Primus are not like other bands. A bewildering anomaly for the last 40 years, these Bay Area oddballs must be the weirdest band ever to conquer the metal world. Record companies have no idea what to do with them, magazines tie themselves in knots trying to describe them, and their fans are almost as weird and unconventional as the band themselves. When Primus played at Lollapalooza in 1993, in support of their bizarrely successful third album, Pork Soda, the response was a little… well, meaty.
“Back then I was a strapping young fellow and I’d play with my shirt off,” says singer and virtuoso bassist Les Claypool, whose band played their first UK dates in a decade this August.
“I go up to the microphone and boom! It was like somebody punched me in the chest. I looked down and there was a giant, red welt on my chest, and at my feet there was a huge pig’s foot with a big toenail on it. There was a juggler at the festival, and he used to juggle chainsaws, and for some reason he’d cut up some pig onstage, so someone thought they’d be clever. ‘Pork soda? I’m gonna throw this pig knuckle at Les!’ If it had hit me in the face it would’ve fucked me up hard!”
While Les never expected to be dodging chunks of pig carcass, he had already become accustomed to people reacting strangely to his band. Formed in El Sobrante, California, in 1984, when Les was 21 years old, Primus were anything but conventional.
These three guys, who didn’t necessarily fit together, just happened to have this amazing chemistry, and it became Primus.
Les Claypool
Inspired by a dizzying array of disparate influences, from Funkadelic and the Grateful Dead to Frank Zappa and Rush, they were never a metal band in any meaningful sense. In fact, after a brief involvement with Bay Area thrashers Blind Illusion, Les – who had gone to high school with Metallica’s Kirk Hammett – had primarily learned his trade via funk, jazz-adjacent improvisation and freewheeling jam band rock.
After a slow gestation, during which Les worked with numerous drummers and guitarists, Primus finally coalesced around the now classic line-up of Les Claypool, guitarist Larry ‘Ler’ LaLonde and drummer Tim ‘Herb’ Alexander. They sounded heavy, funky and doggedly eccentric. It really shouldn’t have worked.
“Once Larry and Herb showed up, it was like, ‘OK, I’m the only guy that has any kind of R’n’B or soul background’,” says Les. “Herb was this world music and Rush fanatic, and Ler came from the metal world. He was in Possessed when he was 15! But his heroes were Frank Zappa, Jerry Garcia and Eddie Van Halen. So it just became this weird hodgepodge. These three guys, who didn’t necessarily fit together, just happened to have this amazing chemistry, and it became Primus.”
Being fiercely original has its benefits, but in mid-80s San Francisco Primus found themselves firmly out of the musical loop. The Bay Area thrash metal scene was absolutely flying, but it was no obvious home for this deeply peculiar power trio. Famously, Les auditioned for Metallica when they were searching for a replacement for the late Cliff Burton, but it quickly became apparent that he was too damn weird for the job.
“We were always this weird band!” laughs Les. “Promoters didn’t know who to put us with! They put us on with Swans one time, and put us on with [cult Californian punk troupe] the Pop-O-Pies, but there was never really anyone for us to play with. Then suddenly, Fishbone and the Red Hot Chili Peppers would come to town, and we were like, ‘Woah, that’s cool!’ Then along came Faith No More, and we’d play with them too, and Mr. Bungle would open for us… so a scene developed in the Bay Area.”
As heavy music entered a new and subtly radical era, Primus were still unlikely contenders for success, but Les had the ambition to back up his extraordinary musicianship and unique approach to songwriting. When his band’s local popularity increased, he asked his auto mechanic father for a favour.
“Well, we were as poor as church mice, but I told my dad that if we recorded some live material and we pressed up some albums, I thought they would sell,” says Les. “So he loaned us $3,000, which was a big deal for a mechanic, and we took that money and we made that live recording, which became [debut release] Suck On This. We printed up 1,000 units and went around and sold them at local record stores and took that money and pressed up some more, and paid my father back.”
Suck On This was released on Les’s own label, Prawn Song, in November 1989 and swiftly became a huge underground hit. Sensing an opportunity, the trio took the money they had made from selling their debut and hit the studio to record their debut studio album, Frizzle Fry, which emerged a few months later.
We became the beaver band
Les Claypool
Full of songs that had been honed over their first few years as a live band, including Too Many Puppies and John The Fisherman, it was another word-of-mouth triumph and, against the odds, Primus were soon pursued by a number of record labels, including the recently founded Interscope Records.
"My manager didn’t want us to sign with Interscope because they had no track record, the only thing they’d ever released was that song Rico Suave by [Ecuadorian rapper] Gerardo,” says Les. “But their A&R guy, Tom Whalley, came to one of our shows, and he saw the crowd going crazy, came backstage and said that he wanted to sign us! He knew nothing about us. He didn’t know that we’d already sold 80,000 records on our own. I said, ‘This is who we’re going with, because he wants us because of us, and not because we sold 80,000 records…’ and obviously it worked out!”
Despite still being resolutely weird, Primus were well-suited to the musical developments of the early 90s. Their second album, Sailing The Seas Of Cheese, was widely associated with the then inescapable funk-metal movement that brought us the Chili Peppers, Faith No More and other bands that blended metal with slap bass, to varying degrees of efficacy.
In truth, it was a much more perverse and distinctive piece of work, with two sort-of-hit-singles – Jerry Was A Race Car Driver and Tommy The Cat – that became ubiquitous on MTV. The latter song was also played by Primus during a cameo in movie sequel Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, which also helped to push the record towards its eventual gold status.
In constant demand as a live act, they spent the next few years touring relentlessly, pausing occasionally to make new albums, including the dark and moody Pork Soda (1993) and Tales From The Punchbowl (1995), which provided Primus with their next significant hit, Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver. A scratchy, country-funk riot, with a suitably bizarre video, its popularity threatened to reduce the band to a novelty act.
“Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver was a kind of double-edged sword,” says Les with a wry smile. “It was just going to be one of those upright bass and banjo ditties that we’d throw on a record for texture, but the record company picked it because it was catchy, and it became some kind of hit. But for a lot of people who didn’t necessarily know Primus, they thought we were a joke band after that. We became the beaver band!”
To make matters worse, Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver was commonly interpreted as a rather unsavoury tribute to Hollywood star Winona Ryder. Awkward.
“She approached me at a radio festival, and she was a little miffed. I said, ‘Hey, look, it’s not about you!’ In fact, it’s spelt differently! I just needed a name. It could have been Jessica or anything. But the song is literally about a beaver.”
An even more significant encounter with pop culture came in 1996, when South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone invited the band to record the theme song to their new TV show.
I was thankful that we stopped before we shit our pants
Les Claypool
The duo had been fans of the band since they performed at the University Of Colorado in the 80s, for an event called Alferd Packer Day, named after the first person convicted of cannibalism in the United States during the gold rush era.
Pre-South Park, Parker and Stone would later make their directorial debut with Cannibal! The Musical, which Les would pick up on VHS during a trip to Tower Records in London, not knowing that its creators were Primus fans.
“I bought it because I remembered Alferd Packer Day, not knowing that Matt and Trey were the ones that made it. A few years later, we get a letter, ‘Hey, we’re big fans, can you do the theme song for this cartoon we’re doing?’ So we did it and obviously they’ve taken over the world!”
Primus spent the rest of the 90s making more weird music. Tim ‘Herb’ Alexander quit, and was replaced by new drummer Bryan ‘Brain’ Mantia, with whom the band released the grubby and polarising Brown Album in 1997.
“I relish the fact that it’s Tom Waits’ favourite Primus record,” says Les, referencing the grizzled American singer and frequent Primus collaborator. “He says, [gruff Tom Waits voice], ‘It sounds like it needs a good wash!’ Ha ha ha!”
1999’s Antipop was even more polarising. Released as nu metal became the dominant force in mainstream heavy music, it featured appearances from James Hetfield, Tom Morello and ex-Police drummer Stewart Copeland, and the album’s first single, Lacquer Head, was controversially produced by Fred Durst. The band still sounded as unique as ever, but the album’s reliance on star cameos and the presence of the Limp Bizkit frontman divided fans.
“It took a long time for me to be able to listen to Antipop, because it was an odd time for us as people,” Les explains. “It just got messy, we were in different head spaces. It was an awkward time. It was not fun anymore, so we stopped. I was thankful that we stopped before we shit our pants.”
Primus called it quits in the year 2000. Les Claypool embarked on a dizzying array of other projects, including Oysterhead and Colonel Claypool’s Bucket Of Bernie Brains, before seeing the error of his ways in 2003, whereupon the classic Primus line-up, featuring a returning Tim ‘Herb’ Alexander, reformed for some celebratory live shows.
The reunion did not last, and, by early 2010, Herb had fled the nest once again. He was replaced by Jay Lane (who’d also played with band in the late 80s), with whom the new-look Primus recorded 2011’s Green Naugahyde. By 2013, the latter was out and Herb was back in for a third go-round on the carousel.
But as chaotic as Primus may have seemed from the outside, Les and Larry were still having fun. In 2014, they released their most out-there album yet, a full-scale interpretation of classic 1971 movie Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory.
“There’s a few things, especially now I’m older, that I’ve had the idea to do, and I need to start knocking a few things off the list!” says Les. “I’ve always wanted to reinterpret the Willy Wonka movie. I told Ler that I wanted to do it and he was stoked. We only had a certain amount of time to perform it, because we had to get licences from Roald Dahl’s family, so it was one and done, but it was a lot of fun.”
2017’s The Desaturating Seven was equally leftfield, based on Italian author Ul de Rico’s classic children’s book The Rainbow Goblins, which the frontman used to read to his children when they were little. To date, it’s the last record the band have released, though Les says they hope to have their first album in a decade ready to roll (almost inevitably, it will feature yet another drummer, John ‘Hoffer’ Hoffman, replacing the once-again-departed Herb Alexander).
What Primus’s 10th album will sound like is anyone’s guess, though their new EP, A Handful Of Nuggs, gives a few clues, with strong echoes of the Frizzle Fry era filtered through a wonky, psychedelic lens (alongside a ripping version of Dio’s Holy Diver, sung in characteristically depressive fashion by cult clown Puddles Pity Party). But ultimately, who knows?
“It’s part of the joy and part of the agony,” concludes Les. “I always joked that we were ‘psychedelic polka’, but we’re this odd, eclectic, dynamic mixture of fromage. We’re like the gum on the bottom of your shoe!”
Funk? Metal? Psychedelia? Polka? Four decades in, and Primus remain gloriously unpredictable freaks following their own deranged logic. Long may they baffle.
A Handfull Of Nuggs is out now via AFO Records.
