me up, I sat in the class, and unfortunately the amp was broken. So I had to sit there for a while until the amp got fixed—for several weeks. So I got in trouble one day for chatting it up with the drummers, because there were always a shitload of drummers in jazz band. While one guy is playing, the other three had to sit around.
So I got in trouble for being disruptive, and he said, “Why don’t you at least grab the sheet music and read along?” And I said, “Well . . . I don’t know how to read music.” And he’s like, “You don’t know how to read music?!” He was all flustered. He took me aside after class and showed me the fundamentals of reading music. He said, “You need to learn this, or you can’t be in the class.” So I went out and got a Mel Bay book and learned how to read from that. But I’m not very good at it. I was okay at it back then, but I haven’t read in years. I tried reading some stuff recently, and I could barely get through it.
CHRIS “TROUZ” CUEVAS [Primus tour manager 1989–1996]: The only friends that I am still friends with and in contact with from high school are Kirk and Les.
LES CLAYPOOL: Chris Cuevas, his nickname was “Chris Quaalude.” I saw him around high school—he didn’t really show up to high school very much. I think he made it through the ninth grade. I kind of knew him as the guy who stole my drummer’s girlfriend. So I’m thinking, Who is this guy? But then, years later, I became friends with Chris—his mom was big in the music scene, and she was helping out some different bands, and she started helping us out. She used to hang out and work with the Metallica guys and all these different bands.
CHRIS “TROUZ” CUEVAS: It doesn’t really mean anything [the nickname Trouz]. If you know Les, he’s very rhyme-y. He likes to make things rhyme and come up with nicknames. So the two of us used to make up names for a lot of our friends. Somehow, because Trouz rhymes with cows, Les thought that was funny. So he would create certain songs, like, “Trouz, Trouz, drives the cows,” and, “Trouz, Trouz, is scared of the cows.” Silly stuff like that. It never really meant anything . . . Maybe it had some kind of connection to some sort of cock joke, like “trouser snake.”
LES CLAYPOOL: Yes, it was all about the trouser schnauzer. Actually we used to say, “Trouz, Trouz, drives the cows,” but one time when a bunch of us were frying on mushrooms out at the beach, we walked back to the car through a field of cows and I said, “Hey Trouz, now’s your chance! Get to drivin’ them cows!” He wouldn’t do it so I said he was scared of the cows. He didn’t like that too much. [Laughs]
So, back to my first concert, I drank three Löwenbräus on the way to the Cow Palace, which I’m sure Dan Maloney purchased. [Laughs] We used to get our beer from Nick’s Delicatessen, because Nick was Italian and thought it was bullshit that you had to wait until you were twenty-one to drink. So he would sell us teenagers beer. But he didn’t keep his beer very cold, so it was always kind of warm. So we drank these lukewarm Löwenbräus on the way to the Cow Palace. We stepped out, and I bought a scalper’s ticket—even though the show wasn’t sold out, we were worried it was sold out—on the street. So I paid too much for the ticket, barfed in the parking lot, and bought a bootleg T-shirt. I saw Pat Travers open for Rush, so I saw two of the greatest drummers on the planet and two of the greatest bass players on the planet at the time. Peter “Mars” Cowling on bass and Tommy Aldridge on drums with Pat Travers, and Geddy Lee and Neil Peart from Rush.
As a youngster, I started out like most, listening to all this rock, but I also had been into a lot of the soul and funk back in the day—I got turned on to the Isley Brothers, Brick, Stevie Wonder, the Ohio Players, and all these different things. As a bass player starting out, I was listening to John Paul Jones, Geddy Lee, and Chris Squire. I was such a huge Geddy fan. But, not having much money, I hardly had any albums. We had a couple of friends who had great record collections, and their walls were completely wall-papered with album covers. We’d go to their houses and sit around and listen to albums. So I was sitting there spouting off, like a young kid will, about Geddy Lee. And my friend said, “Y’know, I like Geddy. Geddy’s amazing. But you need to listen to some Larry Graham and Stanley Clarke.”
So he played me some Larry Graham, and just completely blew my mind. And one of the most amazing shows I’ve ever seen in my entire life was seeing SOS Band, Graham, and the Isley Brothers at the Oakland Coliseum. Me and my buddy Flouncin’ Fred, we were two little white suburban kids in the Oakland Coliseum and we stood out like sore thumbs! There wasn’t a lot of crossover back in those days. But it was like a religious experience. I would put it down as probably one of my top three shows—ever. And at the time, it was my top show ever, seeing Larry Graham come out there and strut and get the audience pumped up, and thump and pluck the hell out of that bass. That show was probably one of the most influential shows on my playing to this day. A few nights ago I got to meet Larry for the first time. I was doing an interview for this upcoming documentary about him, and the director invited me to a private jam Larry was doing at a radio station in Berkeley. Me and my buddy Jake went down there, and once again we were the only two white guys in the room. It was just a little KPFA studio, and there’s Larry Graham thumping away, kicking the shit out of everybody—literally four feet in front of my face. It was just another religious experience. It was unbelievable.
KIRK HAMMETT: It was funny, because in high school I was more of a nerdy kind of person, whereas Les was kind of popular. He went to all the dances and he went to the prom, he had a car and a nice-looking girlfriend. I’d see Les and I would think, Wow, this guy just has it all covered!
CHRIS “TROUZ” CUEVAS: Kirk looked like more of a hippie—big glasses and long hair, and kind of grungy. And Les was the direct opposite—he always wore tight jeans and colorful shirts. He had a pompadour hairstyle. They couldn’t have been more opposite. I was somewhere in the middle—a kind of hoodlum, lowrider rocker. So the three of us were very different in our sets of people we hung out with in high school. Kirk had Exodus out of high school, and Les was in a cover band called Tommy Crank. I would go see both of those bands and help move gear for Kirk’s band. And Les was in Blind Illusion for a while—I would roadie for them when they would play parties.
LES CLAYPOOL: He’s confused. I barely knew Chris in high school, mainly because he was never there. Early on, I hung out with those guys “out back,” where we would all go to smoke cigarettes. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the hot chicks weren’t hanging out with us “outbackers,” so in my sophomore year I befriended my longtime pal Flouncin’ Fred Heim and started hanging out in the halls where the girls were. At that age, pretty much everything I did was in direct pursuit of trying to get laid. Also, I didn’t have a pompadour in high school. It wasn’t until after high school, when I played for Hells Angels in biker bars with the Tommy Crank Band did I start sporting the pomp. That’s what all the tough guys flew. I wasn’t tough enough in high school to fly a pomp.
KIRK HAMMETT: And the band he played in at that time had all the best musicians . . . Not all the best musicians, but the driving force of this band Blind Illusion was the guitar player, Marc Biedermann. Just an amazing guitar player. I mean, even to this day I remember me and my friends watching Marc play, and thinking, Wow, this guy is going to be the biggest thing in the music scene once we all get out of school and go on our way. That guy is going to be a huge rock star for sure. But it turned out it just didn’t happen that way. But Les was in Blind Illusion—their songs were somewhat progressive. When he played with them, he brought the progressive factor up a few more notches. We all hung out in the same circle of friends, because all the musicians would kind of hang out and check out each other’s bands, and see who was up to what, and who had the best equipment, and who had the best songs, who was playing the best shows. It was a very friendly but competitive sort of atmosphere to be in.
LES CLAYPOOL: When I bought a bass, I was instantly in this band called Blind Illusion, which
