Kool Arrow and the Gang
Perfect Pitch Online annoys ex-Faith No More bassist Bill Gould.
By Erik Fong

While a few ex-Faith No More members have spent the past few years appearing on ABC game shows, peeing on photographers and growing pumpkins, former bassist and co-founder Bill Gould hasn’t played quite as prominent of a role in the music scene as of late. Why? “I started a shitty little label,” reveals Bill, “so it’s not like I’m in the system.”

Bill’s label, Kool Arrow, has been around for about four years now. As far as the company being as shitty as Bill claims it is, that all depends on how much you despise indie labels that provide a U.S. outlet to international bands that otherwise wouldn’t have a chance for even mediocre success in the States. All Bill’s saying is, give foreigners a chance.

The founding of Kool Arrow, as well as Bill’s now-former role in the Mexican death metal band Brujeria, both seem to have stemmed from either his appreciation for international culture or his disdain for the seemingly endless downward spiral concerning all things American. His participation in PunkVoter.com – a coalition of non-voters united against the current administration – is clearly a result of the latter. After living in Spain and France all last year, Bill came back to San Francisco and settled in the Lower Haight, with most of his energy these days going towards getting Kool Arrow artists and militant Filipino anti-Americans Flattbush out on tour. But that doesn’t mean his playing days are over…

Despite his understandable preference to shy away from Faith No More-driven discussions so many years after the fact, Bill was kind enough to discuss everything with us, from Faith No More to Brujeria to Kool Arrow – past, present, and future. Plus, he made the mistake of giving us his phone number, so he was up shit creek whether he liked it or not.

(Bill made us promise that we wouldn't use a picture of him from 1983. So we used one from 1993 instead. Smooches!)

I think the number one question that fanboys and groupies want you to answer is this: When can we expect to hear some new music?
That has to do with time management. The Flattbush record just came out [on Kool Arrow], as well as an album by this band from Spain called Don Cikuta, and since the label’s so small, I’m covering most of the bases myself. We redid the Web site, and now it’s a matter of getting Flattbush on tour and overseeing that, and mixing the new Kultur Shock record that comes out early next year. So right now, my focus is on that.

As far as my own music – when Faith No More broke up, I started playing with [ex-Faith No More guitarist] Jon Hudson. We wrote a bunch of songs, and Puffy [drummer Mike Bordin] also got involved. We actually got on a pretty good roll – the thing that was missing was the singer. And it was really strange – it was a very familiar, Faith No More type thing, because it was the same people, and there’s just a certain way something’s going to sound with the same people. It’s just the way their minds work. If it would have been something that sounded like the old band, and someone like Patton singing, that would have been a major step in the wrong direction. But I also realized that the way we write – since we’ve been working with each other for so long – it’s kind of unique, and it’s not for anyone to just step into. So I looked around, for a couple of years actually, and I just got frustrated and put it on hold. But I really, really want to start playing with other people. I originally started the label because I wanted to keep working in music, but I didn’t want to just jump into another band, because Faith No More, to me, was my band. So that was good, but it’s a different way of working with music and it puts you in a different mindset than writing and playing songs. And it’s very hard to shift between one and the other. But in this next year, I’m really going to make an emphasis on [new music].

Have you been jamming with anyone else?
A little bit. I did [a project with] this band called Triple Gang, we covered The Fall’s album, This Nation’s Saving Grace. Last weekend, I went to L.A. and jammed with Wayne Kramer (ex-MC5). He has a thing in L.A. once a week where he has people come and play, and that was cool. So I still play, but not nearly as much as I’d like to.

You’ve been running your label for about four years now. What was the first hard lesson you learned when you launched Kool Arrow?
Working in the retail business is super fucking hard. To be an artist and put out records is always a gamble, but you always think of the quality of the product first. It’s hard to admit, but to survive as a label, you have to think of moving and selling [the product] first, and I have a real problem with that. It’s in complete contrast to my whole aesthetic. At the same time, it’s so hard to survive, and you’re going to spend all your money if you’re not careful. So it’s interesting, the amount of work and the kind of calculated thinking that you have to put into it. In an ideal world, musicians should be running labels – our culture would benefit from it. But it’s very hard for a musician to survive in a retail-based, numbers-based business. I brought a lot of ideals into this label – no one was hearing all these amazing bands all over the world and [these bands] couldn’t get into the States – there was a lot of meaning behind it. I felt like I was doing the right thing. And then having to deal day-to-day with people who could give a shit – it’s very frustrating. You have to speak their language –they don’t give a shit if it’s good or bad. They have to know the selling points – who’s the famous rock star on the album? Who did the artwork? What can we use to sell it? Fair enough, that’s fine. I’m just not used to thinking like that.

What bothers me the most about new bands, particularly in the majors, is that it’s a bunch of 60-year old music executives who decide what takes the forefront. That disturbs me – that’s like having your grandmother dress you every morning.
Absolutely. And it’s not just major labels anymore, it goes all the way down to the independent level.

Very few independent labels are about unique artists. They’re just looking for bands that fit their label’s mold.
Exactly. Do they fit the niche, and can we drive that niche home? That’s it. Almost every label that I can think of is like that. What I’m doing is the stupidest thing imaginable. Working a label as a niche-based thing, it works, and you can’t fight the market. But it just doesn’t feel very satisfying.

How do you think your adolescence came to affect your approach to writing music?
I’m 40 now, so I see things in more of a political context, but that probably has more to do with the fact that I’ve toured as much as I have. And if I hadn’t, I’d probably be more of a rebel in the cultural sense. I got into punk when I was 13 or 14, and the big thing at the time was long hair and bad rock, like Boston and Foreigner. And in L.A., if I went to a punk show, guys in pickup trucks with Lynyrd Skynyrd bumper stickers would get out of the car and try to beat my ass. And it became this thing of taking pleasure of throwing rocks at the trucks before they stopped to kick your ass. And this defiance that came out of it was really fun, but also having people hate you for doing it – those types of confrontations really got mixed into my aesthetic at an early age, [developing my need to] bring in chaos and break down people’s pre-set opinions. I was just a guy walking down the street, and some guy wants to kick my ass for no reason – that’s fascinating to me. And whatever button it is that I’m pushing, I want to keep pushing it, because it’s a really irrational reaction. I think [everyone in Faith No More] had this curiosity. People engage in a lot of automatic behavior, and what we tried to do was break them out of their hypnosis. But the point isn’t to be an asshole, the point is to try to bring in something new. You have to break the walls down. So much of our daily lives are preprogrammed behavior. People think I’m an idiot for doing this label, and if I wanted to think about it the way they do, then I would agree with them. But then again, people thought I was an idiot when I played with Faith No More.

Well, you were.
We were idiots for 10 years until something broke, and then we were geniuses. Some people only respect something when someone else respects it first. We all kind of have that in us. I’m the same – I remember when I first heard Korn, I thought, “This sucks.” They had this one song on the radio that I heard two or three times, and I found myself liking it because it was on the radio and I accepted it in a different context, and I caught myself doing that. I think the human mind has an inclination to think like a pack animal. We’re social animals the way dogs are. We do things in packs, we cooperate, and I’m sure there’s a gene that encourages us to all think in the same mindset. Then of course, there’s big business and marketing research that drives that point home.

You recently left Brujeria. What happened?
I was involved from the beginning, and it’s just a different band now. I left around the same time that Ray [Herrera, drummer] did. What I really liked in the beginning was that nobody really said who was in the band, it was something done purely out of fun, and it didn’t take itself too seriously. It ruffled a lot of people’s feathers too, so it was all really positive. At that time, Mexico didn’t really have death metal bands, and it was great to be involved in something that was interesting on so many levels. I think the way the band turned – I can’t stop other band members from giving their names and saying who they are – it changes the focus of the whole thing, and it becomes just a typical rock band that really doesn’t have any meaning that interests me. You know, that just doesn’t do it for me anymore. Brujeria was one of the things that gave Kool Arrow a kickstart, and I think all the Brujeria records that have come out have been pretty good. I think they can still put out good records, but the focus on what the band’s doing and where they’re headed, and what I want to do creatively and where I want to go with my life, they’ve really gone apart.

So the masks have officially come off, so to speak? They’re playing some shows soon…
So they say. That’s my guess, yeah, they’re just going to do it by the book. It’s going to become more about all those things that I always hated about rock – backstage passes and the ego thing. I’m just not into it. I’m just telling you how it makes me feel. I don’t want to say that the band is this or that and put a bunch of labels on them, but I just don’t get the inspiration from it, and I want to do things that keep me interested and make me want to learn new things.

Good. Don’t do things that you don’t want to do.
Exactly. That’s my answer. It just took a long time to say that. [laughs]

Who’s the biggest asshole in the music industry that you’ve ever met?
The biggest assholes – I hate to put their names in print because it gives them too much power – but there are a lot of stupid people. I think the biggest assholes are the ones who leave the least impressions, like Fred Durst. I can’t even call him an asshole, he’s not smart enough to get the title. He’s just a dumb guy.

Are there any particular personal experiences that make you say that?
When [Limp Bizkit opened for Faith No More], people were booing them off the stage because they were just a Korn clone band. Fred would get mad and yell at them, and I remember one show in Philadelphia where he just called everyone fags. That’s really not very smart. Calling people fags into a microphone – you cannot win. It’s just a stupid thing to do. And he apologized to us like we would care. And we were like, “We’re not offended, you should be worried about yourself.” [laughs] I guess he found out Roddy was gay, so he thought he was going to get on our bad side. But he’s just stupid.

What did you think of Trey Spruance’s remarks regarding his time in Faith No More and the way that he left the band?
I thought it was bizarre. You know, what’s really interesting was this picture of this corporate Faith No More monolith, this evil corporation that’s out to screw the little guy. It was definitely a tough time because we’d just gotten rid of Jim [Martin, guitarist], Roddy [Bottum, keyboardist] was doing drugs – it was chaotic. But we were good to him. We treated him pretty well. When he left, I was in South America, and the whole time I’d been told that he left because he didn’t want to tour. We’d talked about how we were going to work it out with him joining the band, but it was totally open-ended, and it was just kind of weird to see how he told us to fuck off. It was weird reading, and it was also weird reading it so many years after the fact – it just seemed really dishonest to me.

So you never joked to NME that he was an heir to the DuPont fortune?
I didn’t say it – how would I know that? [laughs]

Patton must’ve said it.
Could’ve. He knows Trey, they grew up together, so if it came from anywhere it came from him. They have problems with each other, no doubt about it. But it goes back many, many years. Patton didn’t want Trey to join [Faith No More] in the beginning. He was totally against it. But I thought Trey was a great guitar player. The way we decided was, he can do the job, we don’t know him that well but he seems like a nice enough guy, so why don’t we just get the right guy for the job? Jim wasn’t exactly a charmer either. [laughs] We’d just fired Jim and we had to make a huge settlement towards paying it off, and it took us two or three years to pay back. He was a partner – and you can’t just fire someone when you’re in a partnership, you have to buy him out. And we were doing really well at the time, so it was a really high price. We didn’t know Trey, and Mike gave us all the warning signs – “Don’t do it, don’t do it” – and I think we were very cautious. We wanted to see how it worked out first before we got stuck in this fucked up situation again. It was a trial period so we wouldn’t have to go through this every single time something didn’t work out. It kind of made me feel bad to read that. I thought we were pretty cool to him.