The Faith No More song written on the day of Kurt Cobain’s death
Hair metal supposedly went extinct in September of 1991, when Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ debuted on MTV and essentially changed the entire rock format on the network.
Two years earlier, though, there was another massively popular single that felt, within its own moment, like a clear shift away from the hairspray era into something darker, weirder, and more suited to a new decade.
It hasn’t been as studiously contextualised by rock critics as the birth of grunge, by Faith No More’s ‘Epic’, and its appropriately grandiose music video, arguably had a comparable influence on the trajectory of ‘90s rock. Showcasing how the convergence of metal, alternative rock, and hip hop could actually work, the track wetted the public’s palette for the emergence of everyone from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Rage Against the Machine, Deftones, Korn, and System of a Down.
Unfortunately for Faith No More, by the time their next album, Angel Dust, came out in 1992, the grunge wave had hit with a vengeance and surpassed them in the zeitgeist, at least in terms of commercial viability. Despite strong reviews, Angel Dust peaked at number ten in the States and then faded quickly, and none of its singles took off in the way ‘Epic’ had. To make matters worse, the band was dealing with increasing internal turmoil, leading to the departure of long-time guitarist Jim Martin.
This set the table for a complete fresh start of sorts in 1994, as Faith No More started work on their fifth album, King for a Day… Fool for a Lifetime. “The big question for us after the past few years was, ‘Do we still have something to say as a band?’” drummer and founding FNM member Mike Bordin said after the record’s release in 1995. “We couldn’t continue if we felt we were wasting people’s time or ripping ourselves off.”
In the end, with new guitarist Dean Menta on board and an anything-goes philosophy adopted, King for a Day completely re-energised Faith No More, with Bordin calling it “the first time in the life of the band that I’ve been 100% happy with an album.” The record didn’t actually perform any better than Angel Dust in terms of sales, but it solidified FNM as something more than a mere influence on bigger bands. They were still pushing into new territory and arguably writing better, pound-for-pound songs than at any other point in their career.
A particular standout track on King for a Day was ‘Ricochet’, the second single off the record and one of the last songs written during a nearly nine-month rehearsal period. According to Faith No More lore, frontman Mike Patton wrote the lyrics on the same day that news of Kurt Cobain’s suicide broke, making it almost impossible to hear the song outside of that thematic context – “Runnin’ twice as fast to stay in the same place / Don’t catch my breath till the end of the day / And I’d rather be shot in the face / Than hear what you’re goin’ to say,” and then there’s the chorus – “It’s always funny until someone gets hurt / And then it’s just hilarious.”
Perhaps Patton was aligning himself with Cobain, commenting on the cruelty of celebrity culture and taking aim at the tabloid press? In typical Mike Patton fashion, though, he wasn’t offering up clear and concise explanations.
“I didn’t know him or anything,” Patton said of Cobain when asked about the song by an NME reporter in 1995. When he was questioned more directly about how he felt about Cobain’s death, Patton was similarly not forthcoming, hinting that he was repulsed by the sensationalist reporting of the news. “What can I say? [laughs]. What can I say? I’m sorry? Bad things happen, y’know? I’m sure it wasn’t as great as everyone thinks it was.”
“What wasn’t?” the reporter asked… “His suicide,” Patton clarified, “I’m sure it wasn’t such a glamorous event,” but one member of Faith No More who was more personally impacted by Cobain’s death was keyboardist Roddy Bottum, who’d befriended the Nirvana singer through Courtney Love, one of FNM’s former lead singers.
Bottum was going through an extremely difficult time already, struggling with his own heroin addiction, the loss of his father, and the shame of living as a gay man in the macho world of ‘90s rock – “Kurt was like a unicorn,” Bottum recently said of his friend, noting that Cobain was completely accepting and supportive of Bottum’s lifestyle, “we were really good friends, he loved that I was gay, that that was a thing he got to be around, he was a very special person.”
Bottum was absent for a lot of the sessions during the recording of King for a Day, but he never communicated any concerns about the messaging in ‘Ricochet’, which was ironically produced by Andy Wallace, one of the sound mixers on Nevermind. In fact, Bottum once said that ‘Ricochet’, which sometimes was listed on Faith No More set lists with the codename ‘Nirvana’, had “my favourite lyrics on the record.”
