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Primus: Still Sucking After All These Years

“I think a big portion of what our fans are looking for is similar to what I was looking for when I was experiencing music in the early days for the first time and whatnot, and still, to an extent am,” he begins. “I always looked for things off the beaten path. I didn’t wear the same clothes everybody else wore, I didn’t watch the same films or read the same books or listen to the same music. I always wanted that special thing that was unique. For me now, what gets me going is things where I go, ‘How the hell did that person think of that? ’

“The Primus audience has always been very diverse, so it’s really hard to put your finger on who they are and what they’re like because you get such a broad spectrum of folks,” Claypool suggests. “I think that’s why, over the years, we’ve been able to do things in these different worlds—from the jam world to Ozzfest world to H.O.R.D.E. because we don’t really fit in anywhere but sort of fit in everywhere.”

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The winery is just one of the multitude of projects that the renaissance man-cum-bassmangler undertook after putting Primus on blocks in 2000. And while you might be tempted to refer to his pinot making as a hobby, there is little in Claypool’s life that would qualify as such. He puts as much thought and effort into winemaking as he does songwriting. Or, for that matter, into inventing a new bass, crafting a screenplay or finding the best cache of wild porcini mushrooms around town (which he insists are more properly called bolets ).

“I find them in my neighborhood—I can’t say where, because they’re very valuable,” he says furtively with such a deadpan expression that it would be hard to know whether he’s telling the truth or not, had it not been for photographic evidence on Facebook. “Me and my kids go every year and find bolets. People envy us.”

“You’re not afraid you’ll pick a poisonous mushroom?” I ask.

“I don’t go for anything else,” he says quickly. “I don’t go for morels or button mushrooms—I don’t go for any of that stuff, because I don’t eat those. To be honest, I’m not even a big mushroom fan but there’s something mystical about finding the big bolets. And they smell good.”

Mushroom aficionado or not—he’s been known to ingest the psychedelic variety only on New Year’s Eve—they have played a big part in Claypool’s recent history. Not only was his last solo album titled Of Fungi and Foe, but one of the tracks, “Mushroom Men” became the theme for a video game: Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars. It’s a dire, dirge-y sound collage—tribal-sounding even—that’s meant to accompany a nightmarish romp by three-inch-high mushroom creatures who fashion weapons and tools out of common household objects and wage a nocturnal kitchen war while we sleep.

He thinks Of Fungi and Foe might be his favorite among all of his albums. “I love that record, because it wasn’t like, ‘Well, I’ve got all this stuff, let’s make a record out of it,’” he says. “It was like cooking—finding things that were buried in the back of the cupboards and making something like a casserole out of it.”

But for this one-time culinary student who studied cooking at a Northern California junior college and is fond of using food and piscine allusions for song and album titles, he found his musical cupboard rather bare after he finished cooking Fungi. It was time to put Primus back on high boil.