Primus frontman/bassist Les Claypool has provided Consequence Of Sound with a breakdown of each of the band’s albums from over the years. Claypool spares few details, offering insight into the successes and struggles of each album. Some excerpts can be found below:
On signing to Interscope Records for 1991’s “Sailing The Seas Of Cheese“:
“I remember when we did get signed eventually to Interscope; Tom Whalley had come to see the opening band, Spent Poets, who are some good friends of ours. He’d heard about them and he showed up at our show and hadn’t even heard of us. He didn’t even know that we’d already sold 80,000 copies of Frizzle Fry.
He flipped out. He was like, “Oh, my god. This audience is going crazy over these guys. I need to sign them.” And we were actually being courted by a couple labels at that time. At the time, Interscope had nothing. My manager said, “Hey, we shouldn’t go with these guys, we should go with these other guys that are tried and true.”
And I said, “No, I want to sign with Tom Whalley because Tom Whalley is signing us because of us. He’s not signing us because we sold 80,000 records. He’s signing us for us.”
Tom Whalley really championed us. We wouldn’t have come nearly as far as we’ve gotten without that guy. He basically looked at us and said, “You know what you guys are doing. It works. Just keep doing what you’re doing.” Jimmy Iovine was the president of the company, and I remember sitting in a room and him looking at me and going, “You know, I gotta be honest with you. I don’t get Primus. I don’t know where one song starts and when one song ends. But I get Tom Whalley, and Tom Whalley gets you.” So they always just left us alone.
We were the second band released on Interscope, the first being Gerardo, “Rico Suave”. I can’t even count how many artists I talked to that signed to Interscope over the years who told me, “Hey, we signed to Interscope because of you guys.” They saw the freedom that we had there and they were inspired to join it. That always made me feel really good.”
On “Tales From The Punchbowl‘s hit single “Wynona’s Brown Beaver“:
“The big song off that record was “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver”. I had written the bass part, and I had the lyrics, but it was just going to be one of the little interlude songs, one of the little acoustic, folk-y upright songs. I was even going to have Ler play banjo.
But what happened is the lyrics fit so perfectly to that riff that I just stuck it on there, and I didn’t think much of it. That was the song that the record company loved; for me, it was just supposed to be this silly sidebar song. The attention was wonderful, but it was also the first time that people started going, “Well, wait a minute, are these guys just a joke band?” So it sort of undermined us a little bit at the time.
I went through a period after that where I resented the song for a while because of that. The next song on the album is about a guy dying of hanging himself! There’s a lot of heavy shit. A lot of my material is about substance abuse because it’s been a huge thing in my family, especially methamphetamine. All of a sudden, with this silly song, we got all this attention, and so it undermined us a bit. Now it’s just part of the landscape of Primus.”
On 1999’s “Anti-Pop“, which led to band parting ways with Interscope and a hiatus:
“This is the record that was the beginning of the downfall of Primus with Interscope. The record company stood back and said, “Wait a minute, maybe you guys need a little input now.” It didn’t do as well as the other ones in terms of numbers, and all of a sudden there were all these other bands that had been influenced by Primus that were becoming huge, like Incubus and Korn. The label was kind of going, “Hey, you guys are losing the plot here. What’s going on?”
We loved the record when we made it. It wasn’t as warmly received at the time, but a lot of people have told me that it’s their favorite record because it’s this bizarre departure from what we were doing before. It holds a very strong place in the history of the band, but at the time, I don’t think the label was nearly as thrilled as we were. [Laughs]”
You can find the whole feature over at Consequence Of Sound. Primus‘ new studio album, “The Desaturating Seven“, landed in stores today, September 29th.
