Why Faith No More Fired Jim Martin and whatever happened to the guitarist?
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Best known for his ten year stint in the group Faith No More Jim Martin would be the group’s guitarist from 1983 to 1993.. Faith No More would break up in 1998 and reform in 2009, but strangely enough Martin wasn't a part of the reunion. Why’d he leave the group and what happened to him? Well one of the answers will surprise you and that’s what were going to discuss in today’s video.
Immediately recognizable due to his red trimmed glasses, his bushy beard and long hair, Jim Martin was born in the bay area and spent the early part of his musical career playing in a band called Vicious Hatred, which also featured future metallica bassist Cliff Burton. By 1982 drummer Mike Bordin, keyboardist Roddy Bottum and bassist Billy Gould formed Faith No More, which was named after a greyhound the bandmembers said they had bet on. MTV would report that Cliff Burton urged Martin to audition for the group. Taking his advice he did and got the gig. In their early years group struggled to find a vocalist, instead played gigs using an open mic policy whereby they invited a member of the audience to front the band each night. Not exactly a winning strategy to make it in the music business. One frequent attendee of the band’s early shows was singer Chuck Mosley who performed with the band several times and soon enough he became the group’s frontman.
Mosley’s time fronting the band would last about half a decade seeing the group put out two albums 1985’s We Care a Lot,and 1987’s Introduce Yourself. However Mosley’s volatile behavior and internal conflicts led the group to fire him before the end of the decade. By early 1989 having assembled a majority of the music for their third album, the band held auditions for a replacement finding Mike Patton. Patton at the time was playing in his outfit Mr. Bungle and within a week of getting the job he’d complete the lyrics for their third album the Real Thing.
The Real THing would be the group’s commercial breakthrough producing two hits in Epic and Falling to Pieces and the album went platinum in America selling over a million copies.
The band followed that up with 1992’s Angel Dust a record that would be guitarist Jim Martin’s last with the group. The album would sell about half as many copies as it’s predecessor going gold and marked a change in sound Angel Dust was the first album where Patton had a bigger influence on the music and rumors soon swirled in the music mags that Martin clashed with his bandmates about the title of the album, musical direction and things reportedly got so bad that some of Martin’s guitar parts were stripped from the record (at least that was a rumor for a long time).
Martin would talk to Kerrang in 1992 during the making of the record.
When asked whether Angel Dust was an enjoyable experience he’d rspond
Absolutely not, it's been an unpleasant experience from the very
beginning! It's been very unpleasant, but not really much different to my experiences in making records with Faith No More. It's very difficult to say it all in a short amount of time. "There's certain things
that certain people worry about at certain times, and certain other people choose to play upon it to increase the tension of a given situation until everything's way out of hand."
Angel Dust' would only have one song written by Martin. He wouldn’t attend rehearsals or meetings with the rest of the group opting to have the band send him tapes so he could add his guitar parts later. In all honesty it wasn’t too different from how faith no more recorded their previous records. Once Angel Dust was released in the summer of 1992, If you read a lot of the rock publications who spent time with the band on the road in early to mid 1993 you can see a lot of them writing about the internal tensions between Martin and the rest of the band.
Kerrang would write in their february 1993 issue about faith no more. While vocalist MIKE PATTON was taking an increasingly strong grip on the band's lyrical and musical direction, guitarist and