Small Victories: A Few Thoughts
Today is the official release date in the US of Adrian Harte’s new book Small Victories: The True Story of Faith No More, which is described as “The Definitive Biography of Faith No More.”
First of all, I should clarify that I am not a book critic, and this isn’t a review. I received my copy of the book today, but since the Kindle version was released last week, I’ve had the chance to read the book and I just wanted to share a few thoughts.
Before I go on, I want to say that Adrian has done a really great job with this book. I’m really impressed with the depth he’s gone into the backstory of Faith No More, how they came to be, their rise, their fall, and their return are all documented with great detail. I generally knew Faith No More’s history, but for me, reading this book was a lot like reading A Game of Thrones. I watched the first season of Game of Thrones on HBO before reading the book. So I went in knowing the overall plot, but the book extended the story and went much more in depth on the details I already knew.
Adrian and I don’t know each other, aside from a few online pleasantries, but we share a similar background. I started this site in 1994, during the early days of the Internet, and with the help of many others, it became the first online presence for the band. When the band reformed in 2009, Adrian picked up the long dormant torch and his site became the first major online presence for what would be colloquially known as Faith No More 2.0.
While Adrian does mention this site in his book, for which I am honored, I would like to have seen a bit more about the group of people that built the online fan community in the ‘90s. Seeing as how that’s more my scene than his, I can understand why it wasn’t explored as much as other parts of the band’s history, which is what prompted this write-up. I wanted to give a bit more credit to those that helped promote the band during the earlier days of the Internet.
I’ll start with this site. When I first created a website for Faith No More, it wasn’t called “Caca Volante.” It had a much more generic name of “The UnOfficial Faith No More Page.” Hal Turner and Marc Schoenen created a mailing list, which was called “Caca Volante,” a name that had been coined by Jai Young Kim, who later went on to work with Trey Spruance on several Web of Mimicry projects. In early 1995, the mailing list and my website merged into one community and all of the information I shared came from the numerous members of the mailing list. I certainly couldn’t have done it on my own. In fact, in the first email I ever received from Hal, he included a list of corrections for information I had wrong on my website. Karl Reinsch maintained the earliest complete discography for the band, the Caca Volante logo was originally created by Jesse Kujava, and of course, the thing that probably drove the most traffic to my site was Stefan Negele’s CV Database.
In 1997, another group of fans started the original version of FNM.com, called “Website of the Year,” which would later be turned over the band to be used as their official website upon their return. Website of the Year was created by Heather Scott, Mike Leach, David Cox, and Agatha Samborska, with contributions from Nick Chester, Star Leigh Wall, Simone Turkington, Simon Levesque, Mike Altman, “Danimal,” and Heather Leah Kennedy, who also created the preeminent Mr. Bungle fan site, Bungle Fever.
There are numerous other people that made up the online community for Faith No More in the ‘90s through their own sites, some of which still have active presences today, and even though I haven’t met them all, I am happy to still call most of them friends. Reading Small Victories made me think fondly of those people and those times.
If you’ve read this far, then you owe it to yourself to buy the book and let Adrian take you on a trip through a thorough history of one of your favorite bands.
