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Interview with Billy Gould

photos of Faith No More by Dustin Rabin

Faith No More’s 15 year career has given way to several line-up changes and many different sounds that came along with them. If you listen to any two consecutive Faith No More albums back-to-back, a definite change or progression can be detected, but not so much that you can’t tell it’s still the same band. On the other hand, if you were to play Faith No More’s very first album We Care A Lot back-to-back with their most recent, Album Of The Year, you would probably never suspect it was the same band.

This is welcome change from a lot of bands whose careers have spanned so many years. Let’s use Aerosmith for example. No offense to Aerosmith, or their fans, but let’s face it; if you listen to any song they’ve put out in the last ten years, they could all be from the same album. How have Faith No More kept from falling into this kind of ‘processed’ sound?

Billy Gould: I think if we would have done that, that would have been at The Real Thing. I think that was the time to turn into Aerosmith, and we decided we didn’t want to be Aerosmith. I think you have to want to be that. I mean in many ways when you do that kind of thing, you make the same album over and over and over again, it’s very easy. Things become easier than you think. I mean it might not be interesting to me or you, but we’re not the majority of people that buy records anyway. It actually makes things simpler if you have a product that you can repeat over and over again, because it gives record companies a better chance of building an image.

Dustin Rabin: You get great support from the fans that you’ve had for years, but have you ever had pressure from the record label telling you "Throw on a couple more "Epic"s on this record" to sell more?
Billy: Constantly.

DR: So what do you say to them?
Billy: I mean the thing is, I think we write pop songs. I just think that we try to make pop songs interesting to us. 

DR: Does the label want more mainstream pop?
Billy: Well, yeah. It’s not going to happen. I mean we’re not going to bring a producer in here who’s gonna you know, cut off our songs or anything like that, for example. This just isn’t going to happen. I mean we could try to work with them so we can explain to them that maybe they can use what we give them. You don’t want to tell a record company to fuck off if they’re selling your record, obviously. I mean, you have to work together. The thing is that sometimes they don’t quite understand what we’re trying to do. I mean if you thinks about "Epic" for example. That was our big hit single, and yet the record company put that out as a fluke. They could have just said, "The record’s over. It’s finished. It didn’t work. It didn’t sell. We’re going to do one more single just for, what the hell. What song do you want?" and we picked that song (Epic). It also let’s you see that they don’t always know what’s going to either. They look to us for direction. Asking us, "What songs do you like? What songs do you want to do?" Well, "Ashes To Ashes" seems like an obvious one to put out. We’re not writing radio songs, but I think it’s good to write, you know, pop songs. There’s nothing wrong with that.

DR: If anybody, who has had to make more compromises of the two of you?
Billy: Probably them. I think the thing is, the thing that we’ve had to do is sell to them that it’s okay. We’ve just had to explain ourselves a little.

DR: Obviously it’s got to be working, because you’ve been on the same label for so long.
Billy: Yeah, we haven’t gotten dropped yet, so I guess it’s working. (laughs)

DR: Have you started working on anything for the next record?
Billy: This is the way we work; When we’re touring, we’re pretty much in tour mode. When we got off the road, we start writing again. We’re doing stuff, we’re talking about stuff, but not too much. I mean the record just came out four months ago.

DR: The changes that Faith No More has gone through, have they happened just from you guys growing, or have you been listening to anything in particular that has affected the way you write?
Billy: Both. We’ve all had different tastes. And they’ve changed over the years.

DR: What are you listening to these days?
Billy: Right now?… I mean we’re all listening to different things right now. And it’s totally actually really different from each other. Puffy (drummer Mike Bordin) listens to jazz all the time, I don’t know what (Michael) Patton listens to all the time. I’ve got a tape that I kind of like. It’s kind of cheesy, but… I kind of like it. It’s called "Doom Metal". It’s a compilation of a bunch of doom metal bands. I hate to say it’s cheesy because somebody’s gonna read it and get pissed off, so I’m not going to name any names. I want to say that I do like it, it’s just I don’t take it that seriously. It’s kind of cool.

DR: How big a role does pornography play in your lives?
Billy: I would probably say about 0.1% of our lives. Except for our drummer has porno that he keeps in his suitcase and doesn’t tell anybody.

DR: I remember when Patton got busted at customs once with like a suitcase full of stuff.
Billy: Yeah, that’s true, but he wasn’t married then.

DR: When was the last time you guys went onstage naked like that Billy Idol show?
Billy: That was probably the last time.

DR: Was that the only time?
Billy: Yep. The thing is, they did some hyjinx on us where the fish fell down on us when we played, then we went in our dressing rooms and there were all these farm animals he put in our dressing room. The only thing we could think of, I mean we didn’t have any money. The only way could think of really getting to him was, because he’s kind of such a macho dude, you know, we figured a bunch of naked guys… He probably wouldn’t like it, and I don’t think he did. I think it made him a little uncomfortable, which was the idea. Afterwards he laughed, but I think at the time, it was the thing that really got to him. If it was naked chicks he’d love it.

DR: Are you still in another band?
Billy: I do a lot of different stuff on the side.

DR: If you asked a Faith No More fan about everyone’s other bands, they would probably say that Faith No More was everyone’s main band, and things like Mr. Bungle (Patton) and Imperial Teen (Roddy Bottum, below) are the "side projects". On the other hand, I’ve heard that Mr. Bungle was Mike Patton’s "real" band.
Billy: That’s not it. Those guys get together when they want to get together. Mr. Bungle’s like a thing for Patton where he doesn’t have to do it, like he doesn’t have deadlines. He can put out a record when he wants to put them out. His life doesn’t depend on Mr. Bungle, and so he tries to reserve it just for pure enjoyment. I mean Faith No More is different because when we put out a record, we will tour for a long time. We’re more like a hard working kind of thing.

DR: How would you compare a fan’s perception of which is the main band and which is the side band, vs. what you guys think of it.
Billy: I don’t care. Faith No More gets together when everybody’s ready to do it and it takes a lot of work. So when everybody’s ready to do it, they know what they’re getting into, and it’s definitely the priority of everybody while we’re doing this. Say Roddy’s doing something with Imperial Teen, well then we can’t get together and write songs for Faith No More because he’s doing that.

DR: Does the rest of the band mind having to wait until one of the others is done with their own thing?
Billy: Well, it depends. I mean if some people don’t have anything else to do, they do mind. It just depends how everybody syncs up together. In an ideal world, it would be like, everybody has their side projects at the same time, everybody finishes them at the same time, and everybody does Faith No More at the same time. But things don’t always work out like that.

DR: If you did a crazy publicity stunt for the band, what would it be?
Billy: Free concert in Albania.

DR: Why Albania?
Billy: The first free concert in Albania’s history. It would be the first concert that’s ever happened there. It would be pretty wild. I think it would be a great place to do it. It’s a great place for a concert. I think it would be an amazing show.