Judgment Night - Music From The Motion Picture Released 33 years ago
In October 1993 the movie Judgment Night arrived in theatres. Despite it’s star-studded cast of Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr and Stephen Dorff it was a flop. However a month earlier on September 14, 1993, Judgment Night – Music From The Motion Picture arrived with a gloriously combustible idea: throw some of the coolest alternative bands of the day together with hip-hop’s biggest names and see what happens when guitars and beats collide.
By the early ’90s, the music press was labelling anything that mixed heavy guitars with hip-hop ‘funk-metal’ or ‘rap-metal’. The idea was hardly new. Aerosmith and Run-DMC had turned Walk This Way into a global smash in 1986, while Anthrax and Public Enemy had united their worlds on Bring The Noise the following year. But Judgment Night took the concept further, pairing alternative and metal bands with hip-hop artists to create a whole album of amazing collaborations.
The man behind the project was Happy Walters, then president of Immortal Records and manager of acts including House Of Pain and Cypress Hill. Recognising that alternative musicians were increasingly fascinated by hip-hop, and vice versa, Walters saw an opportunity to bring the scenes together. Getting the idea off the ground, however, proved more complicated than making a few phone calls.
The project took six months of negotiations involving managers, record labels, publishers and artists around the world. Walters supplied musicians with scenes from the film for inspiration, while music supervisor Karen Rachnian handled the business of deciding where the resulting tracks would appear.
“Sonic Youth, Helmet, their managers were super supportive,” Walters recalled. “Helmet was super into it. Faith No More was really into it. Those three, I think, were the first ones to come on board, which were all credible and cool at the time, which helped with others. It was a lot of work, because you had to get the artists, the managers, the labels and the publishers all on board. It took about six months to put the whole thing together.”
Faith No More were paired with Samoan hip-hop crew Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E., and the timing was just right. The band had just completed a gruelling two-year tour behind Angel Dust, which had pushed their experimental instincts further than ever, while guitarist Jim Martin had become increasingly alienated by the group’s direction. Mike Patton, Bill Gould, Roddy Bottum and Mike Bordin therefore headed into an LA studio without Martin to meet Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E. for the first time.
“We didn’t know the Boo-Yaa guys before we did the collaboration… in fact, we met at the studio,” Bill later recalled. “They were all great musicians in their own right, and what was surprising is that we clicked immediately on a musical level. There was no awkwardness or anything. We just started playing and it felt really natural.”
The original plan nearly went in another direction. Bill had travelled to Samoa to record singers and became fascinated by the island’s a cappella traditions, eventually working up a version of the Samoan national anthem with Patton and the others. When they played it to Boo-Yaa, however, the response wasn’t enthusiastic.
“The Samoan national anthem is actually really, really cool,” Patton recalled. “So we worked up a version of the Samoan national anthem. I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s not do rock-rap, let’s do something else!’ We worked the whole thing up and we played it for ’em and they just, like, laughed. They literally laughed in our faces. They thought it was the funniest thing in the world. They were like, ‘What the fuck is this?’”
Boo-Yaa had a simpler suggestion: bring in the instruments and make some noise.
“They were like, ‘No, no, no, bring the instruments in,’” Patton remembered. “So we brought the instruments in and just started jamming. That was really the beginning of it.”
What followed was a half-hour jam that Bill remembers as “insane”, with the two camps clicking immediately. Unfortunately, the engineers assumed they were soundchecking and hadn’t pressed record. They did it again, producing another half-hour of material, only to discover that nobody had recorded that either.
“We played for about half an hour and it was insane,” Gould recalled. “Then we stopped and somebody said, ‘Did you get that?’ And the engineer was like, ‘No, we thought you were just soundchecking.’ So we did it again. We played for another half an hour and they didn’t record that either. It was unbelievable.”
After lunch they returned for a third attempt. That take became Another Body Murdered.
“We went out for Thai food, came back and did it a third time,” Gould said. “That’s the one that ended up being used. It was probably the least interesting of the three, which is kind of funny, because the first two were never recorded. But by then we knew what we were doing and we just went for it.”
The session was as colourful as you’d expect from Faith No More meeting a group of Samoan gangsta rappers. Bill remembers guns being left around the mixing console, while Boo-Yaa’s Vincent “Rook” Devoux - around six-foot-six and 380 pounds - apparently carried an enormous handgun.
“He had this gun that dwarfed his hand,” Bill remembered. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It was just sitting there, and I remember thinking, ‘Okay, this is a different kind of recording session.’”
Despite the intimidating surroundings, the musicians quickly became friends, and the collaboration proved natural.
“For as mean as they look, they were super sweet,” Patton added. “They were really nice guys. They were very respectful, and they were funny. It wasn’t like we were walking into some dangerous situation. It was just a bunch of musicians who wanted to make something cool.”
Another Body Murdered, written by Faith No More and Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E. with Gould on guitar, was produced by the two bands alongside Ghetto Guerillas and selected as the second promotional single from Judgment Night. Marcus Raboy directed the video, later returning to work with Faith No More on Digging The Grave.
For Boo-Yaa leader Ted “The Godfather” Devoux, who died in 2018 following an extended illness, the collaboration offered a chance to push his group further into rock.
“Hopefully, this will open up more opportunities for groups like mine to tour with Metallica and Guns N’ Roses,” he said in 1993. “And it gives us a little edge on the rap scene. We’ve always wanted to be accepted by both sides, because we come from both sides. We’re not just a rap group. We’re musicians, and we like heavy music.”
A Faith No More/Boo-Yaa tour never materialised, although the idea was discussed.
“We hit it off so well [on] a musical level,” Gould said. “At the end of it, we were like really close friends. We were tight! I think that we talked about [touring together] and it didn’t work out. It would have been great, though. I think the shows would have been pretty wild.”
That perhaps explains why Another Body Murdered still works. It wasn’t a record-company masterplan to invent ‘rap-metal’ or a desperate attempt to cash in on a trend. It was two very different groups discovering, almost by accident, that they could make a hell of a racket together - even if someone did forget to press record twice.
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