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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.

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