How Mike Patton Weaponized Poop Against Axl Rose and the World

Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
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Boring bands never become legendary. Sure, you might have riffs from now until the Rapture, your lyrics might read better than James Joyce, and your drummer might be an actual registered AK-47, but nobody’s gonna care for very long unless there is an authentic human element behind the music. Ozzy isn’t God because he rips. Ozzy is God because he rips and he’s fucking fascinating!

Faith No More have always taken the road less traveled. The band didn’t hate to party, but they hated to party like other bands. When Red Hot Chili Pepper Anthony Kiedis started his long standing feud with Mike Patton over certain stylistic similarities, one only needed to look at interviews to see what truly set them apart. Kiedis was sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Patton was compulsive masturbation, compulsive masturbation, and compulsive masturbation.

The Guns N’ Roses / Metallica tour of 1992 has gone down as one of the most notorious concert runs in history. If it seemed bad on the outside, the inward chaos was way worse. Faith No More were reluctant to accept the opening spot on the tour to begin with, but their ambivalence turned to antipathy with the passing of day after resentful day. Somewhere along the lines, a legend grew about a disgruntled Mike Patton taking a shit in an orange juice carton belonging to Axl Rose and resealing it. While there is no printed evidence to substantiate this claim, it marked Patton’s departure from incessant talk of masturbation to something he called “Shit Terrorism.”

Patton began telling publications that he refused to use toilets, initially telling Sky Magazine in 1992: “I don’t use toilets. I just don’t. It’s not a wild rock n’ roll thing; it’s a hobby, shit terrorism.” 

An incident occurred in which a reporter witnessed the frontman dropping a log on a bench outside of the Buckingham Palace. He told Details Magazine: “It started out being a problem, but now it’s more of a weapon than anything.” 

In the book The Faith No More + Mr. Bungle Companion, Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil discusses Patton’s proclivity, saying: “Mike Patton’s thing, he was kind of obsessed with scatological issues in relation to his pranks, and his scatological manifestation of his pranks was in defecation…he liked shitting in funny places. He liked to shit and hide it somewhere in the cafeteria, or shit in the parking lot of a hotel behind some car, or just go and shit on a hood of a car.” 

Several very real incidents of warfare with bodily waste did indeed occur during the GNR / Metallica tour. For one, Patton poured a bottle of piss over his head while standing on one of Axl Rose’s monitors in Spain.

Kim Thayil went into greater detail about the erratic behavior of the shit terrorist on the ill-fated tour. “There’s something else he would do – he would drink lots of water and Coke or coffee, and some diuretics, and hold it in. Then he’d pee and fill up…I think Guns N’ Roses had water jugs on stage. We didn’t really use that, I just had beer. But those guys had things that could squirt water. And Patton would fill it up with piss and then throw it into the crowd. I think he collected like a milk jug full of piss – he was doing this for a few days. I believe that’s the case. He filled up a jug full of piss and I remember the Soundgarden guys talked about it and the crew guys were like, ‘Oh my God! Do you see what he’s doing!’ Ben [Shepherd, Soundgarden bassist] would say, ‘Fuck! He’s got a fucking jug full of piss and he said he’s going to throw it into the crowd!’ I guess he did – I think he swung the jug fall of piss into the crowd. And somebody told me he was going to take a shit on stage.. .or maybe he did. This is not apocryphal – it may be anecdotal, but it’s not apocryphal. I never saw this happen, but I heard that that happened – I didn’t hear that was a plan, I heard that happened from crew guys and band guys on that tour, that he tried or just dropped his pants and took a dump on stage. But the stage was grated. Guns N’ Roses had a stage with grating, so if you spilled anything, it fell through, just so you couldn’t slip on the thing.”

Patton himself confirmed the validity of a few of these rumors. In an interview with Brazilian journalists Regis Tadeu and Paulo Baron. It turns out the orange juice incident did indeed happen, just not to Guns N’ Roses: 

“Not true. However I did piss on his [Axl Rose] teleprompter. One day I was just so bored. It was such a drag touring with those guys, I hate to say it. They treated us like shit. They paid us really well. Be we were like everyday looking for something fucked up to do.

“The shit story is different, that was with L7. They did not like it at all. I thought it was funny. I took a shit in their orange juice and put it back in their fridge and they figured it out, ‘that’s the most fucked up thing I can’t believe you did that’.”

Although he did NOT shit in Axl Rose’s orange juice, he did at try to get the infamous GNR frontman to consume his excrement in a different way:

“I was bored. I took a chocolate cake and put some of my shit inside it. Then we watched. I was hoping maybe Axl Rose would eat it. Instead our crew guy picks it up. He’s about to eat it and I was like ‘don’t do it!’ at the last second. So the experiment failed.”

With the exception of the song “Cuckoo For Caca” on King For A Day, Fool For A Lifetime, Patton seemingly retired from his days of shit terrorism. With the exception of a few instances of pissing on stage, the Faith No More frontman has mostly left the dookie in the toilet.

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