Features

Primus: A Hallucino-Genetic Evolution

Suck On This and That

I haven’t rehearsed this much with a band ever in my life. We could have got away with not rehearsing so much but we really want to do this right and make sure that the parts that were written by Tim and Brain really get the respect that they deserve and the approach that the people are familiar with these songs are going to want to hear. There’s a huge catalog that Jay has been learning and he’s been working his ass off. He’s been in the studio five days a week, four or five hours a day, just playing drums and then we rehearse on top of that.

Jay’s been working really hard because there are the parts that he’s familiar with from the old songs and then there’s the repertoire of material that Tim Alexander had a big hand in and those are some difficult drum parts. So he’s been learning these things and then there’s the whole Brain [Mantia] era stuff [Primus drummer 1996-2000] which none of us have played for ten years. So we’re going out this summer and fall, playing a lot of material, some of it has never been played before in front of people and lot of it hasn’t been heard in many years.

Circling The Seas of Cheese

“Too Many Puppies” was one of the first songs, if not the first song, I wrote for Primus in 1984. And then, for a while, I looked at that song and it kind of seemed cheesy, this young idealistic kid writing an antiwar song and using the metaphor of puppies instead of soldiers. But then it comes back around like your old high school haircut.

An Anti-_Antipop_ Album

We’re just assembling sounds right now. We’re rehearsing our asses off to get ready for these tours. As we get together, there are these little nuggets that start appearing in the intervals between rehearsing songs. I’ve been recording these things and assembling what theoretically will be the foundation for the music for the next record. And as we move through this tour, we’ll be assembling more stuff. And then I have books of lyrics and I have a bunch of songs that potentially would have been the next Claypool record and we’ll look at them and some of them will become Primus songs I’m sure. Right now, it’s almost like we’re at Costco and we’re just assembling the pieces for the barbeque.

It seems like every other week the idea of how we’re going to approach [the new Primus album] on a creative level changes. Is it going to have a running theme? Is it going to be collection of this, is it going to be about that? It changes all the time. That’s the thing about Larry LaLonde and I. We were very good friends for a long time and in the later part of the ‘90s we fell apart and I think the music really suffered from that, mainly the Antipop record because we were always the guys who were big on British comedy—we have the same sensibility as far as humor and whatnot. And that’s how “Pork Soda” and “Hamburger Train” and these different things that are inside jokes to us became these odds things for other people to interpret. Laughs. And that relationship is now back. We’re tight again, we’re becoming tighter and our families are friends and that relationship has rekindled. So a lot of the Ler and Les-isms are starting to pop again and we laugh about them: “Ahh that should be a song… Ahh that should be an album title.”