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 Claypool, Tim 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 Brigade, Oysterhead, Colonel 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.

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