a personality, that deck, that we always liked a lot. It was straight out lo-fi, but we always liked the quality of it. It’s kind of like using eight millimeter or something. That’s all we had, and at that point, everything was borrowed anyway. So he’s like, “Why don’t you just grab the eight-track, we’ll go into Berkeley Square, and we’ll do this thing?” And I was going, Oh man . . . this is going to be impossible. Once again, Les just making something impossible go down. So it was two nights, and they were playing with Faith No More, which made it interesting. Primus would have packed the place by themselves, but Primus and Faith No More, it was just pure insanity. It was packed beyond belief. Not to mention that somebody gave me ecstasy on that first night, as well. I had never had that before, so I was like, staring at a beer can for twenty minutes at one point. [Laughs]
DAVID LEFKOWITZ: There were two shows recorded at Berkeley Square—one was headlining, and one was opening for Faith No More. And by the way, Faith No More, when they were losing their original singer, Chuck Mosley, and were looking for a new singer, they definitely saw Mike Patton for the first time opening for Primus [with Mr. Bungle]. And we had done some shows in LA opening for them, back in the Chuck era.
MATT WINEGAR: We loaded everything in there, and I think we pretty much decided to use whatever stage mics they had, because to do a professional live recording, you have to rent an isolated splitter that splits the signals, or run separate lines if you want recording microphones up on stage. It’s a pretty complicated process. And the fact that we sort of stumbled in there with this junky equipment, and used these old, beer-soaked stage mics. We needed more than the eight channels—we could only get eight channels, and it was supposed to be something like twelve total. We needed another mixer—of course, none of us knew anyone with a mixer. But then Tim Alexander said, “Oh, I do know somebody who has a mixer.” He brought this giant piece-of-shit mic mixer. So we submixed all the tom mics on that thing, and then just ran it onto one track. It was so ghetto, it was unbelievable. Technically, I can’t even believe we got something that could ever be pressed to vinyl and sold—let alone be listenable. Some people might argue that it’s not listenable at this point. [Laughs] But I think the performances are awesome, but it just sort of doesn’t matter. It can be a cassette deck, who cares?
So we loaded all this stuff into the back of Berkeley Square. The plan was to record two nights, and that way we would have two takes for each song, to be able to choose from. But it was just unbelievably hectic and crazy. I remember you’d come out of the back area where the recording equipment was—I had some headphones back there—and just went back, got levels, and we adjusted the mics the best we could. There was no drum overhead from the PA, so we ended up duct-taping a SM58—a cheap vocal mic—by the cable on the ceiling of the stage. It just hung down. And that became the audience mic, because there is no audience mic, so in between songs it would just be this faint “Yeah!” and clapping sound. So we would take that drum overhead mic and just blast it, because it was the only one that had any kind of crowd noise. It was really rinky-dink and duct-taped together.
We recorded those two nights, and I think if anything was used from the first night, it was maybe one song. I remember they did the Ted Nugent cover [“Wang Dang Sweet Poontang”], that wasn’t included. It was already slated to be our tape-changing song, because the reels would run out at a certain point. We timed it out so that I’d step up on stage and go, “The reels are running out!” Les would go, “Okay, we’ll do the Ted Nugent song while you go put a new reel up.” So I’d have to put that thing in rewind and get that reel off there, and pop a new reel of tape on there. And then be like, “Okay, it’s recording!” I do remember Les screwing up—a song wasn’t going well halfway through—and he stopped and said, “All right, we’re going to do that again.” It’s like getting a one-take recording—you’ve got one chance with the dang thing, and it’s going to be released. You want to get something that doesn’t have some horrible wrong note on it or a huge mistake. But I don’t think he did that for more than one tune. Maybe two.
LES CLAYPOOL: I talked my dad into loaning me money. And my dad doesn’t have a lot of money—he was an auto mechanic. He loaned us three thousand dollars so we could record and print up a thousand records [and issue it via Claypool’s own label, Prawn Song].
LARRY LaLONDE: It was originally going to be a demo, because back in those days you needed a demo to give the clubs to get a gig. Then that turned into Les being like, “Why don’t we just press this into an album, and take it around to college radio?” So I was like, “All right. Good idea.” Les was very good at having ideas like that, because I would have never thought that was possible.
MATT WINEGAR: [Suck on This] wasn’t up to Sausage level. I don’t think there’s even a surviving version of Sausage that sounds like the original tape, because it was mixed to a cassette and then dubbed to another cassette. I know there are versions on YouTube, but they just sound underwater, crazy bad. The actual, original Sausage recording was pretty dang cool. It’s just sad that we didn’t have the technology to mix it down to anything. That’s a really interesting thing about Suck on This—when we mixed it down, we didn’t have a DAT [Digital Audio Tape] machine. Which was kind of the standard, you’d go rent a DAT machine. It was a horrible format. But it was the best you could get for a home situation, by far.
We certainly didn’t have a professional analog mix-down two-track deck at that point. Suck on This was actually mixed down, to my mom’s VCR! We fucking unplugged the thing from my mom’s television set and carried it into the little spare bedroom, where we mixed Suck on This. We mixed that sucker to my mom’s piece-of-shit VCR, onto a videotape. Not only that, but we’re at my mom’s house, mixing this record. And I remember Puffy—Mike Bordin from Faith No More—was there. My older brother, who always gave me shit and was like, “Why are you doing this stupid music bullshit?” When Puffy came over, he goes, “I’ve seen that guy before.” You can’t miss Puffy. And I’m like, “Yeah, he’s the drummer for Faith No More.” For once in my life, my brother was like, “Whoa, okay!” So we mixed it down in a spare bedroom and I gave Les the videotape and said, “Here’s the mix. Good luck.” God knows what the poor mastering engineer did when Les sent him a shitty videotape. The guy must have been horrified. But it was all we had. It was a small step up from a cassette, so we figured, “Hey, it’s better than a cassette.”
It was totally self-funded, and after the pressings came back, I remember Les coming by and dropping off a bunch of pressings, and telling a story about giving it to family members. I’ll never forget Les telling a story about one of his relatives having a stroke or something. He gave the record to him and his relative said, “Ham sandwich.” I think it was one of those neurological disorder things, where the words just come out—like, the brain’s been rewired to replace some words with other words. So instead of saying whatever he was trying to say, he looked at the album and said, “Ham sandwich.”
LES CLAYPOOL: I had a buddy of mine make the sculpture for the album cover—old Lance Link—and then I painted the sculpture. Bosco, who is Mirv’s brother, who worked for Guitar Player magazine and whatnot, did the photography. And he did the effects on the photography and did all the art layout. And there it was—we had a thousand of these things. Ler and I would drive around in my little Karmann Ghia to record stores and deliver them ourselves. “How many do you want? . . . Wow, they took five!”
MATT WINEGAR: Les and his piece-of-shit Karmann Ghia car . . . He used to have to touch these two wires to start up this Karmann Ghia back then! It didn’t have a fucking ignition in it. He basically was hot-wiring his car every time he was starting it up. He had a big stack of records in that Karmann Ghia, and I remember driving to some record stores with him, and, “Hey, we dropped off five copies to this record store,” and then, “Five copies to this record store.” Les was delivering those albums and making whatever little deals with these record stores. I don’t know what it
