By Martin Popoff

Chuck Mosley is a name you might not recognize, but forsooth you know legendary early FAITH NO MORE anthem ‘We Care A Lot’? That’s Chuck turning in a hilarious Emmy of a vocal performance there, Mosley lasting for two records before being replaced by Mike Patton. Then, outside of a bizarre stint fronting the BAD BRAINS in the low ‘90s, Chuck kept an even lower profile… cooking and moving to Cleveland, mostly. But now he’s back with a fun, heavy, funny solo album called Will Rap Over Hard Rock For Food, which… don’t worry…

“Yeah, that’s more of a joke than anything,” says he of the Barry White purr. “That’s going to go further and further away. There’s not much rap heard in all this. I’ll freestyle. I’ll be more like talking over rock in the future. My style is more like conversational talking, as opposed to rapping, but I called the album that to make fun of us and everybody else out there. I like to make fun of people.”
“But, let’s see… mission?” continues Chuck, asked for one, “Or style? I don’t really have a style That’s kind of my style. I mean, I’m credited with starting that whole rapping over rock business. That kind of happened by accident.”

Yeah, just how did that happen, and do you buy that? Are you an inventor of that?

“Well yeah, I am. Just being mixed, I think, culturally. When I was working with Faith No More, when I started out with them, there was simply stuff that I wanted to rap over. I was a big fan of rap, but I wasn’t really good at it. But I didn’t want to let the fact that I wasn’t any good at it stop me from doing it over the more rhythmic parts of their music. Because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Because I couldn’t hear a melody to sing; I’m a melody-type person. So I sang where I heard melodies, and I did that where I didn’t hear it, where I just heard beats. And so it kind of took off, and Mike imitated me when he took over. He took over the job and I think he thought that’s what he had to do, because that’s what I did, and people would credit him for doing it before they realized that I was doing it all along before. I’ve seen it directed both ways, but obviously, if I came before him and I was doing it, than I deserve the credit (laughs). So I took the credit for that, but as far as musical styles, I don’t have any one style that I like. I don’t have one style that I follow. When I’m writing, you know, it just comes out. If I write on an acoustic it sounds different from when I’m writing on an electric or if I’m writing on piano. I write all kinds of styles, because I listen to all kinds of styles. So if I have any one style, that’s my style.”

Going back 20 years, were you a piano player and could play guitar?

“Yeah, I studied classical piano from around 3 ½ to 14, and I heard David Bowie when I was 11 or 12, and I wanted to be able to play his music on guitar, and I got to take guitar lessons for three months, and all my guitar playing came from there, just stole secrets from other people and stuff. I never really got great on guitar, but that didn’t stop me from playing that either.”

The experience shines on the new record, which really, in sum total, is a cool, sometimes goofy echo-slap-reverberation of the early Faith No More albums. Is there a deliberate view Chuck has about injecting humour into what he does?

“Well, yes, but it’s not so much philosophy. I’ve never taken anything really serious. I’ve always been sarcastic and into humour, so it’s going to reflect on the music. Because that’s part of who I am. Like I say, I like feedback, I like psychedelic, I like hip-hop, I like heavy metal, I like R&B;, and we have more R&B; flavour in some of the tracks too, but it didn’t make it to this record, because it was getting too long, and was taking too long to get finished. So we had to save that; there’s a lot of stuff we had to save for the next outing.”

And perhaps underscoring the appreciated legacy of what Chuck’s up to on this record, he’s got some pistol-packing guest stars helping out.

“Yeah, let’s see, Jonathan Davis from KORN, sings with me on ‘Enabler’, which is the first designated single. And also JOHN 5 from MARILYN MANSON and ROB ZOMBIE plays guitar on the same song. Roddy Bottum is on our new rendition of ‘We Care A Lot’, so right there is my sense of humour. And Roddy plays keyboards on that, from Faith No More, obviously. Let’s see, what else, oh, Michael Cartellone from LYNYRD SKYNYRD played drums on most of the album, and our producer played drums on a couple tracks. And a girl, Lilu, who is just 19 years old, and she is actually a label mate. She is going to be coming out with a record later this year or the beginning of next year, on the same 360 Records, and she was a fan of my music, so she asked Mike (Seifert – producer) if I can sing on there, and hell yeah, because I love her voice. I thought it would go good with mine, and it did.”

Did Michael Cartellone (DAMN YANKEES – rock it!) come to Cleveland?

“Yeah, he came here for a weekend and played the drums. Came in and did the job and got out. Real professional. And he recognized the David Bowie influence in me, and for that… that really makes me a fan of his.”

And why did YOU go to Cleveland?

“Cheap real estate was one thing. We were going to move at one point; we had a second daughter on the way and we wanted a change of scenery. We’re kind of nomadic in nature. So it was either here or Seattle or England or Pensacola. And we had a friend here, and he just happened to have a house open, and it was a lot cheaper than where we were living in LA. So we took the jump. And I wanted to start... I was a fan of a lot of bands that came from Cleveland, and I thought it would be fun to get a band from here.”

But it’s time to hit the road again… “Oh definitely. We’re just waiting for the right booking agent to get us on the right kind of tour, start it here in America and then go on to Europe and England and continue on from there, to all points east, west, north and south.”

Will Rap Over Hard Rock For Food is available right now from ReversedImageUnlimited.com.