But Les, he’d get on the drum set, and he could play the same two drum beats, but he played them really, really well. I remember the first time he was playing a drum set, and I was going, Hey, he’s playing the most simple drum beat in the world, but he’s got an amazing sense of tempo that just feels really spot-on and doesn’t move. And it translated right to his bass. He had a really, really good, even sense of timing and a good sense of rhythm—which has become apparent over time, now.
LES CLAYPOOL: I always attribute that to Kirk Hammett. Besides the golden nugget of the key to success being sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, Kirk told me when he was first learning that the key was to always tap your foot. I tell my kids that now when they play; that, and Mr. Johnson being a stickler for tempo in high school jazz band.
TODD HUTH: The recording was great and it turned out great. Personally, I still think that’s the best Primus record ever made.
MATT WINEGAR: It certainly wasn’t production in the sense of what you think of production now, where you tear the songs down and rebuild the structure. I guess in the sense that it was judging performance, which is more what record production was back in the day. It was more like judging performance and, “You can get a better vocal there,” or, “You guys can play that better.” Now, it’s like record production has gone into this insane thing, where you’re responsible for every note of everything, and you’re changing everybody’s shit. [Laughs] I think the sign of the times was that the band didn’t really have any problems that needed to be addressed. They were what they were. It’s not like they were trying to be a pop band and you had to restructure everything to fit a pop format. They were almost like a jazz band or something, where you let them do their thing—it didn’t have to be edited down to a three-minute-and-fifteen-second radio length, because we never thought it was going to get played on the radio. So we obviously didn’t give a shit.
I don’t even know if there was a credit on the Sausage demo. But they were always really kind, and usually they’d give me more credit than was due to me because we were friends, and we were there to help each other out. It wasn’t some business agreement. Still to this day, I don’t like to make contracts. It’s just like, “Hey, man, if we can’t see eye-to-eye as human beings, then why are we working together? Let’s just try to be cool to each other, and help each other out.” So as far as I’m concerned, those guys threw me a bone. It was just icing on top of the cake, being able to hang out and help those guys out.
I remember Les had said, “Man, you have to meet my friend Adam Gates. You guys would totally be great playing music together.” That’s how I met Adam Gates. And then Adam and I ended up making a band called the Spent Poets eventually, that was on Geffen. Adam and I actually met through Les, which was interesting. And we’ve been lifetime friends from then on. Les obviously had a good gauge of what musician personalities were going to work well together. So yeah, they came in and did that, and that tape was just instantly popular.
LES CLAYPOOL: When we did the Sausage demo, people were actually buying it, and people wanted it. So we knew there was a good buzz about it. But unfortunately, not that long after that is when Jay Lane left the band, and then subsequently, Todd Huth left the band, and left me high and dry, to go find some new guys. [Laughs] And at that point we really started taking off—we were selling out Berkeley Square easy, started selling out the Omni, we were doing shows with Limbomaniacs and whatnot. And all of a sudden, this scene was forming, with Mr. Bungle, Fungo Mungo, and Psychefunkapus. There was this really vibrant scene going on in the Bay Area.
Todd Huth had a baby. And Todd is a family guy—he’s a very family-oriented guy. So when he had a baby, it became really difficult for him. He wasn’t around as much. I found even making T-shirts, me and Jayski were doing a lot of that stuff, and Todd wasn’t even around. It finally got to where Jayski was in this other band, the Freaky Executives, and they had a deal with Warner Brothers, so he was starting to get a little more distracted. And I was like, “Jay, you really need to commit to either us or them,” because he was getting really flaky and it was getting to be a drag. Since they had the deal with Warner Brothers, he decided to go with them.
JAY LANE: I was committed to the Freaky Executives. We had a Warner Brothers record deal, I was a cowriter in the band. Even though the band was kind of on its last legs, we still had this deal with Warner Brothers—a big-shit record deal. Had I seen that it was going to fall apart and that Primus was going to blow up, of course I would have chosen a different route. But I’m really happy about the way everything turned out, regardless. It was just a commitment thing. Les wanted me to basically quit that band, and I couldn’t.
TODD HUTH: We were getting to a point where I had a kid, Elmo, and Primus was playing a lot. We started playing out of town a little bit more. At one point, I think we had eight shows in seven days, and I was working—I had a job. I was exhausted, for one thing. So I came home and saw Elmo lying there, and he was a different kid. And I was kind of out of control—I didn’t have it under control of what was going on with Primus at that point. You know how things get out of control when you’re playing and people want you to do shows and go on tour and stuff. I thought, I’m not going to not see my kid grow up. This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. So I decided to leave because I wanted to be around for my kid. And I just knew Primus was going to take off. And much to Les’s dismay, I didn’t have a choice really.
Chapter 5
Then Along Came Ler
LES CLAYPOOL: I had been touring with Blind Illusion, because they had called me a year or so prior to that—their bass player had quit the band. So Marc Biedermann said, “We’ve got this record deal. Come be on the record. If you’re on the record, we’ll buy you a new bass amp.” So I was like, “Okay, cool.” I got a new bass amp out of the deal, and I made the record, and then I did a couple of tours with them. During that time, they had this guitarist in the band, who was playing rhythm guitar, whose name was Larry.
LARRY LaLONDE [Primus guitarist 1989–present]: I’m from El Sobrante, California. Basically, got into music because of this guy who lived next door to me. This kid that had long hair, he had a guitar, and it looked cool. [Laughs] Then a friend of mine in seventh grade said, “Hey, I’ve got tickets to go see Rush.” I was like, “Awesome. What’s Rush?” I had no idea—I didn’t know what a concert was, I didn’t know what any of this stuff was. So we went to see Rush, and I was like, “This is killer!” So when I put that together—with the guy next door having a guitar—it made me want to get a guitar.
I was taking lessons from this guy around where I lived, George Cole, and he was a student of Joe Satriani’s. I slowly started finding out through all the other kids my age group around the Bay Area that took lessons, all of our teachers took lessons from Joe Satriani. So he was kind of this mythical kind of guy, who we had heard was better than Eddie Van Halen—which at the time, it was like, Is that possible?! And then I just went in one day to this music store in Berkeley to buy an amp, and on the wall it said, Sign up for guitar lessons: Joe Satriani. And I was like, I think that’s that dude! So I signed up and totally just lucked out that it was him. Joe wasn’t famous yet, none of his students were really famous—it was probably right on the cusp of Steve Vai [who was an earlier student of Satriani’s] getting famous. But it was definitely one of those things where it was like, I couldn’t believe that Joe wasn’t famous, because I never heard anybody play guitar like that.
Definitely, the first [guitar influence] was Eddie Van Halen. By far. That was the main one for a really long time. And Randy Rhoads. And then eventually Frank Zappa, Adrian Belew, Robert Fripp, Jerry Garcia—that’s the main crew. As far as guitars, the very first one I had was a Hondo II. I’m not really sure why they had to put
