Squire stuff was all a hundred-watt Marshall just cranked up—that’s why it’s so awesomely gritty and nice and warm, but it’s still got a wiry top end, but still nice and distorted. Les was definitely chasing that sound, for sure. Which we sure as fuck didn’t come close to. [Laughs] It shows how inexperienced we were. None of us had any clue how to achieve anything like that. And Larry brought in Frank Zappa. And we’re like, “Okay, I don’t know how this pertains to what we’re trying to do sound-wise, but it’s cool—Frank Zappa!” It almost didn’t help us at all. I remember listening to those three things that the band members had brought, and it was hilarious.
DAVID LEFKOWITZ: There was that one group session, where about ten of us were in there doing some crazy backup vocal. The Fart Sandwich Posse. [Laughs] Mike Bordin from Faith No More was in on that. I remember when Larry joined, Larry and Les were almost inseparable from that point, and ultimately moved into a place in Berkeley. One of the things they were doing at the rehearsal studio was printing the T-shirts. I think they may have shared a rehearsal studio with Faith No More, so I guess Mike Bordin asked them to do some Faith No More shirts for them. And Mike was such a huge baseball fan with the San Francisco Giants . . . I don’t know who designed it, but there was this Mike Bordin–derived San Francisco Giants T-shirt, which Les and Larry printed for him.
MATT WINEGAR: We went back in there and we scheduled two weeks to do Frizzle Fry. Which is pretty tight timing-wise, but it was more than enough time to do what we needed to do. I just remember a lot of really late nights. I remember a few nights that were like three in the morning, and then sleep on the couch up in the lounge of the studio. The last time I was walking through the Mission District, I walked past [Different Fur] and was like, No fucking way! I knocked on the door, and they let me in. The room looked absolutely tiny. It seemed like this huge place [while recording Frizzle Fry], but I was probably seventeen years old. I was still looking at things through younger eyes.
But back to the story, we spent a lot of time getting everybody in a comfortable position, where they could play like they did in rehearsal. I always felt like Primus was always going to do their thing best if they could be close to each other and not closed off in a box with headphones on. It just fucks everything up when it comes to a band that really plays together—there’s no quicker way to destroy them than to just completely partition them off. It just sucks. You can immediately feel it. So we tried to keep them really close to each other. We put Les’s amp in the hallway. There was a side hallway kind of thing that connects the control room to the live room. So we stuck his amp in there and mic’d it up. And then we ran a cable up, so he could be close to the drums. We did have to use headphones, so he could hear himself, but they were still really close to each other, and it was still sort of like a rehearsal situation. And then Larry’s amp, we just put a bunch of gobos or baffles . . . we just made padded walls around it, and mic’d that sucker up.
I remember Tim’s drum set was fucking huge, man. It’s probably not even that big if you compare it to Rush’s drum kit. But I normally recorded drum kits that were like five-piece kits up until that time. I remember looking at Herb’s drum kit and going, “Holy fuck.” And Herb had these rototoms. These eight tiny drums. And I remember him telling me, “I want each drum to be in a different speaker.” And I was like, Oh god, help me! I put 57s in all eight of those drums, and put them up inside the drum, just so we could pan them around. It’s funny, because I can’t even mentally place where he played those on the Frizzle Fry record. But he obviously did, because I remember the specific request.
TIM “HERB” ALEXANDER: That would be the famous bong-water incident that you’ve been told already. [Alexander’s response to being asked what his memories were of the Frizzle Fry sessions.]
MATT WINEGAR: The bong-water incident. Mike Bordin—Puffy, from Faith No More—had brought over this giant bong. It was definitely the biggest bong I’ve ever seen. It was tall. And they were smoking this giant bong. We were working, and I came out of the live room, and I was trying to express some idea, and I tend to express myself with my hands. And I just, bonk, hit the bong with my arm. And Puffy had set it up on the side of the console—there’s a little table on the side of the SSL console. And I remember that thing falling in like slow motion. It tipped, and it went right across the console. The center section of the console—the heart and soul of the console. And it went into a bunch of faders as well. I just couldn’t fucking believe it.
So Puffy grabs his bong and is like, “I’m out of here, man!” And he takes off—he didn’t want anything to do with what was going on. He knew it was bad. And poor Ron, who was the assistant, was like, “How much went in there?” I was like, “I think a pretty good amount, man.” We’re getting paper towels and toilet paper, trying to soak it up. I’m like, “I don’t know—it still works and it’s still on.” So we’re like, “Maybe we’ll just keep working. Maybe it’s not that bad. Maybe it just drained to the bottom of the console and it just needs to be cleaned out at the bottom.” We didn’t know how a console worked or how it was set up. So we kept working, and I remember looking up at the computer screen—the SSLs had this really primitive computer screen, that would show the levels of each fader. And I remember seeing the fader displays up on the monitor changing by themselves. And then we’re still working . . . and I totally smell smoke.
LARRY LaLONDE: That was crazy! I was sitting in the back of the room, and I just remember everyone going, “Oh shit!” They had spilled the bong into the number one fader, and the smoke came out eight feet away from inside another fader. I was like, “That is not good.”
MATT WINEGAR: Man, I could smell the burning electronics. We look over, and there’s this really intense, thin stream of smoke, coming out of the center section of the console. I was like, “Oh my god! The console’s smoking!” And freaking the fuck out—this is an SSL. It’s a state-of-the-art console. To this day, most big albums are mixed on an SSL. It’s an unbelievably famous console to this day. And god knows how much that thing cost back then, new. It must have been worth a fortune. And the console is smoking, and everybody is flipping the fuck out. I’m yelling, “Turn it off! Turn it off!” And Ron is like, “You don’t understand. There is no on/off switch for this console. You have to go down to the basement and throw this Frankenstein switch to turn the damn thing off.” So he runs out to find the electrical panel, and throws the Frankenstein switch that shuts the thing off. And it was smoking, man—it probably would have caught fire at some point. It was bad news. We all ran out to find the power, we come back in, and Les is taking the faders out with a screwdriver! And he’s got RadioShack contact cleaner, which is like electronic spray cleanser—I don’t even know where he got this shit. He’s like, “Dude, I can totally clean this shit out.” And Ron is like, “What the fuck are you doing?! Put the screws back in—do not fuck with that console!” We were just in shock.
LES CLAYPOOL: I used to be a bench tech for this audio company, so I was like, “I’ll fix it!” I started unscrewing the console—I’m taking the console apart, and these guys are going, “What the hell?!” I ended up pulling a bunch of faders out and we mopped it out, and it smelled like a big old dirty bong still. We were spraying some Ozium around, which was probably the stupidest thing we could possibly do. We ended up not being able to fix the console.
MATT WINEGAR: I didn’t even smoke weed, but being in that control room and the concentration of weed, I’m pretty sure I was stoned. I remember being really freaked out and really scared. I took the BART home—we take rapid transit around that area—and I went right to sleep. I woke up, and my first thought was, I think that was just a bad dream. Then I thought for another second, and I was like, Nope. That totally happened. Ugh, fuck. I’m probably going to be paying off this million-dollar console for the rest of my life. $250 here and $250 there. [Laughs]
Susan [Skaggs, the studio’s co-owner] called, and she had just spoken to Les. She goes, “I just wanted to call and say it’s the second engineer’s job to make sure that all beverages are not anywhere on the console’s side tables or patch bay.” So immediately I go, “Beverages?” I just rolled with it.