up whatever money it earned. But it must have been Les on the phone, making the calls, because he was driving around himself. I always thought that was so cool. It’s like, “Hey, man, Les is driving all over the Bay Area to these little mom-and-pop record stores, dropping off five or ten records.”
LES CLAYPOOL: We sold through that first thousand pretty quick, and we took that money and made another thousand, and then sold through those pretty quick. Took that money and made another thousand, and Rough Trade Records said, “Hey, we want to do it.” So we did a distribution deal with them, and paid my father back.
DAVID LEFKOWITZ: Out of that first thousand, I probably took at least a quarter of those for business purposes. Between the band and myself, we would go around to stores in the Bay Area, where they would take these records from us on consignment. With the other 250 copies that I had, I did whatever I could to push things forward business-wise, which included sending them to record companies, music press, distributors, and college radio. I would take copies of the CMJ Report, look at every playlist of every college station in America, and circle the ones based on what they were currently playing that would potentially consider playing Primus. There was a one-year period where I had moved out of that bigger company and was just working out of my bedroom in Haight. We just boxed up a couple hundred of these vinyl albums, carted this gigantic box on a skateboard downtown several blocks to the post office, and mailed them out.
And it charted in the Top 100 on CMJ—nationally! One of the guys from CMJ had moved out to the Bay Area and wound up becoming a friend—Dave Margolis. And he gave us a feature in the CMJ Report, on the cover. The next thing was that we wanted to do some touring on a national basis, and there was a booking agency at the time, Bulging Eye, based in San Francisco. They had a pretty incredible roster—Nirvana was on there, and a number of other Seattle bands. This was in ’89. Anyway, we did this ramshackle kind of tour—we headlined some shows which were probably hit-or-miss, we opened for some bands here and there. But the ultimate show was in October of that year out at the CMJ convention—it was opening a bill that was headlined by Soundgarden, somewhere on the campus of NYU. I know White Zombie was on the bill, so that was pretty cool.
KIM THAYIL [Soundgarden guitarist]: I had Suck on This, and that was given to me by, I think, our manager at the time, Susan Silver. She said it was a band that was getting a lot of attention in the Bay Area and, I think, in LA. She gave me a copy and wanted to know what I thought. I think at the time they were interested in our opinion about Primus because we were thinking about touring with them or something like that. But there was a lot of buzz about them at the time, when Suck on This came out. And it was the bass playing, and Larry came from Possessed. And, of course, Primus is very different from Possessed. So they kind of had your pedigree of sorts. Everybody was raving about the bass player.
They weren’t some funk-metal party band. It’s hard to even describe them as funk metal. It really is like sort of cartoon funk or something. It definitely had that odd element, with a cartoon-soundtrack sort of sound, which is certainly that strange element that has that humorous . . . It’s odd, but there’s a humorous quality to the rhythmic and melodic lines. The kind of thing you might see in the Butthole Surfers or Captain Beefheart. And in spite of the beauty and sincerity of the work of Tom Waits—definitely, also Tom Waits.
DAVID LEFKOWITZ: So we started selling these copies of the album—we quickly ran out of the remaining retail copies that we had. There is a company called Rough Trade, a British label, that was not only a distributor of albums—both in the US and in Europe—but they also had these big retail stores. And there was a Rough Trade record shop on Haight Street. That was one of the places that took our product and was selling it. Because they were an American distributor, they caught wind of how the sales were doing and told us they’d want to distribute the record.
If I’m not mistaken, they gave us an advance to go and manufacture another couple thousand. Suddenly, it was in stores all over the country. I think it ultimately got to like five thousand sales, at which point, now we had some of these independent labels calling me back and getting interested. Caroline was one of those, Relativity was another, and a number of other ones. But the thing I liked about Caroline and Relativity was that they were both companies that were large independent distributors.
I think what tipped the scales in Caroline’s favor was the short-term nature of the deal. Relativity was trying to be more like a major label, and signing bands for longer-term deals. And I know that, because that’s who we signed the Limbomaniacs to. But Caroline, they were more interested in the studio debut album. The idea was, they would give us an advance to go and record the studio album. And then six months after the release of that, they would reissue Suck on This, worldwide. Their distribution in Europe was through Virgin, so it was basically major distribution in Europe.
TIM “HERB” ALEXANDER: We thought it would be cool to make an album and send it to all the colleges and see who liked it. Those that liked it told us good places to play in their town, and we did our first US tour in an RV that Les borrowed money to buy.
CHRIS “TROUZ” CUEVAS: Around the first record/first tour [is when Cuevas began working as Primus’s tour manager]. And I also did all of the accounting too, which most tour managers do. First, I did it all, and then eventually we were able to hire a production manager/sound person, who would deal with the technical side, and I would deal with more of the band/logistical side.
We took a motor home out some time around Suck on This came out. Did some camping, slept on people’s couches. We did one tour after that on the Amtrak to Colorado. We went from a van, to a motor home, to a train. It took awhile to get into the first shitty bus—that was probably around the second record, I think.
I didn’t really know what I wanted to do for a career, so this sort of opened up this whole new avenue to me. I thought I became really good at it. And since Primus was growing, I was growing as a tour manager, and started to get recognized and asked by other bands to work for them. Gradually, my salary went up and up and up. I definitely am grateful for that opportunity. [Cuevas would remain as Primus’s tour manager for twelve years.]
KIM THAYIL: The first time I met the guys in Primus, they opened for us—or we opened for them, I can’t remember—in St. Louis, at a venue called Mississippi Nights. I remember talking with Les and Larry afterward—I don’t think it was a tour bus, but they had an RV or a Winnebago. And specifically, I talked to them about Captain Beefheart and the Butthole Surfers. And they didn’t seem to be well acquainted with either band. But they were very much into Tom Waits. Which surprised me—sometimes I thought of Tom Waits as the acoustic Butthole Surfers. Or the Butthole Surfers being the acid-drenched electric psychedelic Tom Waits. We played a few shows with Primus around then, but that was the one that I remember, because we got to sit down and watch them, and we went to go talk to them.
BUZZ OSBORNE: I thought that Primus—the first time I heard them—was like a combination of the Residents mixed with Captain Beefheart, and Larry Graham thrown in there. That was my impression of it. Unfortunately for them, they’re lumped into that Red Hot Chili Peppers kind of thing a little bit more than they probably deserve. That is not my thing. That’s not my world. That kind of music is like the soundtrack to a date rape at a frat party. I’ve never been interested in the beer-bong set. And when I lived in San Francisco, when I first moved there in the mid-’80s, it was funk metal bands and bands that sounded like Metallica. And that was it. And the funk metal bands I thought was some of the worst crap that I’d ever heard—even worse than the metal bands. Actually, I once saw one of those bands play a barely ironic version of “Brick House” by the Commodores. I was like, I’m done.
ROBERT TRUJILLO: The first time I heard Primus would have been back somewhere around the late-’80s. I had a friend who was a skateboarder
