A Little Off

This is the strangest record in the library (so far), and one of my favorites. I got to Fantômas via Mr. Bungle, a truly bizarre band that I’ve always described to understandably wary friends as deranged carnival jazz metal. Mike Patton, the singer from Mr. Bungle, Faith No More and a long list of other bands and projects, brought that avant-garde Bungle sensibility to Fantômas. Here it’s the theme from a horror comedy almost nobody saw, and under all of it is a bass riff that creeps up and creeps back down for the whole two and a half minutes. For years I’d have told you it was a keyboard.

Three things about this record fooled or surprised me, and the bass is all three of them.

A film that sat on a shelf

Jack Hill shot Spider Baby in the late summer of 1964. Its working title was Cannibal Orgy, which he picked because he thought it sounded funny, and that tells you most of what you need to know about the film. It’s a horror comedy about the last of a cursed family, three Merrye children slowly going feral in a decaying house, and Bruno, the chauffeur who loves them and covers for them. Bruno is played by Lon Chaney Jr., the Wolf Man himself, near the end of a long career in monster pictures.

Then the producers went bankrupt, and the film sat on a shelf. It finally came out in December 1967, three years late, and spent the next few years on drive-in double bills under more than one title. It’s a cult film now. Over the opening titles, Chaney sings the theme, written by Ronald Stein, who spent those years scoring low-budget horror for the drive-ins. The Wolf Man, singing the title song of a film about his own odd little family.

Shot in 1964, released in 1967.

Fantômas

The band is named after a French villain, a masked master criminal from a run of pulp novels that started in 1911 and a series of French films in the sixties. Patton put the band together in 1998, as Faith No More was coming apart. He sent demos to Buzz Osborne of the Melvins and Trevor Dunn, his bassist in Mr. Bungle, and the drummer he asked first turned him down and suggested Dave Lombardo from Slayer instead. A supergroup, of a kind that only makes sense once you hear it.

Every Fantômas record is built around an idea. The first one was laid out like a comic book, every track named for a page. A later one is a single song more than an hour long about surgery without anesthesia. The Director’s Cut, in 2001, was the movie one: sixteen film and TV themes, from The Godfather played as thrash metal to Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen and Twin Peaks. Some of them stay close to the original and some get torn apart. “Spider Baby” is track nine, my favorite on the album, and it’s one of the ones that keeps its shape.

Is that even the bass?

The first surprise is that I didn’t think the riff was on bass at all. On the record it sounds like a keyboard, low and buzzing, and the bass, if you can find it, seems to be doing something else. So I almost didn’t pick it. I could imagine playing the riff on bass, which is a different thing from it being a bass line, and my original intent was just to say, hey, this is a keyboard riff I decided to play on a baby bass, get over it.

It turns out Patton’s keys are doubling Dunn’s bass, and the keys are much louder. When I pulled the record apart into its instruments, the bass track had the riff the whole way through, the same creeping figure at the bottom of the instrument, buried under the keyboard playing it along with him. It’s a real bass line, and you can barely hear it.

The second surprise came from a live video of the band playing the song. It rarely cut to Dunn for long, so I did a lot of pausing and rewinding, and I noticed first that he plays the riff with a pick, and then which string he’s on, because it’s clearly vibrating. It’s the second-thickest string. Easy enough, I’d just guess the frets from there and be on my way. And I’d have been wrong, because nothing he played on that string would come out matching the record.

I didn’t know Dunn tunes his bass lower for Fantômas, every string dropped, so the string in that spot is tuned to the note the record says. He’s effectively playing a four-string bass the way you’d play the four lowest strings on a five-string. The shape I saw was right; on a normal bass it just lives one string lower. Anyone copying his hands by eye on a normally tuned bass ends up playing the whole song in the wrong key, and I came close to being one of them.

The line

The note that sounds wrong

Four pairs of notes, the same shape over and over. The hand barely moves. The hard part, for me, is speed: two notes on every beat, long-short like a shuffle, for the whole song, and I still struggle to hold it at full tempo without it rushing and going straight. Dunn plays the pairs with a pick, down and up. I pluck with two fingers, back and forth, the same idea by hand.

The third surprise was the last pair. Every time I played it, my ear wanted it one step higher. Higher sounded right. It landed somewhere, like the riff was finishing a sentence. The note on the record sits just under that, and played on its own it sounds a little off, as if somebody missed. They’re an unusual band, so my first thought was that maybe they’d played it a little off. I checked the record, bass and keys separately, and both of them play the lower note, every time. It’s on purpose. The riff creeps by the smallest steps there are, up and back, up and back, and it never gets to the note that would let you relax. That’s the joke and the menace of the whole song in four pairs of notes.

So I play it the way they do, and it still sounds a little wrong to me, which I’ve decided is how it’s supposed to feel.

The uke bass

This one is the simplest thing I’ve played on the uke bass, and the hardest to play for long. The short neck puts the whole riff under two fingers without stretching, and the open string plays half the notes. What the short scale won’t do is help you keep time. A shuffle this fast sits entirely in the plucking hand, and the play-along on the site will slow the record down until the long-short feels like walking.

The Wolf Man sang it in 1964 for a film that wouldn’t come out for three years. Thirty-odd years later a band named after a French phantom played his tune with the bass buried under a keyboard, on a string that looks like the wrong one, ending on a note that sounds like a mistake. None of it is. You’ll hear Patton again in this library, crooning a punk song like a lounge singer on Let’s Lynch the Landlord. This one’s for Halloween.