Going through old stuff and found this - king for a day fool for a lifetime tour.

I thought the song was decent when it first came out but I did question why they chose it as their first single in years (aside from the obvious message)

Once i had heard Sol Invictus in its entirety i felt separation anxiety and cone of shame would have made better choices.

However I've grown to appreciate it much more since its release. It has a really distinctive sound with that classic cinematic FNM atmosphere. There's something refreshing about its simplicity especially compared to so much of today's overproduced rock music. It really has a character of its own.

Does anyone else feel this way?

This song is from King For A Day era. He uses his nasal vocals again. Would like to see his nasal vocals again in trt era songs live

My Opinion

One of the band's best performances, featuring the great Jim Martin on guitar. Simply fantastic.

Just wondering. I've never really listened to them. Where should I start?

Been obsessed with this one for awhile again, good example of pre Mike FNM still sounding like Angel Dust. Absolutely a stepping stone to their later sound!

Imma need sum evidence

This is such a weird video, but I just wanted to illustrate how I think FNM are the ultimate band at manipulating people. I am fascinated by how The Real Thing is so compelling. It is a very weird song. Not very comparable to much else. But it is so good at one thing. Creating tension. And it's really all from Billy, I think. The space and holding moments. And it comes from his style of playing.

Maybe other people have more precise thoughts.

Don’t think anyone’s posted this here yet but if they played this song live what would the reaction be with only such a small number of fans even knowing about it?

Please don't cancel.!!!!!

I don’t know but i have a strange feeling that says to me Kindergarten will make a surprise comeback somehow lol

Whenever I watch/hear FNM performances from Mike's first few years in the band, it always strikes me just how perfectly these two songs went together in the setlist. The juxtaposition between the velvety smooth, atmospheric Alpine White jingle and the brutal Surprise You're Dead!, and the way the former just melts into the latter is just irresistible to me. I know the likelyhood of them ever bringing that song back into live rotation, is very slim. But I was just wondering if anyone else would love to see it brought back.

This probably has been done before but anyway...

I got into the band just this August and am still exploring the huge Patton catalog. Bought all four FNM Deluxe Edition CDs recently and finally got around to listening to all the B-sides. To say I'm amazed is an understatement. It's impossible to narrow it down to one favorite track so I picked four, all of which I think should have been on the albums:

The World Is Yours

This Guy's in Love with You*

Cowboy Song

Absolute Zero

*Not original but one of the only two FNM songs that have had me in tears so it has a very special place in my heart. It was actually the BBC Radio One session version that moved me to tears but I really wish they had recorded a proper studio version back in the AOTY era.

One of Mike Pattons many projects, amazing show. Got the poster near 20 years ago, can’t recall the artist. Again, my bad. But what a beauty!

Billy Gould didn't just "randomly stumble" onto Roberta Findlay's Raw Footage in some adult shop clearance bin, and anyone still regurgitating that press-kit myth has clearly never run a basic Bayesian update on late-1980s video distribution. By 1988, North American retail and rental pipelines held a baseline catalog of at least 50,000 active commercial adult and exploitation VHS titles (N = 50,000). Under the naive null hypothesis H_0—where Gould is an innocent civilian who walked in and bought exactly one random tape on a whim (n = 1)—the likelihood of pulling that specific release is P(E | H_0) = 1/50,000 = 0.00002, or a flat 0.002% statistical miracle. But Gould was embedded in late-80s San Francisco, right when the Tenderloin and lower Market Street grindhouse corridor (the Strand, the Presidio, the Center, the Mitchell Brothers orbit) was dumping two decades of worn-out 35mm and 16mm celluloid prints onto cheap magnetic tape duplications, fueling an aggressive bootleg-swapping subculture where underground musicians and noise heads traded multi-generation dubs out of car trunks and rehearsal spaces alongside issues of RE/Search. In that specific countercultural sub-manifold, the relevant population collapses from 50,000 retail tapes to an active cult/sleaze canon of roughly N = 1,000 titles. Inside that network, circulation wasn't uniform; it followed a standard Zipfian power law concentrated around notorious 42nd Street exploitation directors like Roberta Findlay, who was already a household name in bootleg circles for Snuff. With a power-law exponent s = 1.0, the harmonic sum over 1,000 titles is approximately 7.485, meaning an unhinged oddity like Raw Footage sitting at cult rank k = 25 had an initial single-draw probability p_k of (1/25) / 7.485, which comes out to roughly 0.00534 (0.534%). If Gould maintained an absolute bare-minimum floor of just half a dozen sleaze tapes (n = 6), the probability of him holding that specific tape under H_1 is 1 - (1 - 0.00534)^6, which equals 0.0316 (3.16%). Dividing that by the null probability yields a Bayes factor of 0.0316 / 0.00002 = 1,580, meaning the physical evidence is over fifteen hundred times more probable under the stash hypothesis than the retail accident myth. Even if you slap an aggressively hostile prior on Gould and assume a 99% baseline probability that he was completely clean and owned zero exploitation media (Prior Odds = 0.01 / 0.99 = 0.0101), multiplying that by the Bayes factor of 1,580 produces posterior odds of 15.96, which updates the posterior probability that he was sitting on a curated stash of underground sleaze to over 94.1%. To hit a 50% median probability of discovering it entirely solo without trading partners scouting for him, he would have had to churn through 78 to 130 tapes, but even at the hard mathematical floor of half a dozen, the "serendipitous accident" narrative is completely dead. Gould didn't walk into a shop and hit a 1-in-50,000 lightning strike; he was an active tape hound who had a cardboard box of tracking-damaged Tenderloin filth sitting on the Faith No More tour bus.