first time I met the guys in Primus, they opened for us—or we opened for them, I can’t remember—in St. Louis, at a venue called Mississippi Nights. I remember talking with Les and Larry afterward—I don’t think it was a tour bus, but they had an RV or a Winnebago. And specifically, I talked to them about Captain Beefheart and the Butthole Surfers. And they didn’t seem to be well acquainted with either band. But they were very much into Tom Waits. Which surprised me—sometimes I thought of Tom Waits as the acoustic Butthole Surfers. Or the Butthole Surfers being the acid-drenched electric psychedelic Tom Waits. We played a few shows with Primus around then, but that was the one that I remember, because we got to sit down and watch them, and we went to go talk to them.
BUZZ OSBORNE: I thought that Primus—the first time I heard them—was like a combination of the Residents mixed with Captain Beefheart, and Larry Graham thrown in there. That was my impression of it. Unfortunately for them, they’re lumped into that Red Hot Chili Peppers kind of thing a little bit more than they probably deserve. That is not my thing. That’s not my world. That kind of music is like the soundtrack to a date rape at a frat party. I’ve never been interested in the beer-bong set. And when I lived in San Francisco, when I first moved there in the mid-’80s, it was funk metal bands and bands that sounded like Metallica. And that was it. And the funk metal bands I thought was some of the worst crap that I’d ever heard—even worse than the metal bands. Actually, I once saw one of those bands play a barely ironic version of “Brick House” by the Commodores. I was like, I’m done.
ROBERT TRUJILLO: The first time I heard Primus would have been back somewhere around the late-’80s. I had a friend who was a skateboarder buddy, who was really into alternative music—a lot of punk he was into, as well. And he had on vinyl, Suck on This. I’m listening to this, just thinking, I’ve never heard anything like this. And I’m a lover of a lot of different strands of funk and R&B. This was really, really special to me—it was exciting, it was fresh, and it was whacky and zany. That was my first kind of experience listening to them. And soon after that, I joined Suicidal Tendencies, and I had the pleasure of actually seeing them perform in New York City, and kind of started to get to know them a bit back then. So it would have been around ’89 that I think I first met them.
HANK WILLIAMS III [Solo artist]: The first one I heard was the live recording, Suck on This. I was working at a record store, and that’s when I first noticed them. I was by chance at that time playing bass and taking lessons from Regi Wooten’s brother, Victor Wooten. I don’t know, his voice stood out for me in that nasal, twangy, almost country sound. And, being a drummer myself, the rhythm in that band just really grabbed me. It stood out from a lot of the metal and stuff that was happening at that time.
CHAD SMITH [Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer, Chickenfoot drummer, Bombastic Meatbats drummer]: The Red Hot Chili Peppers used to play with Primus. I remember when we would come up to the Bay Area—especially in the late-’80s, they were a really popular band up there. People would say, “Oh, Primus is like the Bay Area Chili Peppers. You’ve got to hear them!” Obviously, they were doing their own thing and they were really cool. At the time, Tim Alexander was the drummer, and he was incredible. They were real musicians’ musicians. I was really impressed with their musicianship. It was quirky and people just loved them. I remember them playing with us and how much the people loved them. You could tell they had a real loyal, rabid fan base—real fans that really dug what they were into.
In the late-’80s, when we got popular, Hollywood is a perfect example—whenever you go to Hollywood, you’d see bands on the Sunset Strip. It was Guns N’ Roses and those kind of bands. And then it was the Chili Peppers, and there’s a guy slapping the bass and a singer with his shirt off jumping around. You just saw a lot of it—they were playing Poison songs a year before that. It wasn’t real. But Primus had their own thing, for sure. Nobody really does that Primus thing—they have their own personality, which is something difficult to do. When you hear the music, you say, “Oh, that’s them.” I really admire that. I’m definitely a fan.
MATT WINEGAR: That record, everybody had it that was involved in that scene. And you look back on it, and you’re like, “That’s only a thousand pressings.” But you think about five hundred people who are really tightly [involved] in this music world, and they all had it, so it really seemed to be well known in the circle of community of musicians. And after that, they played the Omni, and it would be packed. Maybe because I was still a teenaged kid, but the Omni seemed big and packed. And I was going, Man, these guys are really making this shit happen. After Suck on This, it really snowballed. That’s when Caroline started sniffing around.
LES CLAYPOOL: With the money from Suck on This, we actually made enough to go back in and record Frizzle Fry.
Chapter 8
They Call Me the Frizzle Fry
LARRY LaLONDE: The thing I remember mostly is, “Okay, now we’re actually going to go make a real record.” We didn’t really look at Suck on This as a real record. It was more a demo. So that was our foray into, “We’re a real band, we’re going to have a real record. Here it is.”
LES CLAYPOOL: It was at that point that various labels were interested in us, and our manager at the time—Old Smilin’ Lefkowitz—was wheelin’ and a dealin’. But we felt, Let’s just go in and make this thing, and then we’ll have a stronger leg to stand on when we start negotiating. So we did—we actually went in and recorded the Frizzle Fry record before we had a record deal. I remember we were very adamant about working with a young engineer, because I had some bad experiences in the past with guys in the studio who were just a bit intimidating to a young musician such as myself and the rest of us. And had some experiences where we were sort of dominated by people who were supposedly more in the know. And plus, we were just young and arrogant. [Laughs] And felt we knew best. So we ended up working with Ron Rigler, but we brought Matt Winegar in again as a coproducer. We did that at Different Fur in San Francisco.
MATT WINEGAR: Frizzle Fry was great. It was really, really fun. We went in and tried to do one song with Howard Johnston, who was the studio owner. We tried to do that first, because it’s his studio, he’s going to know the place, and is going to have a better understanding of the console. They had a big SSL console, and I’d sure as hell never seen anything like that—other than in pictures. So we tried to use Howard, and Howard was just one of those eighties engineers, like, “Get everything real bright and pristine, and put it through the cleansing system.” We went in there, and we sort of struggled. We were like, “No. We want the sound to be a little more tough and a little more raw. A little more chaotic.” And he was just like, “I don’t get what you guys are talking about exactly.” So we did one tune . . . I wish I could remember what tune it was. It was probably like, “Groundhog’s Day,” or one of those five songs on the Sausage demo. We took cassettes home and we called each other the next day, and were like, “I don’t know, man, I’m just not feeling it. It’s not working.” So Les says, “Dude, you’ve got to engineer it yourself. We put on Sausage and Sausage is way cooler. So you’ve got to engineer it.”
I was fucking terrified to go in that studio and try to run that SSL, because I’d just never seen one before. I asked our friend Matt Wallace, who was a really successful record producer—and still a really close friend of mine to this day—and he goes, “Dude, it’s the same shit as your TASCAM eight-track. Do you have an echo setting on your TASCAM?” And I go, “Yeah, I have two.” And he goes, “All right, well, the SSL has eight. It looks crazier, but it’s just more of the same shit.” So that made me feel a little better.
We had everybody bring in a CD that they really liked, just to get inspiration for what we were going for. And it couldn’t have been weirder shit that they brought in. The elements didn’t fit together at all. I remember Tim brought in Siouxsie and the Banshees, which was so fucking weird. And Les brought in Yes’s Close to the Edge or whatever—early Yes—because the bass tones are just so fucking amazing.