Credit: Neil Zlozower
As a co-founder of legendary band Faith No More, bassist Bill Gould first found international success when the 1987 single “We Care A Lot” took off. Faith No More would go on to mainstream success just a few years later when 1989’s The Real Thing took off and the group became an MTV staple. The band would eventually go on hiatus in 1998, remaining broken up until 2009. However, Gould never slowed down, even during Faith No More’s years off, not only playing with other artists (including Fear Factory and The Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra), starting the Koolarrow Records label (which specializes in releases by overlooked international artists), and founding and importing the acclaimed spirit known as Yebiga.
When interviewing Bill Gould this month, author of the forthcoming book DLR Book: How David Lee Roth Changed The World and co-host of The DLR Cast with Steve Roth — Darren Paltrowitz threw in some Van Halen-related questions to Gould. As it turns out, Gould and Faith No More used to cover “Jump” in concert:
“We did Black Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’ [as recorded for The Real Thing] and we got kind of known for that, but actually the song we used to do before that was ‘Jump.’ We played ‘Jump’ for years, this is when we were a really underground band and we did it in clubs when Chuck [Mosley] was singing. We did ‘Jump’ all the time and people just absolutely hated it.”
YouTube currently shows a more recent Faith No More performance from 2015 in which the band briefly performed “Jump” in the midst of their hit “Midlife Crisis,” which you can see below. However, the jury is still out as to whether video footage exists of Faith No More performing “Jump” live in the 1980s.
Within the same conversation, Paltrowitz also got Gould to discuss whether Van Halen I was influential on him and whether he and band ever crossed paths with Van Halen as fellow Warner Music artists; as it turns out that FNM’s A&R representative while signed was Ted Templeman’s sister Roberta Petersen. And as it turns out, a pre-fame Van Halen played Gould’s high school a few years before he went there.