Scott Ian is sporting a brand new tattoo of the MR. BUNGLE “bunny” logo.
The ANTHRAX guitarist, who has been a member of MR. BUNGLE since the summer of 2019, took to his Instagram earlier today (Saturday, June 12) to share a time-lapse video of him getting the tattoo on the back of his upper left arm at Sara Lou Tattoo in Los Angeles.
Scott wrote in an accompanying message: “You can get a bunny tattoo of your own, it didn’t hurt (yes, it’s me). Not feeling that committed? Then get ‘The Night They Came Home’ and just feel like you’re getting tattooed,” he said, referencing MR. BUNGLE‘s just-released first live album.
Last year, Ian told Full Metal Jackie‘s nationally syndicated radio show about how he came to join MR. BUNGLE: “When, when Mike [Patton, vocals] first approached me to do this, he already knew I was a big fan of BUNGLE and he said, ‘Stay with me here… We want to put the band back together, and we want to record the original demo from ’86.’ And he’s, like, ‘Did you say you’re familiar with that?’ And I was, like, ‘Yeah, I had a really crappy tape of that.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, we wanna do it, but the only way we’ll do it is if you and Dave Lombardo [former SLAYER drummer] are in the band, because that way we’ll have the guys that influenced us in the first place to even write those songs.’ I took it, obviously, as a compliment and all that, but I didn’t really take it all that seriously. Maybe I have a hard time taking compliments in general, especially from Mike Patton. But then Trevor [Dunn, bass] started making new demos of all the songs so we’d be able to learn them, because they couldn’t even figure out what they were playing by listening to the old demo. Then they sent me these demos. I started hearing the riffs and then I understood what Mike was talking about how Dave and I were a big influence. I could very much hear S.O.D. and SLAYER and ANTHRAX and POSSESSED and SUICIDAL TENDENCIES. I could hear a lot of the influence on the music because they were writing the songs in ’85 and ’86 when all of that stuff was the genesis of that whole scene of thrash, crossover and hardcore. The riffs were very, very familiar and recognizable to me. If I jumped back into my 1986 shoes, it all made sense. The arrangements, on the other hand, made zero sense at all — seven minutes songs with, literally — I’m not joking — 93 changes in them. Even then, in ’86, these guys who were teenagers at the time were so far ahead musically than any of us other bands at the time, such as or METALLICA or SLAYER or MEGADETH or any of the other bands I’ve mentioned. Nobody knew because nobody had ever heard this in 1986. It’s kind of mind-blowing when you hear the degree of difficulty in this music and what they were writing and what they were doing at such a young age. It puts the first BUNGLE album that came out in 1991 into much more of a perspective when you hear what they were doing with thrash in 1986.”
MR. BUNGLE was formed in an impoverished lumber and fishing town by a trio of curious, volatile teenagers. Patton, Dunn and guitarist Trey Spruance launched the group in 1985 up in Humboldt County, California, sifting through a variety of members until around 1989 when they settled on a lineup that managed to get signed to Warner Bros. Records. Up until 2000, they released three albums (“Mr. Bungle” in 1991, “Disco Volante” in 1995 and “California” in 1999) and toured a good portion of the Western hemisphere.
MR. BUNGLE recently confirmed its first live outing of 2021, performing at Riot Fest in Chicago in September. The festival marks the first time Patton has performed on the same bill with both MR. BUNGLE and FAITH NO MORE.
