4-D Art
Trey Spruance: music producer, guitarist for Mr. Bungle and Secret Chiefs 3, and heir to the DuPont fortune.
By Erik Fong

We’re all familiar with the stereotypical “mad genius” that’s commonly depicted in movies and on television: A traumatic, life-altering freak occurrence sends a seemingly ordinary man over the edge and into seclusion. And upon emerging from isolation several months later, scraggly beard, unkempt hair, the smell of urine, ragged clothes and all... voila! The secret to the world’s energy problems. The final digit in pi. A three-cents-per-gallon substitute for gasoline. Pheremones. Time bombs. You know how the story goes.

At the very moment you’re reading this article, guitarist and producer Trey Spruance – best known as a founding member of Mr. Bungle and Secret Chiefs 3 – is holed up, alone, deep in the Santa Cruz mountains. Within the walls of his log cabin made of earth and wood, to which he escaped three years ago after living in San Francisco for over a decade, Trey is working 12 hours a day on the next three Secret Chiefs 3 albums, hoping to rejoin civilization and emerge with final product in hand in early 2004. It’s a lot of work to produce and mix three albums at the same time, yes – but anyone who’s had the privilege of hearing an album with Trey’s name on it knows he doesn’t do anything half-ass. From the Coalinga-based death metal outfit Faxed Head to Faith No More’s King for a Day (on which Trey played guitar) to Mr. Bungle’s production-heavy masterpiece California, Trey has that rare ability to create vastly deep four-dimensional musical worlds that swallow and consume the listener – no matter how painstaking his role in the process towards sonic perfection may be.

Only 20 years ago, redneck punks were slamming little Trey into lockers and chucking him into trashcans for wearing his Devo energy dome to school. But the sum of his harassment in school, his love of Devo, his simultaneous discovery of Stravinsky and Slayer, and being raised in the serial-killer-breeding town of Eureka, California all contributed to the schizophrenic conglomeration that defines Trey’s musical compositions. Whether a movement is sweet, fast, angry, loud, slow, retarded, dissonant, herky-jerky or sludgy – they’re all musical translations of events that have made Trey who he is today.

Frontman Mike Patton was recently quoted as saying that he thinks Mr. Bungle is over. But regardless of the uncertainty in the air between the bandmates, Trey remains optimistic and hopeful that the members can unite to create more music: “I think the band has a lot of fucking steam left in it. The best days are clearly ahead. It’ll be incredible, but I don’t know when it’s going to happen.”

Despite his tendency to completely separate himself from society while forehead-deep in an ocean of creativity, Trey – who confesses to only granting about one interview every six months – “opened the vortex” and spoke to us for an oh-so-very-exclusive interview with Perfect Pitch Online.

Luckily, it was over the phone, so we weren’t subjected to the unmistakable scent of “mad genius urine.”

In an article that The Guardian wrote about you last year, your friends said you’re impossible to get a hold of, so I’m excited to be speaking with you.
I don’t know why everybody always says that. I’m not that hard to get a hold of; not as hard as some people I know. I do occasionally dip into an intense creative thing, so I won’t get back to people for a while sometimes. Good friends of mine will get a hold of me and say, “Oh, the vortex is open, wow, great!” Maybe, to me, it seems like I’m easy to get a hold of.

It was almost too easy getting a hold of you. One might say it was meant to be. So if I walked into your log cabin right now, what would I see?
It’s not “Abe Lincoln,” but it’s also not your lame “summer home in Montana” kind of thing. You’d see burgundy carpeting, and a lot of carved vases, sculpted things, weapons, swords and heraldic shields, and a lot of wrought iron. And a lot of wood. [laughs]

Do you ever feel a little too isolated in the mountains?
I’ve found that I’ve become a lot more social since I’ve withdrawn up here. I’m actually a lot more actively engaged in San Francisco things now. I lived in San Francisco for 12 years, and for the last six years of it I was getting more and more fed up and pissed off. I still have the same gripes, but living there drove me completely fucking bananas, and it just turns you into a much more cynical person. So this withdrawal has made me appreciate things about San Francisco that I had really grown to despise.

Flashback: Tell me about the recording of the very first Mr. Bungle demo, The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny, in high school.
We started our first demo in 1984 on a four-track. That was fun – we were a death metal band at the time and decided we wanted to have some train whistles and all this stupid shit. [laughs] We had all these heshers who liked the bands we’d previously been in. Then we played punk/skate rock kind of shit. Then the punks started liking us and the heshers started hating us. I guess we’ve been alienating people from the beginning. And it’s natural to destroy what you build up – I think it’s healthy. The best thing I could tell you about our first demo would be actually getting the guy to dress up like the Easter bunny [for the demo cover].

How did that come about?
We’d watch everyone walk by at lunchtime. Eureka is filled with strange and interesting characters, even at the high school level. It’s so entertaining. So Trevor [Dunn, bassist], Mike [Patton, vocalist] and I would just sit and watch people, and we became obsessed with this guy, Tommy Leydecker. We started nicknaming all these people – one guy was “Shrooms” because he was a shroomhead…

You named them behind their backs?
Yeah. Amongst ourselves. [laughs] We didn’t have any fucking friends! This is Eureka for fuck’s sake, there’s nothing but rednecks and psychopaths and speed freaks. So we’re sitting there naming everybody, and Tommy ended up with the name “Mr. Bungle.” We decided, hey, we’ve got to approach this guy. And since we named him Mr. Bungle, he’s got to be on the cover. This is about him – he’s our man. So we dressed him up in bunny ears and somehow got him to do irrational things like hold big rocks in his hands and between his legs, and stand on a flatbed with these stupid ears. Totally insane. [laughs]

When Mr. Bungle released California, were you disappointed with the amount of publicity and promotion that Warner gave you?
Not at all. I think we got more attention and publicity than ever with that record. We’ve never been disappointed with lack of promotion because we never expected to be promoted, or even particularly well received. I think we’ve always considered it kind of a fluke that there are even people who listen to this music at all. [laughs] Doing the Snocore tour with Incubus and Puya – that’s the kind of thing you do if you’re trying to get that kind of attention, and if anything, for us it was the opposite. I think we reacted somewhat negatively to that experience.

You guys were booed mercilessly when I saw you perform on that tour in Los Angeles.
We love that. I should say that Snocore brought back some of the fun that our first couple tours had, which was the booing. That’s the good thing that can be said about it. [laughs] I think in 1990 or 1991, we were playing in Anaheim and the Melvins were opening up for us. The crowd decided to boo the Melvins and start a “Mr. Bungle” chant while they were playing. This was around Ozma, so it was amazing seeing them in this huge venue. Anyways, they’re getting booed, so we decided to play all our songs tuned down three quarters of an octave and really slow for like, 50 minutes. And we saw streams of people in this 3,000-seat place leave while we were playing. The thing about it is, and I think this is the key to Mr. Bungle – there were about 300 people left by the end of all of that, and they had the biggest smiles you could imagine. The music was intolerable bullshit, and we now have a lot of sycophants who will kiss our ass no matter what we do, but at that time, these people hadn’t really made up their minds as to whether we were great or shitty. But then we ended up playing a real show for them once everyone was gone. And out of those 300 people, I bet you every single one of them is still buying our records. How many bands from 1991 are still making records that people are buying? You see what I’m saying? You don’t have to kiss people’s asses to have longevity or be successful.

Exactly. Just do what you do and people will get it.
And do it thoroughly and strongly, and be unbearably uncompromising about it, and those people will be with you, man. Tom Araya from Slayer came backstage after that show and was fucking yelling at us. “People paid money, you’re entertainers! That’s totally unprofessional! This is bullshit!” And I’m sitting there going, this is my hero, Tom Araya! That was a real eye opener. That whole experience, to me, was what set the tone for the rest of Mr. Bungle’s world. And California, believe it or not, kind of fits into all of that. It would be easy to make Disco Volante 2 with John Zorn and all the different people we’ve been doing things with. We could pander to that fucking crowd as easily as we could pander to the people who wanted funk-metal in 1991. And Mike and Trevor and I all came together – we’ve always remained very honest to our muse, and our muse at that point was, let’s do this gigantic… analog production. [pauses and sighs] Fucking nightmare.

California’s production is incredible.
We linked three 24-track tape machines together and we were doing a lot of things that are just totally unacceptable in the studio. [laughs] I promised I would write something about this and I probably should; the production of that record was legendary in some ways. It’s pretty ridiculous. It’s probably the last huge analog production that was ever done.

Probably. Even producers who swear by the superior sound quality of analog won’t use it anymore now that digital is around. It’s just too inefficient.
I’m the same way, I’ll go down and record the drums and maybe some of the bass and immediately dump it into Pro Tools. Fuck, I don’t want to deal with syncing up microlinks. No way will I ever do it again. But I’ll go to a studio and track the basic tracks on analog. Believe me, as soon as it sounds as good on digital, I’m outta there. I have no great romantic love for analog – it just sounds better. Once the digital sounds better, if it ever does, I’ll switch. I’ll be the first to stop using tape machines.

Producers are notorious for being workaholics and spending days on end in the studio. What’s the longest amount of time you’ve spent locked up and working without going outside?
36 hours. That’s my longest marathon, during the mixing of Disco Volante. I think I ended up just collapsing and crashing, not even being awake for the last mix, which was “Everyone I Went to High School With Is Dead.” We had our priorities and we had our deadline, and I just collapsed.

What was the catalyst that made you want to learn to play guitar?
Listening to Devo. They’re not really a guitar band, but these twangy guitar solos that they’d do once in a while, like the guitar solo in “Beautiful World,” just did something for me. I think it’s just the juxtaposition of the robot sound against the twang. To this day, I marvel over Devo’s achievement as a band. They’re transcendent. I think Devo is the perfect rock band. If you think about what’s being said enough, and you really absorb yourself into their twisted post-modernist world, you start seeing that it’s very relevant social commentary, man. It’s very deep.

You’re good friends and former Faxed Head bandmates with our beloved Perfect Pitch Online contributor Gregg Turkington. How’d you two meet?
I think it was through an old girlfriend of mine in San Francisco who was a friend of his. I was out in the Sunset District, not really involved with anything musically. I was just this weird kid from Eureka. That girlfriend of mine saved my sanity because she introduced me to a lot of great people that I ended up spending a lot of my time with, and Gregg was one of them. I’ve actually pissed my pants laughing – that’s only happened to me one time – because of him.

What’s one of your guilty pleasures in your CD collection?
Def Leppard – High 'N' Dry. Great record, man. They weren’t a glam band at that point. They sounded more like AC/DC – not to be an apologist for Def Leppard or anything. [laughs] My brother was into all that stuff. Like most little brothers, he was exposing me to all the hard rock bands of the early ‘80s. It was weird – my first real excitement came through Devo, and then the hard rock phase came and it was Def Leppard and Van Halen. Fair Warning – I still listen to that, it’s amazing. What a fucking great album. It’s Van Halen’s best by far. It’s overlooked, mostly because you have your early Van Halen adherence and then you have Hagar. And even before [Hagar] – around 1984 – it started getting pretty bad.

The production after 1984 sucked.
Yeah, [in the early days] they sounded like a band in a big, huge, open space. Then all of a sudden they sounded like a band turned up really loud in a tight little studio. That’s garbage. Once Eddie took control of the production of that band, everything went down the fucking toilet. It’s too bad. Ted Templeman was a great producer.

It was the same as when the Red Hot Chili Peppers started getting really bad. It just gives you the same chill down your spine, like – God, how can this happen? I wasn’t a huge Chili Peppers fan, but when it starts getting more and more pathetic, it’s like – if that ever happens to me, I will die. I’m sure there are fans psychotic enough out there to kill me. We have really fucking psychotic Mr. Bungle fans, for sure. They’re watching all of the things that we do, and I’m sure that if I went the road of Eddie Van Halen, somebody would kill me. And that would be good. I support that. That’s no way to live. [laughs]

For years, there’s been speculation as to the real reason you left Faith No More. Some people have said you didn’t want to tour, others said you didn’t want to play “Epic” live, and others said that bassist Billy Gould threw you out because he didn’t want another Mr. Bungle. What really happened?
[laughs] Wow, man. Let me add some rumors to that list. My favorite is the one that came from Faith No More themselves – they said that I was an heir to the DuPont fortune. Did you hear that one? That was printed in NME. I have “connections” to the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, so I’m basically this spoiled rich kid that can’t be relied upon in any way. So of course, with my quirky background and all that, why would I be bothered with touring? I’m just a spoiled fucking brat!

At that point, those guys’ heads were kind of screwed on backwards. It was unfortunate, because I thought that Faith No More was a really good band. I liked them when they came up to Eureka in 1986. I went nuts over them, and Mike – he wasn’t really into them. [laughs] I was a Faith No More fan in the early days. They were fucking amazing, Jesus Christ. Then when that whole situation with [former Faith No More guitarist] Jim Martin was falling apart and they needed a guitar player, I threw my name in the hat. I don’t even think Mike wanted me in the band, but the other guys liked the demo that I made for them. We did the whole thing on a handshake, and basically as time went on, I recorded with them and we didn’t have any formal agreement over what the situation was going to be. And I really felt that they were taking advantage of that situation, which was really disheartening. They were going through so many different issues as a band. And then to walk into a situation where you’re just essentially a roadie and getting jerked around, it really ended up being this thing where, if I’m going to commit to a year of touring with no agreement and they’re reneging on all of these things that we talked about – it’s like, we’ve got you, so you’re going to tour with us for a year and then we’ll talk about you becoming a part of the band.

So you were a hired hand for the album.
Yeah, essentially what was going on was there was a salary agreement, and then that salary was going to extend indefinitely. And all I wanted was, in writing – I’ll agree to a year of touring on this salary business, but after a year, we’ll renegotiate something. We don’t have to say what it is, but we’ll come to a renegotiation. And by the time we finished the record, the only person who was finally straight with me was the manager, who said, “No, we’re not even going to renegotiate. That’s it.” So I just told them to fuck off. I’m not playing hardball, and if this is the way you guys play, forget it. A band is a band, and I’m into doing gentlemen’s agreements – we’ll be gentlemen and we’ll do it. You play fucking hardball with me, you can fuck off. I walked – simple as that. It wasn’t a hard decision. But I learned a lot from it and I don’t hold resentment. Billy, at the time, was in a screwed up mindset. Patton – he can exert a lot of influence over people, and those guys had their balls in a vice. They were in a tough fucking spot. It basically became clear to me why Patton didn’t want me to be in the band after a while. He was incredibly hard to get along with in that band environment, and I’d honestly never seen that side of him in Mr. Bungle. We’d never dealt with that. Patton and I have butted heads over the years, but just as friends. It’s nothing that I saw in a band context. But man, that’s not a side of him that I want to deal with.

I was also really worried about that Faith No More situation threatening Mr. Bungle, because we’d just finished recording Disco Volante. I knew that if I stayed in Faith No More, my relationship with Mike would’ve deteriorated very rapidly. So that was a concern. That and not wanting to be shit upon. I remember when I made the decision, it was right after I hung up with their manager. It was like, ‘Alright, I’ve got all this other music.’ And that was when Secret Chiefs 3 was born.

But like I said, I’ve got no hard feelings. I learned how this industry works, I learned how people get, I learned how gross everything is. I have to tell you this – right after all of this stuff happened, I was served fucking papers after quitting. They tried to charge me for equipment that I didn’t buy, thousands and thousands of dollars. I recorded that whole record with my roommate’s $100 Les Paul imitation because I didn’t have a fucking guitar that would work. I bought a power amp on their account, and after I quit I get this bill for $10,000! That’s just one – believe me, there were a million fucking things. It all worked out man, whatever – I don’t really care, to me that stuff is comical. But the part that was so surreal was when my friend told me, “Trey, you’ve got to see this interview in NME. The guys are saying all this stuff about you.” So I get on my bike and ride down Divisadero to Tower Records, and at that point I didn’t have any fucking money at all, so I was looking under books and laundry and all this shit, scraping for change. At the end of the month I always got to the point where I was scraping for burrito money. So I got $2.75 to buy a burrito after looking at [the NME interview]. I don’t even have enough money to buy the fucking magazine, and I’m standing there in Tower Records reading about how I’m the heir to the DuPont fortune. [laughs] That was a surreal experience, having the bicycle, barely scraping by, and having the entire fans’ perception being this completely other thing. I can’t tell you how fruitful of an experience that was. Most of the philosophies that I’m interested in have to do with the engineered appearance of the world that we live in versus the esoteric or hidden reality behind it. I feel very privileged to be in a world where I can deal with some press coverage like that. [laughs] Where you just get that driven home to you, so explicit, like a hammer into your fucking skull. It’s really quite a healthy thing, and I wish everybody could experience it.

How has that experience affected you today?
It didn’t make me bitter. I guess I was lucky because I’d read enough Kierkegaard to enjoy the irony. [laughs] To be honest, for a few years up to that, stuff like that was bothering me, but that article was the final nail in the coffin – when it all became hilarious.

Did you ever talk to Patton about that article?
No, man. No way. It’s all part of a game that gets played. Again, I like the fact that these things are going on. I’m not trying to dispel myths – I think it’s funny. [laughs] It’s hilarious to me. The more of it that goes on, the better. I mean, Patton went out there [in the early Faith No More days] and talked about shit eating [in the press], especially over in Britain. He doesn’t eat shit! But the stuff just spreads like wildfire, it’s unbelievable the way it works.

Describe your musical philosophy.
To articulate experiences through sound. It has to do with perception and the way all our perceptions can lead us to seeing things in a three-dimensional way, but they’re also able to give us a four-dimensional view as well, provided the senses are coordinated enough to see a deeper layer of reality. If you play any of my guitar stuff alone – people say, “Hey, play one of your songs,” I mean, it’s pathetic – it sounds totally ridiculous. It’s all in the setting. I like to create a setting for the guitar to fit inside. So musically, what I try to do is take the things that I’ve experienced and translate it into a listening experience. That probably explains why some people just don’t hear anything but bullshit and other people go gaga over it. It’s sort of like those holographic things – remember those things? You’d stare at them and they’re just a bunch of fucking dots that look like Pointillism crap?

Yeah, I could never focus/un-focus my eyes to see those pictures.
That’s the thing – when you see it, it’s unbelievable. It’s there and it’s undeniable. But you hear people talking about it at first, and it’s like, “What the fuck? It’s just a bunch of fucking dots.” I really do think that’s what’s going on in the music that I make. But I try to make it work on multiple levels – so it doesn’t just look like a bunch of stupid fucking dots.

Purchase Mr. Bungle's latest album, California, or Secret Chiefs 3's latest album, Book M, through Amazon.com.