Primus - Rock Without Sugar

Over the course of the Nineties, rock's most significant innovations came through cross-pollination with other genres, electronic music and jazz chief among them. Few bands, by contrast, managed to invent a sound starting purely from rock's basic toolkit: guitar, bass, drums and voice. Primus stand at the top of this select group, powered by an aggressive, fast, out-of-its-mind funk-rock in which the lead element is neither the voice nor the guitar, but the acrobatic bass playing of Les Claypool, one of the most charismatic figures on the current American music scene.

Claypool, absorbing the lessons of the progressive and hard rock bands of the Seventies into a highly personal style, delivers a lively, histrionic rock in which his enormous skills as a bassist are always ready to astonish the listener. An explosive blend, bringing together the most disparate influences (from Frank Zappa to Captain Beefheart, by way of Devo and Pere Ubu), has earned the American outfit the enviable status of untouchables. Hailed by critics and loved by audiences, Primus's music has also won the respect of several "colleagues", as shown by collaborations with, among others, Tom Morello (Rage Against The Machine) and Tom Waits.

Claypool already had a previous outfit under his belt, Sausage (later reunited for a decent album in 1994), when, toward the end of the Eighties, in his hometown of San Francisco, he formed Primus together with guitarist Larry Lalonde and drummer Tim "Herb" Alexander.

The band debuted with a live album titled Suck On This, a quirky, sticky, mocking slab of rock whose best moments come in the metal-funk roughness of "John The Fisherman" and "Harold Of The Rocks", the irreverent blues of "Groundhog's Day", and the future classic "Tommy The Cat". The chaos of "Pudding Time" and the unhinged jam of the title track sum up both the strengths and the weaknesses of a formula that was as talented as it was still raw and naive.

Their blend of genres and styles, which Claypool would later dub "psychedelic polka", would become more cohesive and focused on the studio albums that followed (which would revisit almost all the tracks featured on this live record). Even so, the embryonic genius is already audible, and the trio's instrumental prowess is plain to hear.

The following album, Frizzle Fry (1990), contains a good portion of the tracks already featured on Suck On This and showcases the three musicians' talents even further. Larry LaLonde's guitar chases relentlessly after Claypool's acrobatic riffs, occasionally unleashing devastating solos, while Tim Alexander's impetuous drumming ranges from rolls to stop-and-go patterns, from light touches to fiery outbursts, with astonishing ease. That skill already overflows on the opener "To Defy The Laws Of Tradition" (with an opening nod to Rush), amid supersonic drum rolls and acrobatic bass virtuosity. The title track also stands out, with its swollen bass-and-drum riffs and constant time changes, building to an explosive finale.

The album boosted the band's reputation on the American underground circuit. The trio embarked on a string of shows supporting Jane's Addiction and Faith No More, which brought them a significant boost in popularity.

It was with the following album, Sailing The Sea Of Cheese (1991), however, that the Californian band definitively established itself in the wider public eye, going on to sell 500,000 copies thanks to hypnotic tracks with a pronounced, driving rhythm, subtly psychedelic and dominated by Claypool's slap-bass riffs. The sound grew more mature and polished, without losing the comic, demented streak that had made the band famous.

Tracks like "Here Come The Bastards", with its sardonic lyrics and overwhelming drive, "Jerry Was A Race Car Driver", poised between jazz-rock and funk, and "American Life", with its vintage flavor and fine guitar counterpoint, became huge favorites. The icing on the cake is the presence of Tom Waits, who lends his unmistakable vocal madness to the now-famous "Tommy The Cat", amid piercing riffs, overbearing bass lines and ever more commanding drumming. But perhaps the album's most representative track is "Fish On", which sums up a decade of progressive, blues and jazz-rock mutations, lurching from one acceleration to the next in a constant interplay of references and sonic twists. Closing the record is an instrumental, Spanish-tinged reprise of "Here Come The Bastards" ("Los Bastardos").

A surprise came a year later with a covers album, Miscellaneous Debris, featuring reworkings of songs by Peter Gabriel, Pink Floyd, Xtc, Residents and others.

In 1993, another success arrived with the album Pork Soda, branded with a pig amid bubbles on the cover (!) and driven by the grueling jam of "My Name Is Mud". An even more complex, layered record, alternating pure nonsensical delirium ("The Ol' Diamondback Sturgeon", "Welcome To This World") with moments of dark intensity, as in the horror-tinged sketch of "Mr. Krinkle", set to the cadence of double-bass strings, the nervous breakdown of "DMV", and the long, varied instrumental "Hamburger Train". Claypool calls the shots pretty much everywhere, hamming it up with his raucous, tipsy-sounding vocals, and pushes himself beyond every limit in the acrobatic finale of "Nature Boy".

Two years later came confirmation with Tales From The Punchbowl (1995), an avant-garde rock record balanced between convoluted virtuosity and compositional clarity. The title is inspired by the legendary college parties at Berkeley, where punch was said to be spiked with LSD. And it's precisely the psychedelic component that comes through more strongly here, across a series of surreal, hypnotic "trips".

The opener, "Professor Nuttbutter's House Of Treats", is a jam of over seven minutes, branded not so much by the bass as by an unusually dark, heavy guitar. An oppressive mood also pervades "Mrs. Blaileen", the story of a boy's school humiliations with a tragic coda. "Wynona's Big Brown Beaver", on the other hand, is another of the band's typically unhinged romps (in the video, the band members appeared dressed as plastic cowboys!), this time set to an improbable country-western beat. The record's lysergic soul resurfaces in the grooves of "Southbound Pachyderm", almost a psychedelic ritual, driven by an insistent bass arpeggio.

And while "Space Farm", with its porcine grunts, falls into pure nonsense, the slow "Glass Sandwich" (with Claypool bowing a double bass) and "De Anza Jig" (with Les wrestling a bass/banjo) bring things straight back into this bucolic, surreal mood, like a western parody. Closing things out are the Indian-tinged "Over The Electric Grapevine" and the brief "Captain Shiner", which accompanies the main theme of "De Anza Jig" with the flight of seagulls.

If the albums' titles are always ironic and biting, musically Primus offer variations on a theme, sometimes favoring song form and sometimes experimentation, in a schizoid hybrid between Rush and Frank Zappa. In the meantime, the band has become one of the top live attractions on the American scene, with performances that are always spectacular and engaging, ingenious but never pedantic.

Brown Album, released in 1997, received less attention, marking a dip in Primus's fortunes. On this occasion, the band underwent a small revolution, with Alexander giving way to new drummer Brian "Brain" Mantia. Tracks like "The Return Of Sathington Willoughby", a cartoon set to a tom-tom rhythm punctuated by the usual bass "slaps", and "Shake Hands With Beef", a familiar funk-rock pantomime, are classy exercises, but they also betray a certain reliance on craft over inspiration. Elsewhere ("Camelback Cinema", "Bob's Party Time Lounge"), the blending with metal starts to show signs of wear. And the injections of reggae and ska ("Duchess And The Proverbial Mindspread"), or the attempt to recapture Alexander's dark guitar work, even if drowned in a funky sauce (the closing "Arnie"), aren't enough to redeem the disappointment.

Meanwhile Les Claypool — already alongside Sausage since 1988, albeit with just one album to their name, 1994's "Riddles Are Abound Tonight" — proved particularly active with side projects tied to his own label, Prawn Song (whose name nods to Led Zeppelin's legendary Swan Song). Among the main projects to feature him, in an almost Zappa-like crescendo of productivity, was Oysterhead.

Interscope took advantage of the pause to release Rhinoplasty (1998), an EP including covers, live recordings and a remix of "Too Many Puppies".

In 1999, however, Primus got back on their feet, trying to shake things up with Antipop, an album whose title made its aversion to what was happening at the top of the US charts — dominated by vacuous teen-pop idols — more than explicit. And it was a small resurrection. The tracklist shows a band in great shape, seductive and intriguing, with no sign of fatigue whatsoever. A true model for anyone wanting to break the mold of a rock scene that seems to have lost the strength to carry the weight of its enviable past. "It's a heavier record," Claypool explained, "a response to what radio has been like in recent years: sugary, flabby, boring radio."

The album kicks off explosively: after a brief interlude, it launches into a breakneck track like "Electric Uncle Sam", enriched by a guitar duel between guest Tom Morello and the ever-rock-solid LaLonde. "Natural Joe" is another tense track in classic Primus style, while "Laquer Head" even winks at nu-metal with its jagged dissonances. Metallic themes edge closer to prog on the dark, oppressive "Eclectic Electric", while the equally unsettling "Dirty Drowning Man" flirts with a certain deviant jazz-rock. And the closing track is more bizarre and brilliant than ever, entrusted to the delirious grand waltz of "Coattails Of A Dead Man", featuring none other than... Tom Waits on mellotron!

It's essentially the final act of the Primus story. In the years that followed, Les Claypool would continue his frenetic parallel activity through countless albums and musical projects.

In 2003, keeping alive the memory of the trio's heroic exploits, came another EP, Animals Should Not Try To Act Like People, containing five unreleased tracks performed by the original lineup, plus a valuable DVD featuring all of Primus's videos.

After giving life to numerous side projects, Claypool indulged himself by resurrecting the wild force of early Primus with Green Naugahyde, losing longtime member Herb and re-enlisting Jay Lane, one of their very first drummers. The result is a cunning little record, one of their low points, which simply lifts the intentions of Frizzle Fry wholesale and wanders half-heartedly among their usual trademarks (funk-metal, vaudeville, assorted experiments), while still keeping the bass-and-voice interplay intact, but reducing the other members' contribution to little more than a soundtrack for his hyperactive noble-retiree persona.

This tendency is confirmed once again in yet another side project, Duo De Twang, a duo with guitarist friend Bryan Kehoe, with whom he recorded the collection of old childhood hillbilly tunes Four Foot Shack (ATO, 2014). It's no coincidence, then, that Claypool then sank into nostalgia with a remake of the 1971 musical "Charlie And The Chocolate Factory" on Primus & The Chocolate Factory With The Fungi Ensemble, the first record with great drummer Herb since Tales From The Puchbowl. The result is a limp vaudeville act with none of their past instrumental brilliance, creative only in its colorful live staging.

The following The Desaturating Seven (2017), again with the golden-era lineup, is a new soundtrack piece (this time based on illustrator Ul De Rico's 1977 "Rainbow Goblins") that more genuinely imports a Residents-like surrealist mood and at least tries to restore their original sound, from their typical funk-metal marches ("The Seven") to long, narrative tracks ("The Trek", "The Dream") that cross acid jams with their usual deranged, grotesque registers. The problem is that the predictable virtuosity and the actually rather stiff stylistic variety of the operetta (admittedly cleverly brief) only last for a couple of listens.

Contributions by Stefano Conti and Michele Saran ("Green Naugahyde")

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