Buzz Osborne on King Dunn, Melvins and doubting a Fantômas return
Influencing the likes of Nirvana, Faith No More, Slipknot, Sunn O))), and numerous others would be enough for most musicians to head off contentedly into the sunset after decades of success, finally swapping the sweaty stage for a beach lounger and a cocktail, but not Buzz Osborne.
The Melvins leader is arguably the most singular force in the music industry. He has consistently charted his own path, triumphing in defying expectations, and his unbridled creativity has taken him to many domains. This year, he’s released Tarantula Heart with his main band and embarked on an extensive global tour with old friend Trevor Dunn. Clearly, there’s no reason for him to stop yet, and nor would he want to.
I caught up with Osborne over the phone, and he was somewhere near Boston amid the American leg of the King DunnTour before it hit Europe, where it the run of dates will wrap up at London’s Dingwalls on Halloween, a fitting date to call it a day. The jaunt is a significant one. It is not only Osborne’s second-ever solo tour as King Buzzo, arriving a decade after his last round of live performances, but it also sees the pair of esteemed creative associates join forces a good while apart.
Dunn requires little introduction. Known initially as the bassist for Mike Patton’s influential pre-Faith No More band, Mr Bungle, he also featured in Patton’s supergroup Fantômas alongside Osborne, with whom he shares a long collaborative history. Despite his jazz roots, Dunn and the Melvins’ frontman are kindred spirits, consistently striving to create idiosyncratic sounds. In 2020, they joined forces as King Buzzo on Osborne’s second solo album, Gift of Sacrifice.
On their latest tour, Osborne sings and plays the acoustic guitar while Dunn plays the stand-up concert bass. This stripped-back set-up is a considerable departure from the madcap rock of Tarantula Heart.
“It’s been great,” Osborne says of the run. “He’s really fun to play with. We’re having a lot of fun doing this whole tour, and I don’t know when we’ll ever get to do it again. So if people don’t see it this time, I don’t know that they ever will.” Naturally, both have a lot going on creatively and logistically, such as Melvin’s bassist Steven McDonald and drummer Dale Crover’s touring with Red Kross, which freed up time for them to do it.
Gift of Sacrifice arrived in August 2020, a time when the pandemic still wreaked havoc on the world. Osborne explains: “We were going to do this tour then, then the pandemic screwed it all up. Ruined everything. So we had to wait, and then when it became time to tour again in 2022, I wanted to do Melvins stuff, you know, louder rock stuff. I didn’t want to start that off in an acoustic tour, so it took a couple of years for it to happen.”
The Melvins frontman knows the material with Dunn is entirely different from Tarantula Heart, but “that’s the cool thing about it” – they get to explore a different part of their artistic range. By the time the tour wraps up, they’ll have completed 70 shows. Contrary to the belief that they’ve thrown the project together, the prep time was hefty. That’s why the tour is so extensive; they’re making their hard work worthwhile. “Nobody’s done what we’re doing. Nobody,” he says of their collaboration.
Given that Osborne and Dunn are back together again, questions of another Fantômas record in the offing are undoubtedly on the lips of fans. Formed by Patton in 1998 after the demise of Faith No More, featuring Osborne, Dunn and Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo, Fantômas are the CSNY of heavy music and one of the greatest supergroups ever formed. They’ve released four albums to date, the most recent being 2005’s Suspended Animation. Their last performance was in 2017, so the project feels far from dead.
The group were a key influence on Slipknot honing their distinctive sound in the late 1990s, and also impacted Tool and Mastodon. Famously, they can count fans in Danny DeVito, Alan Moore, and even the world’s most dedicated vegan, Moby.
Unlike most supergroups, though, Fantômas has had a lasting influence. However, Osborne doubts there will ever be a fifth album: “I think it’s very, very, very unlikely it’ll ever happen.” Prompting intrigue about why, he explains that it’s simply not in his hands, “Well, you’d have to get Mike involved in it, and who knows what’s going through his head? I just don’t see it happening.”
Despite Osborne questioning the likelihood of the band returning, he thinks it’s a tremendous idea and would be more than willing to partake in a reunion: “I think Fantômas would do really well, especially at this point; it’s been so long since we did anything. But I just can’t see it happening.”
Osborne is still in contact with the rest of Fantômas, and Melvins even toured with Mr Bungle in Australia this March; it just seems everyone, including Patton, has other things going on; they’re all prolific, after all. “I think it would be huge. I’m not in charge. It’s not up to me,” he states.
Later in our conversation, when I mentioned Melvins’ possible influence on nu-metal bands, Osborne dispelled the idea, saying of Korn in particular: “Korn sound exactly like Helmet; I don’t hear any difference.”
He then turned to a band that made a defining impact on that particular era of music: Faith No More. “As far as Faith No More and stuff like that, I know almost nothing about Faith No More,” the Melvins leader maintains, despite working extensively with Patton. He vaguely heard the hits during their zenith but didn’t watch MTV; it wasn’t his thing. Joining Fantômas, he knew Patton had a cultural presence but couldn’t tell you any records, save for 1993’s Angel Dust, and he hasn’t heard it.
“It was really hilarious. We’d be on tour with Fantômas, and all these Patton fans would come up to me and start asking me all these questions. I’d tell them, ‘I don’t know anything about Faith No More.’ ‘Does Mike know? Does Mike know?‘And I’d go, ‘He never asked’,” Osborne recalled.
The bright lights of MTV and the Grammys and the like were never Osborne’s thing. It shows the measure of the man and artist that he could go into a supergroup and be totally unobstructed by his bandmates’ previous efforts. This makes sense, too, given his history. When Osborne was a bit older, he would find his music mainly through word of mouth and fanzines, but as a kid in the 1970s, he formed his music taste “all on my own”. He had no “musical partners” in older siblings or people turning him onto new music, so publications like Hit Parader were instrumental. Photographs of bands like The Clash would prompt enough interest for him to buy one of their albums on mail-order.
He would undertake typical adolescent chores like cutting lawns and then give the money to his mother to write him a cheque in order to send off for records by the Sex Pistols, The Damned, and David Bowie, eagerly awaiting their arrival at the Osborne home. It was through the Sex Pistols covering The Stooges’ ‘No Fun’ that he found Iggy Pop’s proto-punk legends and fellow Michigan pioneers, The MC5.
“As a result, I only thought things were good or bad. I didn’t think, ‘Well, I don’t like this genre of music.’ You know, I could put on Van Halen, Led Zeppelin and Black Flag in the same week, no problem at all,” he says, offering insight into his singular being. “I never threw away my Led Zeppelin or Van Halen records or any of that stuff. I was listening to all that stuff at the same time.”
“There’s not enough good music out there for me to be that picky. The (one I like) least is probably hip-hop, and I still like a few of that stuff, but I generally don’t find anything about it that’s appealing to me,” the Melvins frontman adds. “I mean, I think it’s okay, but by in large, I think it’s a bunch of crap. If people want to listen to that, you know, yeah, I’m good. I’ll sit over here with my Captain Beefheart records.”
It’s not all been about the King Dunn Tour this year, though. Tarantula Heart is a brilliant album, demonstrating that Melvins are not a band to be pigeonholed, regardless of their impact on the sludge metal genre. Osborne is happy with it, too. “I’ve never done a record like it; I think it stands up really well; I like it a great deal,” he states, noting it was a pleasure to play with additional drummer Roy Mayorga and guitarist Gary Chester. He likes all the records the band do but was finished with it nearly two years ago: “So, you know, I’m past that record, way past it. But that’s the way it always works with records. By the time they come out, you’ve moved on.”
Buzz Osborne is an artist who keeps pushing forward, regardless of the project he last committed to. It’s safe to say that by the time the King Dunn Tour is over, he’ll swiftly turn his attention to another creative endeavour. As expected, he has a wealth of material up his sleeve and has already written the next Melvins record. They’ll probably start recording soon, he says. This industriousness is key to producing such widespread influence; stopping is not in his nature.
