FAITH NO MORE

Having sold one million albums with 1989’s The Real Thing album, Faith No More were poised for superstardom. Then they released the dark, twisted and hateful Angel Dust, and the world wasn’t ready

WORDS: PAUL BRANNINGAN

GETTY

Axl wasn’t angry, just disappointed.

“Why do you hate me?” the Guns N’ Roses frontman asked, a note of genuine hurt in his voice. “It’s like I went away and came back home to find you guys fucked my wife.”

Standing beside the singer in GN’R’s backstage compound at Orlando’s Citrus Bowl stadium, the normally easy-going Slash was equally forthright. “If you don’t like it here, just fucking leave,” the guitarist told the three sheepish, shame-faced musicians standing before him. “It can’t be like this.”

Mike Patton, Bill Gould and Roddy Bottum knew this confrontation was coming, given that almost every day for the past three-and-a-half months the trio had been bad-mouthing the Los Angeles hard rock superstars both onstage and in the media. Most of their peers would have been thrilled to be hand-picked to open for Guns N’ Roses on the spring/summer 1992 European stadium tour booked to promote the quintet’s epic Use Your Illusion albums, but Faith No More had always been a particularly contrary, perverse and antagonistic unit. From day one of the trek, which launched at Slane Castle in Ireland on May 16, the San Francisco band had made no attempt whatsoever to disguise their disgust and disdain for the “circus” they had willingly signed up to.

Just one month before the September 2 face-off with Axl and Slash in Florida, Select magazine had published Bill Gould’s scathing, scornful critique of the GN’R roadshow, a brutally honest assessment the bassist knew full well would soon enough come to the attention of the headline act.

“Every band in the world might think they want to open for Guns N’ Roses,” Bill told English journalist Mark Putterford, “but lemme tell you, it’s been a real ugly personal experience, having to deal with all the shit that surrounds this fuckin’ circus. I’ve always hated that aspect of rock music and I’ve never wanted to be part of it, so to find myself being associated with a tour this big kinda sucks.”

Just hours before their scheduled summit with their understandably pissed-off hosts, Faith No More had actually taken a group vote to determine whether or not they would walk away from the tour. Today, speaking from his home in San Francisco, Bill Gould won’t share exactly how that vote broke down, but does admit that his personal preference was to withdraw. Having been out-voted by his colleagues, being subjected to Axl and Slash’s hour-long dressing-down was as embarrassing as it was excruciating for the bassist. Before dismissing the trio, Axl asked Bill directly what exactly he had hoped to achieve with his incendiary diatribe in Select.