and he’s gone on to become one of the best bass players around. I think the influence is quite strong in that area, because our band, when we first formed, from the ages of about fifteen to eighteen or nineteen, we were very much orientated in the more progressive sound—much more instrumental-based.
And the other reason for that was because I didn’t value myself as a singer at that time. I definitely mainly wanted to be a guitar player, and the original idea was to find a singer for the band, but again, because we came from a small town in a rural area, we could never find one. So really, that was another reason why we leaned toward bands like Pink Floyd and Primus, where the emphasis is not so much on the voice—it’s more on the instruments and the arrangements. And that’s how the band Muse really started. It wasn’t until I was eighteen or nineteen that I started to sing, and my voice—even though I didn’t think it was that good—it seemed to lead to a kind of songwriting, and that was when we started to veer more toward the songwriting approach and when I became more confident as a singer.
And Primus was very influential in the formation of Muse and what our priorities were.
Matthew Bellamy
Muse
Chapter 1
Welcome to This World
LES CLAYPOOL [Primus singer and bassist 1984–present, Sausage singer and bassist, Oysterhead singer and bassist, Frog Brigade singer and bassist, Colonel Claypool’s Bucket of Bernie Brains singer and bassist]: I was born a poor black child. [Laughs] I was born in Richmond, California [on September 29, 1963], and the hospital I was born in is now a mental hospital . . . so maybe that says something. My parents were very young. My mom was seventeen years old when I was born, my dad was nineteen. He used to like to brag that when he was nineteen years old, he had a wife, a newborn son, a mortgage on a house, a car payment, a payment on a washer and dryer, and a job at a transmission shop. I grew up in the East Bay.
There’s a lot of Claypools in Missouri, that’s all I know. My grandfather—who’s still alive, he’s ninety-seven—is from Missouri. He was a cowboy carpenter. But beyond that, I don’t really know. There’s been a rumor of Claypools on the Mayflower, but I don’t know. We’re all mutts. My mom’s side, my grandfather, he’s Italian—second-generation Italian. Actually, it’s funny, because I moved up here to West Sonoma County, and that’s where my great-great-grandfather settled when he came over from Italy. It was fairly close to where I live, and I didn’t even know that until I moved here. The old Simoni farm—Simoni is my mom’s maiden name. There’s a big hunk of Italian in there somewhere. I used to wear the old Italian good luck horn when I was in high school. I have a brother, a sister, a stepbrother, and a stepsister.
I started playing bass when I was right around fourteen years old. I’d always wanted to play something, but I remember when I was a kid, and the teacher—I think his name was Mr. Capelli—came around the grammar school to see what kids wanted to play. Some of the options were trumpet, clarinet, cello, or violin. And I was told that cello and violin were very difficult. I wanted to play trumpet, but he said my teeth were too “bucked” to play the trumpet, so maybe I should play clarinet. Unfortunately, I didn’t see the appeal of clarinet, so I opted not to play anything. Hindsight, I wish I’d taken up clarinet, because I now love the clarinet and perhaps I wouldn’t have bastardized the instrument as bad on Seas of Cheese.
Years later, in high school, there was a kid in my algebra class who was kind of this burnout dude, with these big, thick pop-bottle glasses. A little Filipino guy, with long hair and a dirty white T-shirt. He’d sit in the back of the class, and he’d always have these guitar magazines. He’d show these pictures. He’d go, “Hey Claypool, look at this, man, that’s going to be my guitar,” and he’d show me a Stratocaster he was going to buy. “Man, I’m telling you, I’m going to be big, because I know all the key elements, man—sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll!” And that guy was Kirk Hammett. He used to sell me weed, actually. I bet a lot of people that went to our high school don’t even know that they went to high school with the guitarist from Metallica, because he was just this little skinny guy, with thick pop-bottle glasses, that hung out, out back—which was where everybody who smoked cigarettes hung out.
KIRK HAMMETT [Metallica guitarist]: I first met Les in algebra class. He sat right next to me. He saw me one day looking at a Guitar Player magazine. He was interested, and at that point he was interested in music more as a fan or a listener, rather than as a musician. I remember telling him, “I got a band together and we need a singer. You want to join my band?” And he said, “What’s the name of it?” And I said, “Exodus.” And he goes, “Wow, that’s crazy!”
LES CLAYPOOL: He had this band Exodus that kind of sounded like AC/DC back in the day. I was always singing songs—I’d come into class singing songs, like Aerosmith or Zeppelin. So Kirk said, “Hey, man, you’ve got to come audition for my band and sing.” He used to give me these cassette tapes of various things. He turned me on to Hendrix, and wanted me to learn “Sunshine of Your Love” by Cream. He wanted me to audition for his band, but I was too bashful. I couldn’t do it.
KIRK HAMMETT: Literally, the next day he bought a bass, and the next day after that he joined some other band. I was so mad at him, because I thought he was going to come by and try and sing and be the singer of my band. And then, when I actually got to see him play a few months later in the band that he joined, I was so impressed at how well he could play, and how much technique he already had at that point. I was so impressed by his whole approach. Even in the early days, his playing was highly stylized. You could tell whenever he played—it was Les playing, it wasn’t the other bass player down the street playing bass. He did a lot of finger pops and thumps—it was totally like Larry Graham and Stanley Clarke. It was very evident that he was on his way to becoming a very accomplished musician. Even at that time.
LES CLAYPOOL: I ended up meeting this guitar player who was sort of the local hot-shot guy, and we became buddies, and he needed a bass player. I had this friend who was selling this little piece-of-crap bass for thirty bucks, and I think I had fifteen bucks. So I went to my dad and said, “Dad, I really want to play bass. This guy has this bass for sale, and it’s thirty dollars. I have fifteen dollars, can you loan me fifteen dollars?” And he said, “Is this something you really want to do?” And I was like, “Yeah, Dad, I really want to do this!” He says, “Well, if we’re going to do this, let’s do this right. We’re going to go down and see Al at Al’s Music.” And I remember him and my stepmother getting into an argument about it, because she thought I wouldn’t follow through—like the swim team, I wouldn’t stick it out.
So we went down to Al’s Music and picked out this bass. Al was a buddy of Dad’s, but I don’t think he gave him that great of a deal. Anyway, I got this Memphis P Bass. And I was instantly in a band, because back then everybody wanted to be Eddie Van Halen and nobody wanted to play bass. They usually stuck the guy who couldn’t play guitar very well on bass. But I was all about it. I worked that whole summer—I remember working for my dad and pulling weeds at this doctor’s house, just trying to earn the money to pay off this bass. And I would sit and play that sucker nonstop. I didn’t have an amp, so I would sit on the edge of the couch, listen to music, and play along even though I couldn’t hear what I was doing. That’s kind of one reason I don’t really know a lot of other people’s music, unlike guys who knew every Rush song lick for lick, or every Zeppelin song lick for lick. And I just never learned that stuff, because I was jamming along with those records, and basically playing them my own way. And probably completely out of key. So I would get the sense of the rhythms, but not necessarily the notation.
I learned to read music around that time, because a buddy of mine was
