The Real Thing

This is the album on which a change of singer took the band to an entirely different scale. It was recorded between December 1988 and January 1989 at Studio D in Sausalito, California, produced by Matt Wallace, and released by Slash and Reprise in 1989. It is the first record with Mike Patton, then twenty-one, in place of Chuck Mosley. The other four — Jim Martin on guitar, Billy Gould on bass, Roddy Bottum on keyboards and Mike Bordin on drums — are unchanged from the previous album. Funk bass, metal riffing, keyboards and Patton's delivery, which moves between singing and speaking, trade places inside a single song. "Epic" reached number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was played repeatedly on MTV. Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" is on the record too. It went platinum in the United States. The running order here is the original's as printed.