The story of Primus’s Bay Area MTV rise is, at its core, a story about being too strange for every available box, and somehow winning anyway. Forty years in, these El Sobrante oddballs remain one of the most bewildering anomalies in heavy music: a band that record labels could not categorise, magazines could not describe, and audiences could not stop watching.
The pig’s foot says it all. When Primus played Lollapalooza in 1993, riding the unlikely success of their third album, Pork Soda, singer and virtuoso bassist Les Claypool was performing shirtless when something connected hard with his chest. ‘I go up to the microphone and boom! It was like somebody punched me in the chest,’ he says. ‘I looked down and there was a giant, red welt on my chest, and at my feet there was a huge pig’s foot with a big toenail on it.’ A festival juggler had apparently been cutting up a pig onstage with chainsaws, and someone in the crowd had drawn the obvious conclusion. ‘If it had hit me in the face it would’ve fucked me up hard!’ Les recalls. The band had just played first UK dates in a decade this August.
From El Sobrante to the Edge of the Bay Area Thrash Scene
Primus formed in El Sobrante, California, in 1984, when Les was 21. The influences were dizzying and deliberately incompatible: Funkadelic, the Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa, Rush. After a brief involvement with Bay Area thrashers Blind Illusion, Les had learned his trade through funk, jazz-adjacent improvisation and jam band rock. He had gone to high school with Metallica’s Kirk Hammett, and famously auditioned for that band when they were searching for a replacement for the late Cliff Burton. It became apparent quickly that he was too weird for the job.
The classic line-up eventually coalesced around Les, guitarist Larry ‘Ler’ LaLonde and drummer Tim ‘Herb’ Alexander. ‘Herb was this world music and Rush fanatic, and Ler came from the metal world. He was in Possessed when he was 15!’ Les says. ‘But his heroes were Frank Zappa, Jerry Garcia and Eddie Van Halen. So it just became this weird hodgepodge.’ The result was heavy, funky, and doggedly eccentric. It really shouldn’t have worked.
In a Bay Area dominated by thrash, Primus had no natural home. Promoters would stick them on bills with Swans or cult Californian punk troupe the Pop-O-Pies. Then Fishbone, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Faith No More started coming to town, and suddenly there was something resembling a scene. ‘Mr. Bungle would open for us,’ Les recalls, ‘so a scene developed in the Bay Area.’
Self-Pressed Records, Interscope, and the Primus Bay Area MTV Moment
The route to any kind of commercial footing was characteristically DIY. Les persuaded his auto mechanic father to loan the band $3,000 to record live material. That recording became debut release Suck On This, pressed up in 1,000 units, sold around local record stores, and released on Les’s own Prawn Song label in November 1989. The money made went straight back into recording debut studio album Frizzle Fry, which emerged a few months later. Against the odds, Primus had sold 80,000 records independently before a major label even came sniffing.
When Interscope’s A&R man Tom Whalley came backstage after a show and said he wanted to sign them, he had no idea about those 80,000 units. Les took that as a good sign. ‘I said, “This is who we’re going with, because he wants us because of us, and not because we sold 80,000 records,”‘ he explains. His manager was sceptical: Interscope had no track record, their only prior release being Rico Suave by Gerardo. Les signed anyway.
The second album, Sailing the Seas of Cheese, landed in the funk-metal moment, with Jerry Was a Race Car Driver and Tommy the Cat becoming ubiquitous on MTV. Tommy the Cat also featured in a cameo appearance in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, pushing the record towards gold. Pork Soda followed in 1993, then Tales from the Punchbowl in 1995, which gave the band their next MTV moment: the scratchy, country-funk riot of Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver. The song threatened to reduce Primus to a novelty act, and was widely misread as a tribute to Winona Ryder. ‘She approached me at a radio festival, and she was a little miffed,’ Les says. ‘It’s spelt differently! The song is literally about a beaver.’
South Park, Willy Wonka, and Four Decades of Controlled Chaos
The band’s most unexpected cultural coup arrived in 1996, when Trey Parker and Matt Stone invited them to record the theme tune for their new animated series. The connection traced back to a show Primus had played at the University of Colorado in the 80s, for an event called Alferd Packer Day, named after the first person convicted of cannibalism in the United States during the gold rush era. Les had later picked up Parker and Stone’s debut film, Cannibal! The Musical, on VHS from a Tower Records in London, without realising its creators were Primus fans. ‘A few years later, we get a letter: “Hey, we’re big fans, can you do the theme song for this cartoon we’re doing?”‘ he says. ‘So we did it and obviously they’ve taken over the world.’
The late 90s grew complicated. Tim Alexander departed, replaced by Bryan ‘Brain’ Mantia for the polarising Brown Album in 1997, Tom Waits’s favourite Primus record, according to Les, who does a very committed Tom Waits impression in the telling. 1999’s Antipop featured appearances from James Hetfield, Tom Morello and Stewart Copeland, alongside first single Lacquer Head, controversially produced by Fred Durst. The album divided the fanbase. ‘It just got messy, we were in different head spaces,’ Les says. ‘It was not fun anymore, so we stopped. I was thankful that we stopped before we shit our pants.’ Primus called it quits in 2000.
Les returned the classic line-up to the stage in 2003. Further permutations followed: Jay Lane came in, then Herb came back for a third stint. In 2014 Primus released a full interpretation of the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, navigating licences from Roald Dahl’s family for a one-time-only run. The Desaturating Seven followed in 2017, based on Italian author Ul de Rico’s children’s book The Rainbow Goblins, which Les used to read to his kids.
A new album, their tenth, is in the works, featuring yet another drummer: John ‘Hoffer’ Hoffman. New EP A Handful of Nuggs, out now via AFO Records, offers early clues: Frizzle Fry-era echoes filtered through a psychedelic lens, plus a version of Dio’s Holy Diver sung by cult clown Puddles Pity Party. Whatever comes next, Primus’s Bay Area MTV rise and everything that followed has been governed by one consistent principle: absolutely no one tells them what to do. ‘We’re like the gum on the bottom of your shoe,’ says Les. For a band who has been dodging pig’s feet and defying categories for four decades, that sounds about right. Primus remain gloriously, defiantly themselves.
