Primus Desaturating Seven, the band’s 2017 concept album, began with a children’s book read aloud at bedtime. Les Claypool, speaking to Prog, traced the record back to a 1978 illustrated book called The Rainbow Goblins, written and illustrated by Ulderico Conte Gropplero di Troppenburg, better known as Ul de Rico. It is a story about seven evil goblins named after the colours of the spectrum who travel the land stealing the colour from rainbows, filling their bellies with the stolen light. It ends badly for the goblins. And it ends, for Primus, as their most elaborate concept record to date.
From bedtime story to Primus Desaturating Seven
‘My wife used to read The Rainbow Goblins to my kids a lot when they were little,’ says Claypool, speaking from his home in Sonoma County, California. ‘I remember going through it and thinking how amazing it was: the artwork, the colours, the beauty… and yet the darkness, and the creepiness, and the message. It was just an amazing piece of art.’
Ul de Rico went on to publish a sequel, The White Goblin, in 1996, and worked as a designer on The NeverEnding Story and Flash Gordon. But it was the original goblins, and their kaleidoscopic demise, that lodged in Claypool’s imagination. ‘It was inspiring to me and I wanted to supplement it with my obscure interpretation and perspective. Obviously it’s also fairly relevant to what’s going on today. It just seemed like the right time.’
The band contacted Ul de Rico (‘a thoroughly eccentric fellow,’ says Claypool) to licence the artwork. ‘My manager was emailing with him there for a while because we needed his permission. To me, a huge part of the pie is utilising all those images. He painted all that stuff on these wood panels, and we’ve had a couple of people do some reproductions of some of it, and it just doesn’t look nearly as good as what he came up with.’
Seven songs, thirty-four minutes, and a deliberate choice
The finished record is a compact, focused thing. Spotify lists seven tracks with a total runtime of 34 minutes and 40 seconds, mirroring the seven goblins of the source material. That brevity was a conscious decision. Claypool is direct about it: ‘That, to me, is the folly of CDs. I don’t want to hear 20 songs by my favourite artist. I’d rather hear 10 songs and get to suck them in.’
He reached for a specific comparison. ‘One of my all-time favourite records as a kid, it was also my first concert, was Hemispheres by Rush, and this record is either a minute or 40 seconds shorter than that.’ The physical constraints of vinyl, he noted, reinforced the point: ‘The more information you put on a disc, the more you included, the more the quality dropped. The grooves got closer together, and you lost the bottom end. So I wanted to make sure it sounded great on a single album.’
Across those seven tracks, from the lurching, disembodied vocals of The Valley to the racing climax of The Storm, the record builds something between a nursery rhyme and alien jazz, bassist guitarist Larry ‘Ler’ LaLonde and drummer Tim ‘Herb’ Alexander locking into rhythms that feel simultaneously playful and menacing. The ominous spoken-word introduction is read by Justin Chancellor.
The central creative problem was tonal. ‘The biggest challenge was to write lyrics about goblins and rainbows and it not to come off like a Tenacious D song,’ says Claypool. ‘It could easily be interpreted as some form of parody, and if you look through the lyrics I don’t often mention goblins and very rarely mention rainbows. Instead I use the notion of the metaphors that are implied in the story.’
Lead single The Seven, with its corrugated rhythms and wobbling bass, draws a clear line back to King Crimson‘s Discipline era. Claypool is enthusiastic: ‘Those 80s Crimson songs are just spectacular. Tony Levin and Bill Bruford playing those rhythms together, just the whole package. They’re one of the greatest bands ever.’ Working with Sean Lennon on the Claypool Lennon Delirium project, he says, also fed back into the album: ‘He has this incredible ability to form vocal melodies and harmonies, and that was very helpful for me on The Desaturated Seven.’
The live show, when Primus take the record on the road, promises to go large with Ul de Rico’s visuals. ‘Obviously there’s going to be a lot of rainbows and lots of goblins,’ says Claypool. ‘Not a lot of helicopters on this one.’
