Features

Primus: Still Sucking After All These Years

With the Primus fall tour in support of Green Naugahyde set to open tonight in Boston, we revisit this feature from our April/May issue. After the piece ran, Claypool explained to us that his comments about the Brown Album were intended for Antipop.

Just a 20-minute drive from where Alfred Hitchcock filmed his classic thriller The Birds and a short amble across the small Northern California town of Sebastopol, where Charles Schulz penned his iconic Peanuts comic strip, is Les Claypool’s caboose. You read right, caboose.

So, one naturally wonders: How did this platinum-selling artist—master of the slap bass, author, actor, mockumentarian, band leader and, most recently, vintner—come to end up conducting business in a railroad car?

It’s not as bad as it sounds—he’s hardly living like a hobo on the wrong side of the tracks. It’s pretty nice. Enviable, even. This restored 1855 Southern Pacific railroad car is the headquarters for Claypool Cellars, a small winery that only produces pinot noir.

Claypool and his wife Chaney sell their Purple Pachyderm Russian River Pinot Noir and Pink Platypus Pinot Noir Rose out of this little red caboose. The wine comes with endorsements from the likes of South Park co-creator Matt Stone: “If I could buy only one bottle of wine by a bass player this year, Purple Pachyderm would be it.”

Claypool Cellars is an elegant space, with pale yellow walls, furnished simply with a small, fine-oak desk which is left open to reveal its neat little cubbies, a small, perfect antique lamp that throws a warm light over the room and an oversized bar.

There’s also a few turn-of-the-century straight back bar chairs and a painting of what looks like beautiful Siamese twins—a paean that makes one thinks of his wife who is a twin—next to a chalkboard with prices of the various vintages. A deep glass case displays antique model trains that belonged to Claypool’s late father-in-law and oversized crystal wine goblets etched with the Claypool Cellars logo in frosty white. “We gotta get smaller glasses,” Claypool laughs. “When people come for a tasting, they glare at me if I don’t pour half a bottle into the glass.”

Across a drafty hallway is Claypool’s Prawn Song Records. It’s here that the auteur has been hatching the next incarnation of his legendary trio Primus—this time with stalwart sidekick and guitar maestro Larry “Ler” LaLonde and original drummer Jay Lane. They’ve been busy recording a yet-to-be-titled album due in May, which will be the band’s first release since 1999’s Antipop.

“I started just looking for a weekend vacation property, some place where I could retire,” recalls the Primus progenitor of how his base of operations ended up in this rather remote Northern California town. “I just stumbled across this amazing place, for an amazing price. I went home that day—Chaney and I weren’t married yet but we were living together—and I said, ‘I’ve found an amazing place and it’s up in a place that I’ve never even heard of before, but I have to buy it and hopefully you’ll come with me.’ So she came up, looked at it and fell in love with it. We both thought, ‘All of our friends are going to come up on the weekends.’

“All our friends have come up—on the average of once,” Claypool laughs—a maniacal cartoon cackle, caught somewhere between Heckle and Jeckle. “Once!
So we came up here and ended up starting a whole new life,” he says matter-of-factly. “New house. New friends. New everything.”

The changes weren’t matter of fact—at all.

***

Claypool’s new life did not include Primus, the trashy, thrashy, funk-art project he founded back in 1984. Combining cartoonish voices with social anthropology set to discordant strains of manipulated noise and strangely threatening rhythms, Primus provided a bass-centric soundtrack to disaffected outsiders and a funhouse mirror for those in the know. The trio was nominated for Grammy Awards and racked up gold and platinum records like hubcaps from Claypool’s former life as a car mechanic. But by late 2000, Claypool had lost much of his creative luster for Primus. He decided it was time to put his rock behemoth in storage.

“Hiatus is an excuse for not calling it a day,” Claypool explained to me in 2000 about pulling the plug on Primus. “Because I don’t think any of us feel passionately one way or another, as far as: ‘We want to stop. We’re definitely tired of it. We’re done with this torture.’ It’s not like that at all. It’s just become a bit of a struggle and it got to the point of where it just wasn’t fun doing it anymore.”

Today, he affirms this. “Yeah, that’s what I said,” he says of the musing. “I have always said that I would only do Primus as long as it was fun. And it wasn’t fun anymore,” he says resolutely. In fact, it stopped being fun in 1996, when drummer Tim “Herb” Alexander left the band.

“We decided to go on because we were all fired up because we had a new drummer—Brain [Brian “Brain” Mantia]. We were re-invigorated for a brief period,” Claypool says quietly.