noise version. That’s perfect."
That is such a perfectly in-character answer from you.
“It’s my honest answer, I'm listening to your question, like, what would it be? That would be it, that would be it, that's brilliant!”
If you could only listen to one Mr. Bungle record for the rest of your life, which record would you choose?
“It has to be California. I think, because California has so many layers. Some of that layering was handcrafted. So there are so many different layers of this fine work, that I would be satisfied listening to it probably a million times. Whereas some of the other records are too available to me. I understand them too quickly. California still challenges me, I find myself thinking “holy shit, what the fuck were we doing there”. I always remember new stuff every time, every time I hear it again. So California.”
MR BUNGLE
THE RAGING WRATH OF AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND
WITH FELLOW POP STARS MELVINS
2024
SUNDAY 3 MARCH – TOWN HALL, AUCKLAND
WEDNESDAY 6 MARCH – FESTIVAL HALL, MELBOURNE
THURSDAY 7 MARCH – HINDLEY ST MUSIC HALL, ADELAIDE
SATURDAY 9 MARCH – HORDERN PAVILION, SYDNEY
SUNDAY 10 MARCH – FORTITUDE MUSIC HALL, BRISBANE
TUESDAY 12 MARCH – METRO CITY, PERTH
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