want to do a band?” So we started a band.
I started out with a Kramer. Then this guy was selling a Telecaster, and Les and I both went down and I bought it. I played that pretty much the whole time I played with Primus. Probably pretty much all the guitar [playing] I ever heard influenced me. I’d say my main influence was Jimmy Page. But a lot of the influence I got was from different sources—I didn’t really focus on guitar players per se. I listened to a lot of Mozart. I dug that kind of stuff. I heard Eddie Van Halen once say that you can only play bar chords if you’re going to play rock ’n’ roll. And I thought, Ah, fuck that. I’m going to try something different. So I started tweaking around with dissonant notes and all that kind of stuff, and it kind of fit with what Les was doing.
LES CLAYPOOL: I was waiting for this buddy of mine who was in the army, old Perm Parker, to get out of the army so he could join the band, and we would have a three-piece. So when he got out, we already had written these songs, and had saved up enough money to go into the studio . . . Actually, I had sold my ’68 Cougar to my stepbrother, and took that money so we could record our first demo tape, which was the Primate tape. Somehow, we knew somebody at Live 105. A good friend of mine, she worked next door to Live 105, and got to know a couple of the deejays. She gave one of them the tape, and he liked it—it was this guy, Big Rick Stuart, who had I think a Sunday-night show there. He started playing this song “Prelude to Fear” on the radio. So all of a sudden it was like, Hey, we’re on the radio! Sort of an alternative/new wave station.
The next thing you know, we get a phone call. “Hey, I’m the attorney for the Primates, and you can’t use that name anymore.” So we started coming up with all these names, trying to stick with the sort of monkey theme. And we actually talked about “Simian” as a name, and we almost went with “Anthrate”—thank god we didn’t do that. It just turned out that “Primus” was the root of “Primate.” Todd just goes, “Well, why don’t we just go with Primus?” I was like, “Okay.” So we went with it. It’s Latin, and it means “first” or “first in the line of.” It looked good on paper. Of course, in Europe there’s a gazillion things “Primus”—Primus washing machines, Primus camp stove, now there’s some Primus technology, there’s Primus wine, Primus beer. It’s kind of the “Acme” of Europe.
CHRIS “TROUZ” CUEVAS: I was around when Les thought of the idea of Primus, and started rehearsing and did his first gig. I’m not sure if I can remember when the first gig was—it was probably some crappy little house party. Definitely one of the first real gigs was at Berkeley Square in Berkeley, California.
LES CLAYPOOL: The very first show was at the infamous Mabuhay Gardens. The Fab Mab, run by Ness at the time, got into fights with the skinheads out in the alleyway almost every time we played. That was always fun. A good buddy of mine, who actually made it into a few songs of mine, CG the Mexican, he actually was sort of our half-assed manager back then. But he was an ex–Latino gang president who had gone into the military and learned to be an electronics technician. He looked very unassuming, unless he cholo-d himself up. But he could kick the shit out of people. And I remember we would be battling with skinheads left and right. I saw CG smash a couple of skinheads after a bunch of them jumped him, because the Broadway skinheads of the day tended to be pussies when they weren’t all ganged up.
TODD HUTH: The first shows we started playing—when Les and I were shifting drummers here and there—people would sit there and look at us, and go, “What the hell is this?” Nobody really got what we were doing. But people would encourage us and thought that we were good. So we kept going at it, and I was having fun.
KIRK HAMMETT: Les was writing the songs and Todd had such an unconventional sort of guitar-playing style. That was the blueprint right there for what Primus was going to become. I was so impressed, because it wasn’t really heavy metal, it wasn’t really funk, it wasn’t really rock—it was a whole slew of things thrown all together. And then you had Les’s whacky sense of humor and subject matter. I just thought, Wow! These guys are like the Talking Heads, but way cooler with a lot more energy. They didn’t come across pretentious or put on or anything. I was a big supporter of Primus for a long time. It was really something seeing Primus in its early days. But the template was already set. It was already there.
LES CLAYPOOL: Well, Perm Parker was the guy when we were in jazz band together—of all the drummers in the class, he was the only black guy. So we would just sit there and play all this funky stuff together: Rick James, Larry Graham, Brothers Johnson. He and I really connected well. So when he came back from the military, he was the first guy. I had him move into my apartment, and I went and lived at my grandmother’s house. Unfortunately, old Perm didn’t really have it together very well—he didn’t even have his own drums. So it didn’t last very long. So then we brought in my buddy Mark Edgar, he was the guy who had brought me into the Tommy Crank Band, and he actually played our first gig, at the Fab Mab in the Mabuhay Gardens.
That’s when we were getting that airplay on the Quake, so there were probably twenty people there, and we actually had a little following. But Mark wasn’t down with what we were down with. I remember Todd and I went to see Public Image Limited at the Fort Mason Center. It was all this crazy performance art going on. And I remember Mark going, “Why the hell do you want to go see Johnny Rotten? That’s not music, that’s just garbage. The new Chaka Khan record is really awesome!” We were just like, “You know what, dude? This isn’t going to work out.” So then we got Peter Libby. Peter Libby was kind of a local hero in Berkeley—he had this double bass thing going. He was a great player. I don’t remember why it didn’t work out, it just . . . didn’t work out. So then we had this guy Curveball for a while. He was my old roommate.
TODD HUTH: His singing is different. I remember back when we first started, he was always asking me, “Should we get a singer?” Because he’s not the most on-key guy. And I would always tell him, “Man, you’ve got a graphic voice. Just use it like a cartoon character.” So he’s like, “Okay. Well, if you don’t want to get a singer . . .” So he kept going on that. Just the fact that he stuck that out with his singing . . . and he’s probably one of the best entertainers I’ve ever seen. He had a lot—he still does—going for him at that time, so how could he fail?
ADAM GATES [Friend of band, the chap who plays “Bob Cock,” Electric Apricot actor]: I met Les in 1985. The band Primus was . . . this was quite some time before Larry had joined. It was Todd Huth, Les, and I think Peter Libby was playing drums when I first met them. Les was friends with a deejay named Rick Stuart who worked at a radio station called the Quake, and I was in a local band called Monkey Rhythm. Both of our bands had been playing around a bit. We went to the Quake—I think Les was just hanging out with Rick, and I went there with the band to try and see if Rick would play our music. And that’s how I met Les. We became pretty fast friends and started hanging out right after that.
At that time, they were significantly different than what they morphed into. The aggression was still there, it was still implied, but there was less distortion—particularly Les’s tone. He was playing through a weird Peavey guitar amp, I think. And his tone was a very treble-y one, it wasn’t low end. And certainly accentuated by Todd Huth’s guitar, which was very dry and a little overdriven. But they had this quality to them which was absolutely unlike anything going on in the Bay Area at that point. Thrash metal was starting to really thrive.
Me and Les hung out, and I think they were playing at the Mabuhay Gardens. I walked in, saw them playing, and was like, Who the fuck is this? Les was on stage with a bowler hat on—like he walked out of something like A Clockwork Orange. Playing to an empty club, and it was unabashedly weird. It took us awhile to figure it out. We’d gone on tour, and Les had given us the first cassette, and we worked it out. We thought, My god, we dig these guys, but they’re so fucking weird. No one’s ever
