The A To Z of We Care A Lot

The party to celebrate the release of Faith No More's debut album was on November 30th 1985. We consider this to be the original release date for We Care A Lot.

Here is an our A to Z of We Care A Lot on it's 40th anniversary. Enjoy.

A IS FOR As The Worm Turns

Track eight on the record has remained a fan favourite throughout the band's career. As The Worm Turns was reclaimed live by Mike Patton during The Real Thing tour and eventually re-recorded as a b-side in 1992.

As The Worm Turns is anti-protest song, according to Chuck Mosley.

‘It’s my take on a San Francisco mentality; vegetarian and peace-loving hippies. My take about people that are protesting and complaining. If you want to do something, don’t sit around - just get off your ass, and choose family.’ - Chuck | Small Victories 2017

B IS FOR Mark Bowen

Track three on WCAL was given the working title after Faith No More's previous guitar player simply because an early version began with Bowen’s guitar.

'The truth behind "the Mark Bowen" song, is that prior to having a permanent singer, the band named their songs after persons, places, or things that were around when the music was formulated, rather than naming them song A or song B, etc. There were no lyrics and therefore no real song name. When the boys sent a tape to LA, so that Chuck could write some lyrics for his upcoming stint as singer, he made up lyrics for the song that was labeled as, "Mark Bowen". I had spent a day or so with Chuck prior to that, but he did not really know me. He just made up a song. I'm happy to have my 15 minutes of fame from that, ha!' - Mark Bowen | Faithnoman.com 2013

C IS FOR City Beat

On May 28th 1986 Faith No More appeared on the music show City Beat for an interview with Steve U.

D IS FOR Dodge 66

In early 1986 Faith No More set off on their very first national tour - five band members and a roadie (Roddy’s boyfriend Jim Olson) in a rented ‘66 Dodge van with a trailer. Songs were written and other personal discoveries made behind the doors of that van.

E IS FOR E-Z Street

At the age of 15 Mike Bordin and Cliff Burton joined the band E-Z Street whose leader was future FNM guitarist Jim Martin. The band which took its name from a strip-club in San Mateo. E-Z Street didn't last very long due to the mutual dislike between Bordin and Martin. Burton would of course go on play bass for Metallica but always championed FNM.

F IS FOR 'Fuck the haters. That is all'

In August 2016 Bill, Mike B, Roddy Bottum and Jon Hudson reunited with Chuck Mosley as Chuck & Friends for two incredible US shows. Bill tweeted a message for reluctant fans “Fuck the haters. That is all”.

‘Yes, you know, it’s curious and partly true. With a thirty-three year-old band, we’ve always had people telling us what to do. And also people sticking up for us like “this is what you are”. And us... we responded and explained our intentions. Then we started to have fans who appreciated us for what we did, for doing what we felt and not what we supposedly had to do. Reaching this point today and seeing people, some of them fans of ours, punishing us for having Chuck singing in the band makes me wonder: “Who the hell are these people? How can our own fans adopt the same attitude as that of the idiots who questioned my band at the very beginning?” It’s sheer crap. They can’t put Chuck in a defensive position because they have nothing to defend themselves against. He’s the original singer! (laughs) So, maybe there was a bit of drama, but I didn’t get too upset. It was more like “this is who we are and this is what we do, and if you don’t like it you can go fuck yourself”. I just felt it was necessary to express it. - Bill | Mondo Sonoro 2016

G IS FOR Olga Gerrard

Olga and her husband were Faith No More's management team in the early eighties. Olga was also responsible for the cover design of We Care A Lot. Olga would go on to manage artists such as Monster Magnet, Diamanda Galás, Killing Joke, and Nine Inch Nails.

H IS FOR Hancock Park

Hancock Park is the Los Angeles suburb in which Bill and Roddy grew up together. They both attended elementary school, cub scouts and Catholic high school. At nine years old the young friends would get into allsorts of adolescent trouble - once even calling in a bomb threat to a Safeway supermarket!

I IS FOR I-Beam

On Monday 13th January 1986 Faith No More played at the I-Beam in San Francisco. On 25th August 2016 an audience recording of the entire show was shared on Faith No More's official YouTube channel. The We Care A Lot deluxe band edition includes two tracks from this show.

J IS FOR Joan Osato

Joan was Roddy's roommate who took early photographs of FNM some of which were included on the cover of We Care A Lot. Check out more photos HERE.

K IS FOR KXLU

In the early eighties KXLU was a college radio station broadcasting from Loyola Marymount University. Two DJs Bunny Bouffant and Adam Bomb played FNM regularly and attracted attention to an early recording of We Care A Lot.

'By 1984, I had seen Faith No More live several times in the LA clubs, and was anxious to get their sounds on Demolisten. Their live shows had a lot of power with the fusion of funk, punk, rap, soul. It was a new genre that was moshable and danceable.

Chuck personally brought up a test pressing of some of the songs from the eventual We Care A Lot release—‘Greed’, ‘Mark Bowen’, ‘Arabian Disco’, and ‘We Care A Lot’. I carted up Faith No More and the other top songs from Demolisten for regular airplay on KXLU.

There was a huge positive response, and lots of listeners called in saying, ‘Finally we get to hear these guys on the radio.’ I’m happy the band’s music reached the multitudes; that was always my intention with any band featured on Demolisten.' - Bunny Bouffant | Small Victories 2017

L IS FOR Live Aid!

The title track We Care A Lot is a sarcastic parody of what was going on in music and pop culture at the time. The Live Aid concert and USA's Feed the World song seemed to have irked FNM into creating some kind of statement. The lyrics were written by Roddy with Chuck throwing in the odd line here and there.

'Well, ah Roddy wrote all the things that he cared about and I just wrote the part that says, "it's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it" 'cause I figured that's just the feeling I got. That's the only thing I submitted. That, and the newer lyrics in the updated version.' - Chuck 1988

M IS FOR Mordam Records

Mordam Records was a San Franciscan independent record company founded in 1983 by Ruth Schwartz. After hearing Faith No More's music We Care A Lot from a friend Schwartz signed FNM to the label. Faith No More's debut album was the first release on Mordam.

‘My friend brought their demo home and told me that we should go see them. The record was already recorded, and they just wanted someone to put it out and distribute it, which I did. The rest is history.’ - Ruth | Small Victories 2017

N IS FOR Numb Tongue

Numb Tongue, No Taste is the name of a compilation cassette released by German label Making Tapes on December 20 1984. It was the first official release of any Faith No More music featuring Mark Bowen and Arabian Disco.

O IS FOR Oberheim

Roddy's distinctive keyboard sounds are what sets early Faith No More music apart from their contemporaries of the time.

‘My first keyboard that I used on We Care A Lot was an Oberheim, and that was such a key sound to what we were doing. I actually got that keyboard from this dude in L.A., we pooled all our money and bought this Oberheim from a guy named Dwayne Hitchens. He had just finished the score to Flashdance on that keyboard. And we thought that was hilarious, that we had the Flashdance keyboard. We were like, 'Oh this is magical.' It was so fucking funny. Now we played those shows in California with Chuck, and I was at this guitar store before the gigs checking out keyboards and I picked up this reissue of that old Oberheim that I had and I used that keyboard. The Oberheim is what S U R V I V E use, I believe, for the Stranger Things score as well.’ - Roddy 2016

P IS FOR Prairie Sun

Prairie Sun Recording Studios is an audio recording studio located in Cotati, California.

In the summer of ’85, FNM and Matt Wallace recorded a new five track demo, featuring the songs We Care A Lot, The Jungle, Mark Bowen, Why Do You Bother and Jim.

“The studio was set up in a farm and it was free from any distractions. We only had three days to record, because we only had so much money. Matt had a little eight track studio at home, but I don’t think he’d ever worked on 24 tracks before, so it was a new experience for all of us. We were very military about it, we did a lot of pre-production so that when we went in we didn’t waste a single second. There was zero fun: we just worked, slept on the floor and start recording again as soon as we woke up. We recorded everything in two days and mixed it on the third day.” - Bill | Louder 2016

Q IS FOR Kings Of Quarantine

The title track has proven to be one of Faith No More's most popular and recognisable songs for forty years! We Care A Lot was re-recorded for Introduce Yourself (1987), released as a live track (recorded at Brixton Academy in 1990) with Mike Patton on vocals, re-recorded by Chuck Mosley and VUA (2009) - most recently recorded by the supergroup Kings Of Quarantine in 2020 featuring members of Slaves On Dope, Anthrax, Korn, Mastodon, Men Without Hats, Refused, Quicksand, Brutal Truth, Czarface, Run DMC, Filter and Our Lady Peace.

R IS FOR Run DMC

The inspiration for the aesthetic and lyrics of the title track came from Roddy who was a big fan of Run DMC.

'When 'We Care A Lot' came out I was listening to a lot of Run DMC, I was crazy about it.

I like Rap that incorporates really interesting sampling. It works as a background, rhythm-wise, but I couldn't see us using it constantly. It's meant we've got through to a wider audience, but it's also to keep everyone happy in the band. We're all so different that we have to compromise, but I don't think anyone is unhappy with the songs we've done, although sometimes it takes a bit of coaxing!' - Roddy | Circus Magazine 1990

S IS FOR Star of Chaos

The star symbol featured on the record sleeve is referred to in Hinduism as The Star of Lakshmi where it represents Ashtalakshmi the eight forms of the goddess Lakshmi. However this is not where the beloved logo derives from, the original FNM logo was adapted from the symbol for chaos which originates from The Eternal Champion, a fantasy novel by Michael Moorcock published in 1970. It was Bill Gould who first had the idea to use the star.

'The star was my thing. It's a pretty deep and pervasive symbol that has meaning in several different cultures. What it signified for me at the time was chaos...order through disorder.

....chaos was the thing that drew me to it originally. In a nutshell, musically as well as personally I think all of us found ourselves faced with certain structures in our lives that didn't really work for us..either through coming of Faith No Man or just turning 20, living on our own, and wanting to do things differently, and the way we approached this was to try something that had no rules, only the rules we made ourselves. So this mean doing new things and seeing where they would go. The point of this chaos is that we were trying to discover who we really were, and maybe in this recording you can hear a little of that." - Bill | FnmFollowers 2018

U IS FOR UC Berkeley

Bill, Mike B and Matt Wallace all attended UC Berkeley together. It was at college that Faith. No Man was formed.

V IS FOR The Vats

The Vats was an abandoned brewery building on 4th Street at Bryant. The space was occupied in the early eighties by bands like The Rhythm Pigs who lived and rehearsed in huge beer tanks spread across its four floors. Faith No More moved in to rehearse in 1984.

'On the upper floors, there were just regular big studios. And we had one of those. Not because we had more money. I think we coveted—everyone coveted the vats. But that’s what we were rehearsing in, was just a big basic room up on the fifth or sixth floor. Billy and I, we were kids from Los Angeles. We were brought up in sunny, sunshine, entertainment-industry Los Angeles. And we moved to San Francisco, and it was a marked difference. “Oh wow, this is really foggy and dark and serious, and there’s people on speed, and bicycle messengers. “Just the vibe was so different and so much darker. We would never be exposed to anything like the Vats in Los Angeles.' - Roddy | Who Cares Anyway: Post Punk SF and the End of the Analog Age 2023

W IS FOR Will Carpmill

Will attended college with Bill and Mike B, he would come up with the band name Faith No More’s after Faith. No Man disbanded.

'Mike and I were in rhetoric class, trying to come up with a new band name. We were passing a sheet of paper back and forth with our ideas, riffing on Faith. No Man. I think I suggested Faith. No Morris with a laugh, and then a few seconds later, one of us had Faith. No More.’ - Will | Small Victories 2017

He also worked at Rough Trade Records at the time that Ruth Schwartz of Mordam Records first heard FNM.

'‘Just play it when people are shopping for records’. It turns out that Ruth Schwartz – who started Mordam Records – was played the tape, and she came up to the desk to ask what music that was. My friend told her: ‘It’s just my roommate’s band’. She asked what label we were on and he said: ‘They’re not signed’. And she called us up two days after that. It’s bizarre, but that’s what happened.' - Bill | Classic Rock 2014

Will would later be in Systems Collapse with Jon Hudson!

X IS FOR DeluXXXXXe

On August 19th 2016 Faith No More re-released their debut album We Care A Lot via Koolarrow Records. Rolling Stone called it a "raw punk album" while Select Magazine dubbed it "a lustful marriage of mutoid metal and dance floor verve."

‘I've been a touring guy most of my life, even when the band split up, I was still travelling a lot and I kept picking up all kinds of stuff and storing it in the basement’ he says of the discovery. ‘I have stuff in boxes that I haven't gone through for years and my wife got to a point where she said, 'We're living in boxes! You don't even know what’s down there, can we just dump some of that s**t you have down there!?’ ... and that's when I found the tapes. I was like, 'Oh my God, what is this?' I’d found the half inch masters, which were the finished mixes and I found one 24-track reel that had the three songs that Matt Wallace has remixed for this re-issue (We Care A Lot, Pills For Breakfast and As The Worm Turns). I said to him, ‘if you could remix these songs today, what would you do with them?' and what you hear on the record is the result.’ - Bill | The Independent 2016

Y IS FOR Yazoo

In 1985 FNM had a varied selection of influences from David Bowie, Killing Joke, Run Dmc, Sade and… English synth pop duo Yazoo.

‘I remember bringing this record to San Francisco after a season in Los Angeles. I lived with Mike Bordin, Billy and other people by then. One of our mates said “Wow, this sounds so gay!”. And he was right. I had never considered a sound that evoked “the gay”, so it began to intrigue and scare me at the same time. Once more, this record had great influence on me when it came to production and music in general. Its sound was very bold, gay and sexy for that time, intense and brave. It was very different from what we did, but it had great impact on me.’

Z IS FOR Wiring Department Zine

Wiring Department Zine was a San Francisco music magazine which featured the first review of We Care A Lot, and quite possibly Faith No More's first features.

Here is a parade of uncanny drums, bass rhythms, melancholy keyboards. All the excitement of Killing Joke. The sound is original in treatment. To give authenticity, the music has been based in varying degrees upon well-recorded incidents or experiences in which the members sincerely believe. The excellent recording puts Faith. No More’s music where it rightfully belongs—in our minds.