Before Rockville set in Daytona, Mr. Bungle reflects on its genre-bending mindset

It’s a testament to the gleefully twisted mindset of genre-bending, on-again-off-again, death-metal hybrid Mr. Bungle that the foundation of the band’s set at Welcome to Rockville in Daytona Beach is a re-imagined take on the group’s unreleased 1986 cassette, “The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny Demo.”

For lead guitarist and original member Trey Spruance it’s a splash of serendipity that he finds equally satisfying and amusing.

“There weren’t really plans to get back together, but the inspiration arrived when we thought, ‘Why don’t we play our very first music that nobody has really heard?’” said Spruance in a phone interview that offered a welcome distraction from pool maintenance issues at his Arizona home.

“It qualifies as nostalgia for us, but not for our listeners because none of them were listening to that,” he said, chuckling. “That’s what’s interesting in it. We could indulge in music we feel was viable and needed to be heard and it circumvents this whole notion that the only music that’s successful for Gen X is nostalgia music. It’s weird, but we’re very happy that we have an unknown history to tap into.”

On the album, Mr. Bungle’s core trio of Spruance, singer Mike Patton (Faith No More) and bassist Trevor Dunn were augmented by guitarist Scott Ian (Anthrax) and drummer Dave Lombardo (Slayer).

It’s a unit that also remains intact for tour dates that include a 9:10 p.m. performance Friday, May 10, on the Rockville’s Vortex Stage at Daytona International Speedway.

For Mr. Bungle, it’s a rare opportunity to unleash the band’s sprawling blend of metal, avant-garde jazz, ska, disco and funk for a festival audience.

Taking its name from a comedy bit in a 1981 Pee-wee Herman special, the band formed as a death-metal outfit when Patton, Spruance and Dunn were still in high school in northern California in the mid-1980s. Capitalizing on Patton’s success with Faith No More, Mr. Bungle signed to Warner Bros. Records in 1990 and released three full-length studio albums in the 1990s.

Often hiding their identities behind masks on stage, the band toured through the decade before going on indefinite hiatus at the dawn of the new millennium.

Spruance offered thoughts on the band’s history, its longevity and outlook on music:

Is it true that you and Trevor played together in school bands?

“Trevor and I we went through high school music programs and college music programs together. We’re the musically literate part of the group, reading music, understanding music theory and that kind of stuff.

“He became probably the first-call bassist in New York City for avant-garde jazz, and I’ve done a lot of very experimental, I guess groundbreaking, music. So we both followed our trajectory.

Check out the full schedule: Rockville 2024 lineup: Daily schedule stage by stage. Who's playing when, where?

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“It’s, like, too weird to think about the ‘90s but if we go all the way back to beginning (of Mr. Bungle), it’s amazing. It (the band) allows us to meet on the common route and re-experience again emerging from narrow, but interesting, harmonic world of death metal out into a wider world of all the other different kinds of music. It’s recapitulating the excitement that our friendship was based on.”

What did Ian and Lombardo bring to the new ‘Easter Bunny' demo?

“They facilitated the whole thing, in a way. This is still our high-school fantasy of ‘What would it be like to play with Dave Lombardo?’ ‘What would it be like to have Scott Ian in the band?’

"The answer to the question is that it’s better than we could have imagined. It made our crazy ideas legitimate, made it into the metal it was always supposed to be.”

You refer to the music as ‘metal,’ is that too restrictive?

“We were all very exploratory in our listening. That’s what made Mr. Bungle explode out of death metal, even though what we were doing wasn’t even conventional death metal.

“We were carrying the early 20th century experimental avant-garde ethos with us from the beginning. Everything we touched kind of had that in it. When we moved to San Francisco in the ‘90s, it was easier to access not just information, but the people who were doing the forward-thinking music.

“We did have our habit of growing, always pushing to new harmonic territory whatever genre we were messing around with. Beside the metal, we never really had a genre. What was motivating us was colliding worlds, different harmonic worlds that have different repercussions when they collide.”

Does Mr. Bungle do many festivals, a la Welcome to Rockville?

“In the Mr. Bungle thing, our gigging schedule doesn’t generally involve huge rock festivals. Even in the ‘90s, we never played any of that stuff.

“We have a great crew and everything. Normally, I’d be worried about whether we were presenting a good performance, but we’ve found that this music works in that environment. It works with those kind of big crowds. It doesn’t feel as distant, as disconnected, as I thought it would. You see them out there moshing, head-banging by the thousands.”

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Mr. Bungle among headliners at Welcome to Rockville 2024 in Daytona