to blow up, of course I would have chosen a different route. But I’m really happy about the way everything turned out, regardless. It was just a commitment thing. Les wanted me to basically quit that band, and I couldn’t.
TODD HUTH: We were getting to a point where I had a kid, Elmo, and Primus was playing a lot. We started playing out of town a little bit more. At one point, I think we had eight shows in seven days, and I was working—I had a job. I was exhausted, for one thing. So I came home and saw Elmo lying there, and he was a different kid. And I was kind of out of control—I didn’t have it under control of what was going on with Primus at that point. You know how things get out of control when you’re playing and people want you to do shows and go on tour and stuff. I thought, I’m not going to not see my kid grow up. This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. So I decided to leave because I wanted to be around for my kid. And I just knew Primus was going to take off. And much to Les’s dismay, I didn’t have a choice really.
Chapter 5
Then Along Came Ler
LES CLAYPOOL: I had been touring with Blind Illusion, because they had called me a year or so prior to that—their bass player had quit the band. So Marc Biedermann said, “We’ve got this record deal. Come be on the record. If you’re on the record, we’ll buy you a new bass amp.” So I was like, “Okay, cool.” I got a new bass amp out of the deal, and I made the record, and then I did a couple of tours with them. During that time, they had this guitarist in the band, who was playing rhythm guitar, whose name was Larry.
LARRY LaLONDE [Primus guitarist 1989–present]: I’m from El Sobrante, California. Basically, got into music because of this guy who lived next door to me. This kid that had long hair, he had a guitar, and it looked cool. [Laughs] Then a friend of mine in seventh grade said, “Hey, I’ve got tickets to go see Rush.” I was like, “Awesome. What’s Rush?” I had no idea—I didn’t know what a concert was, I didn’t know what any of this stuff was. So we went to see Rush, and I was like, “This is killer!” So when I put that together—with the guy next door having a guitar—it made me want to get a guitar.
I was taking lessons from this guy around where I lived, George Cole, and he was a student of Joe Satriani’s. I slowly started finding out through all the other kids my age group around the Bay Area that took lessons, all of our teachers took lessons from Joe Satriani. So he was kind of this mythical kind of guy, who we had heard was better than Eddie Van Halen—which at the time, it was like, Is that possible?! And then I just went in one day to this music store in Berkeley to buy an amp, and on the wall it said, Sign up for guitar lessons: Joe Satriani. And I was like, I think that’s that dude! So I signed up and totally just lucked out that it was him. Joe wasn’t famous yet, none of his students were really famous—it was probably right on the cusp of Steve Vai [who was an earlier student of Satriani’s] getting famous. But it was definitely one of those things where it was like, I couldn’t believe that Joe wasn’t famous, because I never heard anybody play guitar like that.
Definitely, the first [guitar influence] was Eddie Van Halen. By far. That was the main one for a really long time. And Randy Rhoads. And then eventually Frank Zappa, Adrian Belew, Robert Fripp, Jerry Garcia—that’s the main crew. As far as guitars, the very first one I had was a Hondo II. I’m not really sure why they had to put the “II” on there—“Hondo I” was taken already? [Laughs] That guitar was so great. I eventually traded it for a phaser pedal or something, and then I ended up with this Strat that I bought at Guitar Center, back when guitars weren’t really that expensive. And had that one guitar until even after the first couple of Primus records. I had set it up myself, and didn’t know what I was doing—nobody else changed the strings. So it turned out that this guitar was pretty much unplayable to anybody else but me. Because other people would pick it up and say, “You actually play this guitar?” I added [a Floyd Rose tremolo system]—I took it in to Oakland and they routed it out and put the whole thing in. Basically, every terrible idea you could do to a guitar, I had done to that one.
In high school my best friend was Jeff Becerra—who was the singer in Possessed—and we had another band called Blizzard. [Laughs] That’s the kind of name you come up with when you’re in tenth grade. So I think we kicked him out of Blizzard because he was a troublemaker. And then he ended up in Possessed, and then when Possessed got rid of the guitar player he asked me if I wanted to join. I was like, “Let’s do it!”
It was crazy, because I was fifteen. There wasn’t much of a scene, as far as anyone knowing about death metal. We had heard Slayer, and that was a big influence. But we had only heard Slayer on college radio, and then you’d have to actually take a train and walk pretty far to a record store that had Slayer records. It was still super underground. Basically, we went into record, and Combat Records gave us some kind of budget. We went in and blasted it out in a week [the Seven Churches album]. It was really about this underdog music—getting out this crazy music that, of course, we had to throw this satanic thing on top of, just to make it even harder to digest for anybody. It was kind of one of those things where you see how far you can push it.
We had a week to do it—we had to do it on Easter vacation, because myself and Jeff were in tenth or eleventh grade. So the week we had off for Easter vacation, we went into this recording studio where you could actually live—they had a little place where you could hang out. Looking back, it probably wasn’t the most appropriate thing for a fifteen-year-old to be doing—hanging out, living at this studio, doing god knows what, and recording satanic death metal. I just remember that and the whole trying-to-freak-people-out-with-the-satanic-death-metal thing, and different album cover ideas, and trying to make it as crazy as possible. Mostly, I just remember from that time trying to see what you could get away with, and seeing how freaked out and offended people could get by the music. The funny thing about it was, no one was into satan or even knew what any of that stuff was. We just knew it got such a reaction that we were like, “Oh, let’s go with this!”
After a couple of years in Possessed, my influences started going more toward King Crimson, Grateful Dead, and Frank Zappa. So the metal thing kind of went from being super trying-to-break-new-ground-and-invent-new-stuff to really being pigeonholed and boxed in, as far as what you could do. So my friend Mike Miner, who was also in Blizzard, he ended up in the band Blind Illusion. I think it turned out that everybody that played an instrument in the Bay Area had been in this band at one point. They needed a guitar player—as I heard they did many times—so I ended up in that band. And Les just happened to be in and out of that band at the time. That’s where I met up with Les.
He was kind of in the same zone, of not really caring about anything except trying to make crazy music. He was wearing two different-colored shoes, which I appreciated for some reason. I thought that was a good idea—I don’t know why. We kind of hit it off, because we were on the same plane, as far as just trying to have fun and trying to push music boundaries.
DAVID LEFKOWITZ: At some point in ’88, the Blind Illusion record [The Sane Asylum] was coming out, and that band didn’t have any management. Les wanted to devote some time to touring in Blind Illusion, to support that album, but he was worried that it would take away from Primus. So the remedy seemed to be to get me to manage Blind Illusion, so that I could help keep things in control, so that Les could still do all that he needed to with Primus at the same time.
I ultimately had a roster of many of the club headlining acts in the Bay Area. For example, Nightbreak was a big club on Haight Street that everybody loved to play. It maybe held 200 or 250 people at most. But I was representing five out of the eight weekend-night headliners in a given month. So, as a result, when national acts would come to town and play any number of venues—and they didn’t have opening acts—I was able to get bands that I booked as the opening act.
I specifically remember both Primus and the Limbomaniacs opening for Fishbone at the Stone on Broadway. Primus opened for the Chili Peppers at the Fillmore. And I remember in late-1988, there was a lineup of the Chili Peppers that never actually made it on to an album, where they had two black members—Dead Kennedys drummer D.H. Peligro