CHUCK MOSLEY: STILL ON DRUGS

Well, I don’t know that the original Faith No More vocalist is back on smack, but I can’t think of any other way to explain this statement from a recent Rolling Stone interview:

“I thought [firing guitarist Jim Martin] was as big if not bigger a mistake than getting rid of me — just because he had a lot of pull with the big part of their crowd at the time. And he was ‘the personality,’ y’know? There was something people could identify to. After Jim, they were going through a string of different guitar players, and I couldn’t name one of them. That Jagger/Richards, Plant/Page thing was gone.”

Alright, I love Jim Martin as much as the next guy, but come on, dude. Let’s look at some facts:

• Faith No More made two great albums, King for a Day… and Album of the Year, after Martin was fired from the band.
• Never in the history of the world has anyone associated Martin with a Jagger/Richards or Plant/Page-style partnership. Who would even be the Jagger or Plant in that equation? Martin never struck me as being particularly close with Mike Patton.
• If no one knows the names of the guitarists who played with FNM in-between Jim Martin and Jon Hudson, that’s because they didn’t stick around for very long (And their names were Trey Spruance and Dean Menta, by the way. Spruance was also a member of Mr. Bungle.). Everyone seems to know who Jon Hudson is.
• If Jim Martin was “the personality,” then Faith No More would have been the most boring band on the planet. Wearing multiple pairs of sunglasses while remaining ever-stationary on stage is not a good way to display “personality.” In fact, I’d wager that 99.9% of all FNM fans would argue that Patton was the “personality” in the band.
• The reunion tour has been a huge success. No one seems to care that Martin isn’t in the band anymore.
• And, oh yeah, firing Chuck Mosley wasn’t a mistake, either. Ever hear anyone say “Well, I like ‘Epic,’ but I really wish the vocals sounded like the lead singer had a terrible cold?” No. No you haven’t. That’s because Patton > Mosley. This is not debatable. The Mosley years were good, but the Patton years are the definitive works of FNM. Period.

In other news, Mosley claims that the band invited him to do a duet with Patton for at least one reunion show, but he couldn’t make it ’cause “my passport expired and I couldn’t get it in time.”

Chuck Mosley has a new solo album coming out. I don’t care, though, and neither do you. Maybe if it had some of Jim Martin’s personality…

-AR