https://www.high-endrolex.com/18

Friday Full-Length: Primus, Sailing the Seas of Cheese

Posted in Bootleg Theater on October 28th, 2022 by JJ Koczan

Some records are just ingrained in you. As I remember it, I first encountered Primus‘ 1991 second album and major label debut, Sailing the Seas of Cheese, at about 10 years old in my sister’s CD collection. This would’ve been when it was more or less new, before the follow-up EP, 1992’s Miscellaneous Debris, because I remember when that came out. I swiped the disc and it was like my soon-to-be-pubescent, soon-to-meet-Beavis-and-Butt-Head goofball ass found a home. I’ve lived with it basically since that time, revisiting periodically, and it’s been a bit, so here I am. This album changed my life as a kid, and it still satisfies listening as an adult for more than nostalgic purposes. I count it as one among very, very few.

What a collection of songs. Into a 45-minute span, Primus — bassist/vocalist Les Claypool, guitarist Larry LaLonde, drummer Tim Alexander, plus a bunch of their friends peppered throughout — cram banger after banger. You’ve got the intro, and even that has a hook, then you get into “Here Come the Bastards,” “Sgt. Baker,” “American Life” and “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” in succession. Holy shit. And even more insane, they’re all so short. “Here Come the Bastards” is under three minutes. In less than three minutes, Primus build and launch that groove, establish and execute that chorus, and roll out a weighted tonality that still carries its heft while dancing in circles doing high-knees.

Across its span, Sailing the Seas of Cheese is a tighter record than 1990’s Frizzle Fry (discussed here), and the tradeoff it makes between atmosphere and impact serves cuts like “Sgt. Baker” — recall the first Gulf War was on when the album was being made — and the later “Tommy the Cat,” the frenetic jazz showoff “Is it Luck,” on which LaLonde shreds guitar and Alexander shreds drums no less than Claypool does bass, or the band as a whole does a number on ‘what makes a radio hit.’

Even the side B pairing of “Those Damned Blue-Collar Tweekers” and “Fish On (Fisherman Chronicles, Ch. II),” where they do branch out more than a little, is more delightfully odd, more weirdo psychedelic in the case of the latter — though as far out as they go into Interscope Records-backed avant garde heavy funk rock, they bring it back to the chorus before they’re done, because songwriting — and the manner in which the concluding “Los Bastardos” reprises the central progression of “Here Come the Bastards” with samples from The Young Ones laced over top is emblematic of the jam band Primus would become after reuniting in the aughts.

Consider “Eleven” — too offbeat to be a single, brilliantly drummed, catchy, something about salsa — and tucked in between “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” and “Is it Luck?” in arguably one of the least enviable positions a song from the ’90s could be in if it wanted to stand out, but it does. It’s got vibe and chorus both. It’s heavy, it’s undeniably their own, and it legitimately works in concert with the rest of the material here to do something in rock and roll that had never been done before. PRIMUS SAILING THE SEAS OF CHEESENot just decentralizing the guitar — because if you listen to this, Frizzle Fry, 1993’s Pork Soda, 1995’s Tales From the Punchbowl, etc., and there’s no shortage of guitar — but in songwriting and personality. This was a new kind of fun at the time, and resonates 31 years later not only because the level of craft is so high — that is, each of its three main players is brilliant — but because no one else in the last three-plus decades has managed to come along and outdo it at its own game.

The back and forth between faster and slower songs on side A, with “Here Come the Bastards” into “Sgt. Baker,” is mirrored by the dizzying “Is it Luck?” moving into the interlude “Grandad’s Little Ditty” before the “Tommy the Cat” — which, yes, has guest vocals from Tom Waits; nobody’s perfect — takes hold and builds an entire world in its 4:15, the sharp turns and razor wit of the lyrics one more reason to fully immerse. Side B’s personality is a little different, as it should be, with the banjo-inclusive “Sathington Waltz” feeling (purposefully) thrown together as if to signal that the rest of the proceedings are going to push even further into the reaches of peculiarity, which of course they do, however memorable “Those Damned Blue-Collar Tweekers” proves to be nonetheless.

And yes, “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” was a smash. Unavoidable for a bit there, and undeniable. As their career has played out, “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” has followed Primus all the while, and I can’t even fathom how many times Claypool has chuckled and said, “Dog will hunt” into a microphone at this point. Thousands, surely. Doesn’t matter, the end of that track crushes, taking all that we’re-gonna-do-bass low end and pushing it alongside harder hitting drums and fuller guitar distortion to create a sound that Pork Soda and later records like 1997’s Brown Album and 1999’s Antipop would continue to explore, the band flirting with the idea that maybe they were a heavy metal band before pulling the plug on the whole endeavor for a few years and sending Claypool into a wilderness of side-projects, many of them righteous — you won’t hear me say a bad word about the Fearless Flying Frog Brigade, dammit; “who wants to go to D’s Diner?” — but all of them a signifier that there would only ever be one Primus.

They’ve been on tour this year covering Rush, which tracks. I’ve made the argument a few times over the years for Primus as a heavy rock band, and I still wonder how the late ’90s and early ’00s would have played out for them if that language existed at the time, because they’ve never been about the aggressive side of metal even as they more than flirted with tonal weight. Whatever they were going to be classified as, they’d always be themselves, surely, and Queens of the Stone Age did Ozzfest too that time, so I don’t know that being heavy rock would’ve prevented the hiatus that stopped the band for a long few years in 2000, but in hindsight, it’s an easier fit as a kind of creative ecosystem than either metal or hard rock, which is where they were most commonly lumped. I’ll gladly go to bat for them having more in common with Kyuss than Powerman 5000, or any other ’90s commercial hard rock entity you want to substitute.

But what is, is, and Sailing the Seas of Cheese remains a singular work of genius songwriting and performance, one of the best records of its decade, for me, one of the best records of all time, and as always, I hope you enjoy it.

Thanks for reading.

I needed this, I don’t mind telling you. This week has been long, hard and largely miserable. My knee is starting to get better — still hurts to straighten it out, but I can move it more — and this morning I go for the results of the MRI that I had done Wednesday evening, so that should be interesting [update: I need surgery], but everything has been a drag. Everything. It was my kid’s birthday — the only time in my life I’m going to get to see my child turn five — and I could barely stay in the room. It just sucked. Wretched, down. I’ve felt isolated in my marriage, utterly adrift as a parent, and completely inconsequential creatively. I keep fucking up like 10 different things at one time and even little things — I knocked over an open bottle of seltzer yesterday opening my laptop on one of the tables in back of Wegman’s; a beer bottle fell out of my cart in the liquor department as I was buying booze for The Pecan’s birthday party tomorrow; I dropped his ice cream cake the other night (fortunately it was okay) — make my brains fucking boil. I feel like I don’t have the capacity to handle as much is coming at me, and that’s before you get to the anxiety of a collapsing political order happening in real-time, my wife learning Hungarian as though I might do so through osmosis and somehow thereby be able to chase down EU citizenship through my family lineage. I feel like I should be granted a duel passport just by virtue of having to tell everyone I’ve ever met in my entire life how to pronounce my last name.

Anyway, Primus, some new Star Trek last night, good music throughout the week, a steady intake of THC and cheese, an unexpected gift that I’ll keep for the rest of my life, and I’m not sure I have any right to complain, but I do. It’s been a slaughter. I get up and want to fast-forward through the entire day and just go to bed. Just be done with it.

But that’s my shit and mine to deal with. In addition to the orthopaedist this morning, this afternoon is a parent-teacher conference — pretty light fare in pre-K, and we try to keep a close eye on how he’s doing anyway, so I don’t expect too many revelations, but still, you go — and then tomorrow is the big birthday party for the kid. Bounce house, pigs in blankets, The Patient Mrs.’ mom’s ziti; all the classics. We’re expecting about 40 people at various points in the afternoon, so if you want to come by, PM for the address.

New Gimme show today. 5pm. I know you don’t care or listen, but I’m lucky to do that stuff so I’m gonna keep plugging it anyhow. Thanks if you do check it out. It’s a good way for me to dig into more of the records that come in for review.

Next week, I don’t know, a bunch of stuff. Couple full streams, announcements, and so on. If I tell you it’ll be cool, will it matter? If you’re reading this now, will you come back because of the vague promise of something good? Probably not, I think. Maybe I’m getting too old for this shit; like a half-assed, lily white Danny Glover of the stoner rock blogosphere.

Have a great and safe weekend. Rest up, watch your head, enjoy. Thanks again for reading.

FRM.

The Obelisk Collective on Facebook

The Obelisk Radio

The Obelisk merch

Tags: , , , , , ,

Friday Full-Length: Primus, Frizzle Fry

Posted in Bootleg Theater on September 11th, 2020 by JJ Koczan

In terms of categorization, no one has ever really known what to make of or what to do with Primus. 30 years on from the 1990 release of their debut studio album, Frizzle Fry, through Caroline Records, that seems like a source of pride for the bass-led trio, whose career has nonetheless included radio hits and creative videos, narrative albums and a sense of progressivism that comes through even in the most straightforward of their songs and in tracks about things like fishing, pudding, and, on 1993’s Pork Soda, being named Mud. But because of their funk-infused sound, their overarching groove led by the technical-wizardry-put-to-rarely-pretentious-use of bassist Les Claypool, because of the intricacy of Tim “Don’t Call Me Herb” Alexander‘s drumming and the almost avant-jazz guitar work of Larry LaLonde — who came to the band after playing in Possessed, giving Primus an automatic connection to metal — theirs has always been a place between styles. How much crossover do you really think exists between Ozzfest and Bonnaroo? That’s Primus.

Frizzle Fry, which has been remastered and reissued through I think Sony or maybe Universal or whoever owns Interscope‘s and Caroline‘s catalogs at this point — does it matter? Brand X. — is comprised of 13 tracks running a CD-ready 51 minutes. There are numerous intros and interludes, even from the start of opener and longest cut (immediate points) “To Defy the Laws of Tradition,” which starts with crowd noise perhaps to make one think on first listen that they’re doing another live record à la 1989’s Suck on This, which was Primus overall debut. This and the waltzing “You Can’t Kill Michael Malloy,” the stomping “Sathington Willoughby” and the reprise “To Defy” at the album’s finish — all under 40 seconds long — act to keep the listener off balance and, ideally, of a more open mind to the many quirks that come not just from Claypool as a frontman, but LaLonde‘s guitar and Alexander‘s drumming as well. At its heaviest — and the record is heavy — Frizzle Fry doesn’t indulge in either the chestbeating of the day’s thrash and early groove metal movements or the preening of glam, or the disaffection of what was becoming grunge at the time. You see where this is going. It’s heavy, and it’s rock. It’s heavy rock.

It’s more than just that as well, but stop me if you’ve heard this before — and yes you have, maybe more than once — but among the aspects of Primus‘ sound that were pioneering was finding that precise place in between Primus Frizzle Frymetal and rock that was heavy and full in tone but put it to non-aggro use. Frizzle Fry has its moody moments, to be sure, in the still-relevant “Too Many Puppies” or the loosely psychedelic title-track and “The Toys Go Winding Down” and in the punch of low end and sometimes frenetic starts and stops of bass, but songs like “Mr. Knowitall,” “John the Fisherman,” “Pudding Time” even “Harold of the Rocks,” though its lyrics are about losing friends to drug addiction, are fun. The bounce of their rhythm, their memorable hooks and melodies, and the immediately-recognizable patterning and voice of Claypool gave Primus an unmistakable approach to rock and roll. And that was part of the thing too. Where a few years later, Nirvana broke through to generation-defining commercial mega-stardom, Primus were too weird and too inimitable to be as influential. Anyone can slow down punker riffs and drawl out their dissatisfaction with life. No one can slap a bass like Les Claypool other than Les Claypool, and those who try, like Korn, just sound silly. So while they found success at the time, they’re perhaps also underappreciated for just how much stylistic accomplishment they were making at the time because, frankly, their style was more their own than behind their marketing knew how to handle. “I guess put out another CD single? Yeah, that’s it,” and so on.

Make no mistake, Frizzle Fry is brilliant, and whether it’s dug in moments like the hard-driving jam that emerges to add thrust to the title-track after its Sabbath referencing post-midsection departure or even the probably-filler “Spaghetti Western” with its double-kick drumming and shredded-apart guitar solo, Primus maintain a striking and consuming balance between personality and craft. Thinking of this as their debut, their efforts across the length of the album are all the more impressive, and of course while they would go on to develop a more varied and progressive approach over subsequent records and decades, the raw edge of a band just starting out is resonant in Frizzle Fry at the same time it’s contrasted by the sheer confidence with which the band executes the material. Maybe they just didn’t care what anyone thought of them. Maybe they knew they were right and time would bear them out. Either way, with 30 years of hindsight and the language and understanding of heavy rock and roll that’s taken place since, one can find yet another lens through which to appreciate what they were doing at the time, what they were able to achieve as a band in their early going, and what they would do with it in the course of the years that followed.

The band are hardly done, if that sentence makes it seem otherwise. In 2017 they released The Desaturating Seven, a narrative concept LP following up on 2014’s Primus & The Chocolate Factory with the Fungi Ensemble, a characteristic retell of the songs from Willy Wonka, and they’ve toured consistently as well, returning in 2004 after a breakup following the harder-edged approaches of 1997’s The Brown Album and 1999’s Antipop, lineup changes and so on. Frizzle Fry, 1991’s Sailing the Seas of Cheese and the aforementioned Pork Soda have all been performed in their entirety in the last decade-plus, usually with copious jams added — the jam-band community wholly embraced the three-piece in a way metal never really did, perhaps with an edge of ’90s nostalgia — and comprise an essential trilogy of offerings to be sure. As the first of them, Frizzle Fry holds a special place and is a landmark unto itself as well as a herald for what would come after.

If it needs to be said, I love this album.

I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

Maybe I was feeling a little nostalgic myself this week after reviewing that Alice in Chains tribute. That album, Dirt, and Sailing the Seas of Cheese, along with C.O.C.’s Blind and Master of Puppets and The Beatles’ Past Masters Vol. 1, were the earliest CDs I ever owned. I had that Beatles record and Master of Puppets before I even had a CD player. So yeah, that’s kind of digging back for me. Life is short. Find joy where you can.

I mean that. Half the country is on fire right now; the other half doesn’t care. Fascism has taken root in US politics in a way that the generation who would most recognize it is too dead or too on board with it to call out. Facts are twisted past recognition so that truth and objectivity themselves — as much as they can exist in the first place — are rendered another malleable tool of disorientation. And a pandemic. I watch the cases every day. It was down this week to in the 20,000s for like two days, is back up today over 33,000. We’re approaching 200,000 dead Americans. No one cares. Cops act in accord with white supremacist terrorists. People care about that, but cops have tanks and people have Twitter and tanks win. I have this dog I can’t stand. It’s not even fair how much I can’t stand this dog. It isn’t fair to her and I know it and acknowledge it and I still can’t stand this dog. Every time she whines or barks I want to smash my face with a hammer. Bottom line is, injustice is rampant.

So find your joy. Because in the background of all this wretchedness and decay dwells the fact that these so, so, so deeply flawed times are all we’ve got. This week I bought my son a big green garbage truck at Costco. He’s got other garbage trucks, also green. I can think of two off the top of my head — a little one and a mid-sized one. This one is bigger and it has an arm that lifts up a dumpster. He’s spent the last three days immersed in it to the exclusion of nearly everything else, or at least everything that can’t fit in the truck, and I’ve gotten to see him absolutely loving this thing, wanting to bring it to bed with him, all of that. It’s been great. He talks about it. It’s the first thing he goes for in the morning. Next week it’ll be something else, but screw it, that’s next week. Right now I’ve got that to hold onto.

And I need it, because he’s also decided this week that he no longer needs a nap in the afternoon, which is so sad. So very sad. That was not only work-time, but also relax-time, reading-time, listen-to-what-needs-to-be-reviewed-tomorrow-time. Put cauliflower in the oven for dinner time. Sometimes even my naptime. A time both productive and restorative. Now it’s two more hours-plus added to the rest of the day. Find your joy. The world he lives in and is going to grow up in is an overwhelming downward spiral moving from garbage to garbage-on-fire, and nothing’s going to get better. Life is complicated and generally miserable. Find your joy. Big or little, if you can. Double high-five.

Oh, and by way of an update, it’s been two weeks and nothing has fallen through, so I guess we own this house now. Pretty wild to think of it as ours rather than my grandmother’s or my grandmother’s-via-my-mother’s. White privilege is real.

Alright. I should probably leave it there. I overslept this morning by more than an hour — alarm set for 3:50, I rolled over at 5 — and it’s kind of thrown me for a loop, but so it goes. I’ll take The Pecan grocery shopping in a bit and we’ll proceed about the day. I’m sure the garbage truck will be involved. Next week is a new Gimme show and a bunch of other premieres that anyone may or may not give a crap about but I think are cool. Some honest-to-goodness stoner rock in there too, which I could use at this point to be honest with you. Been awfully prog-psych around here lately. Also there’s some folk. So you keep a balance. You find your joy. But anyway, time’s a crunch since I overslept.

I wish you a great and safe weekend. Have fun, and be careful out there. Hydrate. So important to hydrate.

FRM.

The Obelisk Forum

The Obelisk Radio

The Obelisk merch

Tags: , , , , ,

Live Review: Primus and Clutch in Boston, 07.23.17

Posted in Reviews on July 24th, 2017 by JJ Koczan

primus photo jj koczan

Primus and Clutch both played new material. Their tour together hit Boston’s let’s-make-this-all-artisanal-condos waterfront on a breezy Sunday night and the semi-open-air venue Blue Hills Bank Pavilion, with its sprawling white canvas over top, seats, high stage and crisp sound, was a suitable enough place to host them, if somewhat staid in a corporate-venue kind of way.

The crowd? Awesome. An eclectic mix of rockers, hippies, headbangers, couples, young and old. Parents were there with their kids — saw a dad and his son in matching Clutch work shirts, Grateful Dead tye-dye, the usual local-fahkin’-spoahts-khed logos representing, along with t-shirts for Inquisition, Slayer, a Meshuggah hoodie and so on. One dude brought his blankie and wrapped himself in it, another had hippie Hammerpants tucked into his Doc Martens because it’s 1994 all over again and not one fucking moment too soon. Brilliant vibe. Amazing to see all these people agree they were in the right pace.

And to be sure, they were. Early start with Clutch on at 7:45, but that worked for my old ass just fine. I had The Patient Mrs. along, and therefore The Pecan as well — he goes where she goes, what with that whole in-the-womb thing and whatnot — and was counting this as my son’s first rock show. He could hardly ask for a better warm-up gig to, you know, life.

The tour started July 17 and this was show number six, so Clutch were on form but still plainly getting settled in. The long-running Marylander foursome of vocalist Neil Fallon, guitarist Tim Sult, bassist Dan Maines and drummer Jean-Paul Gaster are now two years removed from their most recent album, Psychic Warfare (review here), and though the set featured several cuts from that record — “Firebirds!,” “Noble Savage,” “Sucker for the Witch,” “A Quick Death in Texas” and “X-Ray Visions” — they seemed ready to move forward. From the stage, Fallon said their plan was to record in January and before they launched into the new song “How to Shake Hands,” he noted, “You don’t know the material, I don’t know the material,” which got a good chuckle out of the assembled masses. Then, of course, he and the whole band completely killed it.

Because that’s what Clutch do. At this point in their career, fans know what they’re getting when they show up to a Clutch gig, and while it was somewhat odd to see them opening for another act instead of headlining, and that showed itself in some of the tempos they worked with — that was easily the fastest incarnation of “Spacegrass” I’ve ever witnessed; it was like it was playing on 45RPM — their presence and their delivery are undeniable. Opening with “Cyborg Bette” and “Crucial Velocity” from 2013’s most righteous Earth Rocker (review here), they wanted nothing for momentum, and while speed would be the order of their time onstage, as emphasized with a one-two punch of Earth Rocker‘s title-track and “Noble Savage,” both proselytizing the same message of rock-liferdom, they wanted nothing for groove.

Along with the aforementioned “Spacegrass,” which always feels like something special when they break it out, “Escape from the Prison Planet” from 1995’s landmark self-titled was well placed in a multi-song nod to older-school fans — there were a few on hand, to be sure — that was excellently interrupted by a rendition of “D.C. Sound Attack” that snuck in a cowbell-laden jam at the end like it was sliding numbers facedown across a table: smooth and casual. “Passive Restraints,” which followed, might have pushed it on going way back, but you won’t hear me complain.

Fallon demands and rightly gets a lot of the focus in the band, and Sult‘s funk-infused riffing is second to none, but what an absolute joy it was to watch Maines and Gaster in the rhythm section. They don’t even have to look at each other. I don’t know if it’s possible to call them underrated, since Clutch has reaped plenty of acclaim in their time, but they might be anyway, and with Les Claypool and Tim Alexander in Primus still to follow, the evening-with wasn’t short on quality rhythm sections. Kind of the running theme of the night. But still. Whether it was “The Mob Goes Wild” and “Profits of Doom” early in the set or the tight transitions in “Electric Worry” near the end, they were on point to a frightening degree, and even a little flub in “Escape from the Prison Planet” became all-part-of-the-show-folks. The kind of bass and drums you would watch all night, even if there were no guitar and vocals to go with them.

So what about that new song? Well, despite Fallon‘s saying otherwise, they’ve been playing the politically-themed “How to Shake Hands” for at least a couple months now, and they all seemed to know it pretty well. Some of the lyrics felt tentative — a bridge about being born to be president reused the word “born” in a way that felt awkward and one expects will be revised before the track is final — but there was zero screwing with the hook:

“First thing I’m gonna do is go for ride in a UFO
Put Jimi Hendrix on the 20 dollar bill and Bill Hicks on a five note
Hot damn, the democratic process — what a time to be alive
I’m ready to give the people what they want
And what they want is straight talk, and no jive”

Needless to say, it was stuck in the head of all parties involved by its second runthrough in the relatively short, upbeat song. One to look forward to, to be sure. They’ve also been playing a song called “We Love a Good Fire,” but it wasn’t aired in Boston. Instead, they placed “X-Ray Visions” in the spot usually reserved for “One-Eyed Dollar” coming directly out of “Electric Worry.” A bit of a bumpy transition there, but credit to them for changing that up anyhow after years of doing it the other way. It was dark out by the time they were done, and Boston — hopped up as ever on lobster, beers and Chris Sale’s strikeout total for the season — was no less raucous than they might’ve been otherwise for it being Sunday.

I suspect my narrative as regards Primus is like many who showed up to see them. I’ve been a fan since I was 10 years old. I’ll be 36 in a couple months. One of the first CDs I ever owned was 1991’s Sailing the Seas of Cheese and I still have both that copy and my cassette and beat-to-crap digipak version of 1993’s Pork Soda as well. I remember staying up late to watch the video of “Mr. Krinkle” on Headbanger’s Ball — because Primus were no less unclassifiable by MTV back then than they are by anyone now — to the point that when they played it with the clip playing on the backing screens behind them, I had flashbacks. It had been more than a decade since the last time I saw them; I still knew “Sgt. Baker” by heart.

My central question going into their set was how jammed out it would be. Les ClaypoolTim Alexander and guitarist Larry LaLonde are gods to the jam-band contingent, and since Primus came back with the 2003 Animals Should Not Try to Act Like People EP — and really before that with Claypool side-projects like Colonel Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog BrigadeOysterheadColonel Claypool’s Bucket of Bernie Brains, as well as the more recent The Claypool Lennon Delirium and Duo de Twang — they’ve very much worked toward that audience. Still, in partnering with Clutch for this tour, the weirdo stalwarts were embracing an entirely different crowd, so would they expand their songs with improv or cut back toward a more straightforward delivery?

I’ve long been of the conviction that if the language of “heavy rock” had existed at the time Primus were commercially flourishing in the way it does now, they never would’ve even been considered a heavy metal band. They never were one; even at their heaviest and despite LaLonde‘s roots playing in Possessed, they didn’t have the aggression behind the slapped-string punch of Claypool‘s bass or Alexander‘s drumming to be metal. Nor, I think, did they ever want to be. “Heavy rock,” as a concept, is more of a catch-all, and while I think it undersells both the unique nature of their approach and its progressive aspects, the path of their career and their turn toward jam-band affiliations might’ve worked out much differently had they not been so wrongly tagged for so long.

Was I thinking about this at the show? A little bit. They opened with a medley of “Too Many Puppies” sandwiched around “Sgt. Baker” before going into “Last Salmon Man,” which was a highlight of 2011’s Green Naugahyde, so a somewhat less jammy start had me thinking early they’d keep to basic structures, but as they moved through the 1995 mega-single “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver” and “Southbound Pachyderm” — also from that year’s Tales from the Punchbowl — they began to unfold more of an open mood, and that would continue to flourish through a drum solo by Alexander that filled time while Claypool swapped to a stand-up bass to lead through Primus‘ take on “Candyman” from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, a film the entire soundtrack of which the band took on in 2014 on Primus and the Chocolate Factory with the Fungi Ensemble.

That was probably the only moment of their set that left me cold, but I was in a clear minority in that regard. The druggy overtones were laid on thick and I guess if that’s your thing, fair enough, but as soon as I saw Claypool in his pig mask, I was waiting for “Mr. Krinkle,” and that came next, followed by “The Toys Go Winding Down” and the new song listed as “Seven,” which will reportedly be the title-track of their impending ninth album to be recorded sometime after this tour, presumably for release in 2018. By way of stating the obvious and offering the most critical insight one might hope to conjure as regards Primus more than 30 years on from their first getting together, I’ll say it sounded like Primus. That should be considered high praise as well.

A mellow and bizarro deep-dive followed with “On the Tweek Again” and “Mrs. Blaileen,” both again from Tales from the Punchbowl, but the Pork Soda monument “My Name is Mud” brought everyone back to ground and as the three-piece extended the jabs at the end before launching into “Jerry was a Race Car Driver” from Sailing the Seas of Cheese — another delightfully creepy video to remember while it played behind them — it was obvious they were coming around to the finale. And at that point, fair enough. They’d jammed, they’d rocked, they’d spaced out, been heavy, showed off a new song, gone obscure and dug into classics, all the while offering unparalleled performance and personality from the stage. Fucking Primus. They do not, contrary to any and all sloganeering otherwise, suck.

The residual high-school-stoner in me delighted in the nod to 1997’s Brown Album that came in “Golden Boy,” which started a three-song encore that rounded out with “Mr. Knowitall” — he is so eloquent; perfection is his middle name and… whatever rhymes with “eloquent” — and the march of “Here Come the Bastards,” Claypool taking the opportunity work in some last-minute shred in a bass solo before they finished out a couple minutes ahead of what was likely an 11PM curfew and the lights came up. People had been quite literally dancing in the aisles, a kind of friendly mosh took shape a few rows back, dudes jumping up and down and bumping into each other rather than throwing punches or kicks.

All in good fun, in other words — and that was the emergent spirit of the night. During either Clutch or Primus, one couldn’t help but smile at the proceedings, the surroundings, the weather, whatever. It all worked excellently and the two bands fed off each other’s strengths in a manner that, even thinking “hell yeah, this is gonna be a great show” beforehand, was a surprise. I expect as this tour rolls on for the better part of the next month, that complementary aspect is only going to grow more prevalent, and right on. If only they’d made a t-shirt with both logos. I’d have been all over it, and maybe even gotten one for my unborn son to grow into as well. Next time.

More pics after the jump. Thanks for reading.

Read more »

Tags: , , , ,

Frydee Primus

Posted in Bootleg Theater on October 26th, 2012 by JJ Koczan

Somebody’s gotta be with me on this one. I know it’s been a long time, and when they came back in the middle part of the last decade, they hit the jam-band circuit pretty hard, but especially when they first got going, and even up to 1999’s Antipop, uneven though it was, Primus could be pretty heavy when they wanted to be. They always jammed, and I guess Les Claypool decided he wanted to focus on that side of it, but even a song like “Frizzle Fry” in the video above — shot in Sacramento in 1989 — which was more of a psychedelic groover, has a real plod. They were never metal, and I think a lot of people wanted them to be, much to their chagrin, but they were heavy.

I’ve been on a day-long Primus kick since hearing Reign of Zaius play that “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver” riff last night, and Yakuza reminded me of Primus earlier this week as well in that Beyul album reviewEggnogg‘s funky affinity has some of that to it too, and I’ve been grooving on their Louis EP a lot lately, and plus I put Primus on the cover of The Aquarian a couple weeks ago — so in any case, I was due a session with the bass-led trio. They were a band who hit at just the right time for me, and I can’t say that about a lot of bands. I was 10 when Sailing the Seas of Cheese landed, and I’ve always had an affection for them, channeling or at least wishing I could channel my awkwardness into the delight for being weird they seemed to advocate with everything they did. Pork Soda hasn’t held up as well, but it blew my mind at the time. I got a copy of last year’s Green Naugahyde but never really dug into it. Seems they’ve got Jay Lane from Sausage in the lineup now on drums with Claypool and guitarist Larry LaLonde. Fair enough.

Last time I saw them was when they came through doing all of Frizzle Fry — which they do a good portion of in the video above — and it was a little more on the jammy side than I was looking for. I get into that stuff sometimes, but you can cross a line and you end up losing the original dynamic of the song. If the song is a jam, that’s one thing, but to add a seven-minute solo in what used to be a 15-second bridge — well, you get the point. Anyway, I hope you dig the video even if you don’t watch the whole hour or you put it on and do something else. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but Primus is like macaroni and cheese for me. Comfort food.

And apparently I could use it. I didn’t mean for that live review to be quite so glum. I was trying to play up the spiritually healing power of fuzz and got lost in some of the gallows humor, but I can see where you might read that and either wonder what the fuck is up with this guy or be turned off entirely. Whatever, it is what it is and the grammar’s right so far as I know, so I’m not changing it. No regrets, and so forth.

Much to come next week, so stick around. Monday I’ve got more Scion Rock Fest footage going up first thing — or maybe second thing, but early either way — and a track premiere from Norwegian prog classicists Tusmørke, and that’ll be fun. Reviews are forthcoming for Blue Aside, Drug Honkey and Seven Planets as well, among others. I was all set to see Hour of 13 tonight, but I got the heads up that the show’s canceled, so there goes that. Nonetheless, I’ve got interviews in the can (heh) from Curse the Son and Alunah, so I’ll have those up throughout the week, a brand new column from none other than Ben Hogg, and a bunch of other stuff that I either don’t know about yet or can’t remember. It’ll be good times.

Speaking of, I don’t know if you’ve been on the forum this week, but it’s a hoot. I’ve been kind of in and out (heh) as time has permitted, but if you get a minute and feel like lurking or posting a goofy picture of some hairy armpits, it’s all good fun.

Alright y’all. Have a great and safe weekend. Catch you on the aforementioned forum and back here Monday.

Tags: , ,