I knew I needed a real kit but I didn’t know why. There was a very strong feeling toward the drums.
When I was about eight years old, my mom and I lived in an apartment in a small town near Charleston, West Virginia. We had a couch that was very firm and hollow sounding, and I would put in the eight-track recording of Elvis Live at Madison Square Garden, and set up different-sized pillows so that the sound went high to low, like a drum set. I had a pair of drumsticks I got from somewhere, and I would play that concert from beginning to end. The drumming on that was really crazy with a lot of big tom rhythms and very energetic grooves. At the time I didn’t know anything about drums, but I could hear it. The drummer was Ronnie Tutt. I guess he might have been my very first influence.
We then moved to Riverview, Michigan, a few years later. That’s where I started to hit real drums. I listened to Aerosmith, the Cars, Led Zeppelin, Rush, Van Halen . . . all the big radio rock growing up in the seventies. I would air drum to all of those albums. With Rush, I knew every note of every album until the late-’80s. The same with Van Halen. I had pretend concerts in my living room. Sort of visualizing the future.
I had some friends that were also into music, and we would get together at my friend Brian Kirksey’s house, and also at my friend Vance Riley’s place—to drive the neighborhood crazy. Rehearsals were like a concert for us, and no concert would be complete without pyrotechnics, so we would set up flash pots in front of Brian’s garage and we would jam and set these things off like a real concert. The garage would fill with smoke and it felt awesome. We did our school’s version of The Gong Show, which was big at the time. And we played “Takin’ Care of Business” and “Train Kept A-Rollin’.” We took home the prize.
We also got offered to do a show at the Riverview Moose Lodge for some kind of Taco Tuesday or something. Brian, my friend Goob, and myself played our first show as “Oregon.” We were envisioning playing shows at Moose Lodges all over the state and then maybe the country, even the world! There were no limits to our vision. But Oregon didn’t last long, so the nation’s Moose Lodges were shit out of luck. The jamming was moved to our friend John Christy’s basement. His parents were so awesome and encouraged us to play and have a good time. Although sometimes his mom would yell down the stairs, “TURN THAT SHIT DOWN!” That phrase is probably the most used phrase of any young musician’s parents, and I still hear it to this day.
Off to Arizona when I was sixteen. My family moved to Phoenix when my stepfather got laid off in Michigan. After finishing high school, I was working random jobs like at the Foot Locker, pizza places, even digging plumbing ditches in the middle of summer in Phoenix in 105 degrees. I really wasn’t happy with the direction things were heading. I ended up at a navy recruiter testing for the nuclear program. I passed the first test and then I had to do a second test because of the advanced program. Thank god I ended up one point shy of passing—I get seasick! I can’t go into the navy! They said to come back in three months and retest. Sure.
I ended up working in a record store, which I liked but it still didn’t move me much. I was talking to my mom about things and she said the weirdest thing that I don’t think I would have ever thought to do: “Why don’t you look in the Yellow Pages and see if studios need a drummer?” Needless to say, I laughed. If only it was that easy. But after thinking about it, I decided to give it a shot. The second studio I called was auditioning drummers. How crazy. It was in the Yellow Pages all along. This was before the Internet. I did the audition and all I really could do was copy Neil Peart’s solo. Well, needless to say, they weren’t impressed. Not too many requests for Neil Peart wannabes.
But a guy said he knew a band looking for a drummer if I was interested. So I got the number and called the band. I set up an audition, packed my drums in cardboard boxes and pillowcases, and took a Greyhound bus to Flagstaff, where my girlfriend’s father gave me a ride to a ghost town called Jerome. It must have looked like I was moving in when I arrived with boxes and pillows. They let me audition, anyways. I ended up getting the gig. It was Major Lingo—a popular band in Arizona. The music was all original, which helped me learn to create original ideas. It was a mix of world beat, reggae, folk, rock, ska, and the kitchen sink.
After five years in Arizona, we decided to move to San Francisco and build our following. After a good effort, we ended up getting jobs to pay the rent. I worked at a café in Oakland on the late shift. It was then a friend of mine was playing a demo tape of Primus. A local band. I thought it was interesting and at the time I was looking to play. So he said they were looking for a drummer, and I said, “I play drums.” Well, he kind of laughed, and I said, “No, really, I do.” He got a number for me and I set up an audition. That was when I met Les and Todd. We played a bunch of Rush songs and had a good time. Les called me after doing the rest of the auditions and said he had good news and bad news. The good news was they liked me and offered me the gig. The bad news was that Todd had quit. So now what? Les set up our first rehearsal and invited a friend of his, Larry LaLonde. It went great and that became the new Primus.
LARRY LaLONDE: He was dressed really crazy. He had sort of MC Hammer pants on. He looked like he should have been playing with Enya or something—he had flowing, crazy clothes on. But he was the only guy who auditioned that was into the same music as us. We were all into Rush. So he stuck out as the only guy who stood out from everyone who was even close to being in our world. Our thing was pretty specific then too. It was going to take someone like Tim, who was an oddball kind of person.
TIM “HERB” ALEXANDER: My biggest influences were Neil Peart, John Bonham, Stewart Copeland. There were others over time. Rayford Griffin, Billy Cobham, Bill Bruford, Mark Brzezicki, and just various styles of music had an effect on me as well. Let’s not forget Ron Tutt.
LARRY LaLONDE: Les and Tim are definitely way different. Tim is very mellow, he’s very laid back. He’s a super nice guy. And they’re both guys that have a vision. When they have a vision of how they want things to go, they go down that road 100 percent. Both in different ways. They’re pretty normal dudes, for the most part. I get along with everybody though . . . at least that’s what I tell other people.
ADAM GATES: Les has certainly always driven it. It’s always kind of been his beast. He’s always been very specific about what he wants. For someone I’ve known most of my life, he hasn’t changed at all. His personality, sense of humor, and pretty intense seriousness have always been there. Larry is probably the sweetest guy I’ve ever met in my life. I consider him a best friend. Just the kindest human being on the earth, really. And also a really irreverent sense of humor. Just bizarre sense of humor. Tim was pretty dry. But he didn’t get phased by all of our rampant idiocy. Tim was just a constant there—he never jumped into the idiocy as much as maybe Les and Ler were doing. Which is probably a good thing, because it evened things out in a way.
LES CLAYPOOL: There’s actually some videotape out there of my very last show with Todd and Jay at the Omni. It was after we knew it was ending, and I actually even say, “I hope all you people still come and see me. These guys are leaving, but I’m continuing on, I got a couple of guys. We’re going to keep going.” We continued on, but it was definitely a shift.
DAVID LEFKOWITZ: The very first shows that we did with the new lineup would have been January 1989 at the Berkeley Square. We literally had the old band and the new band together, where I think the old band played a few songs, then the new guys joined, and then all five of the musicians played simultaneously. It was a real passing-of-the-torch kind of thing on stage.
Whereas Todd had a thinner guitar sound and was a little bit more of a one-note-at-a-time kind of guy—linear guitar lines—Larry had a much thicker tone and a chunkier metal sound. Tim obviously was less of a funk guy, and had prog elements. He certainly had this Rush/King Crimson thing going on. He was much more of the double-kick guy, which lent itself to the metal side a little bit. And then the polyrhythms and world music inclinations,
