Primus, Over the Electric Grapevine. Primus

ended up paying us back, but he went down in the rabbit hole for a while and it was pretty bad. So that’s what the song reflects.

      MATT WINEGAR: The “You Can’t Kill Michael Malloy” song was a thing I made at home, on a borrowed keyboard. It was just a piece of music that I woke up at three in the morning and had going through my head. I just went down and recorded it really quick. It was made right during those sessions, so I brought it over to the studio and was playing it in the morning. I usually listened to music before they showed up. And Les was like, “Hey, man, what is this?” And I was like, “I made this on my eight-track last night.” And he goes, “This is fucking cool. We should use this.” And I’m like, “You’re welcome to it. Use it.” He’s like, “Maybe we can use it as an intro for ‘Toys’.” We just spliced that sucker in. It was actually a two-and-a-half-minute thing, but on the Primus record, it’s just a thirty-second snippet of one part of it. But it was just this little homemade piece of music. So that was cool that it got left on there.

      TODD HUTH: I think Frizzle Fry is probably my favorite one. I think that the first one, Suck on This, I like the songs, I don’t like the recording as much. Frizzle Fry I like just because they’re songs that I wrote. Other than that, I like a lot of the songs that Primus did later. I guess I’m just partial to the second one because it has my signature on it a little bit.

      LES CLAYPOOL: For me, making videos for Primus was a huge thing. It was one of the things I was most excited about doing. And I always talked to guys in bands [who said], “Oh, I hate doing videos.” I loved it. Because I’m a film guy—I’ve always said that if I hadn’t of been a musician, I’d have been a filmmaker. I was making little claymation films and whatnot when I was a kid. I love film. It’s funny, I got into this argument with a person years ago—she was like, “Well, have you seen such-and-such new film?” I was like, “No.” She’s like, “Have you seen such-and-such new film?” “No.” “Well, how can you call yourself a film buff?” And I’m thinking to myself, Well, you name your favorite Elia Kazan film. It’s not necessarily, What’s the latest film in the theater? as much as all these classic old films—Frank Capra, Stanley Kubrick, Sergio Leone, and all these people that were my heroes. So when it came time to make videos, I was very excited. And I was always a huge animation buff. I remember watching SpongeBob before anybody even knew who the hell SpongeBob was. I didn’t even have kids yet, and I was watching SpongeBob Square Pants, because I thought it was incredibly creative and stylistically cool. Maybe I had kids . . . but they were too little.

      So anyway, “John the Fisherman,” we started talking to videomakers. Because back then, making a video was outrageously expensive. It’s not like today where you just go get a camera, Final Cut, or even iMovie, and you can make something. Back then, you couldn’t make anything. And me and Ler had these Super 8 cameras and we were filming all kinds of stuff. We’d buy these Super 8 cameras at flea markets and we were taking cameras and wrapping them in plastic baggies and putting them on the end of fishing poles, and tossing them out into the water. Just getting footage for what was to be our version of a “John the Fisherman” video, because we couldn’t find a director that we liked. We met all these guys—and I’m sure some of them have gone on to become huge directors—but it was just all the same. “A big shadow against a wall, and you’ll play in silhouette, as there’s somebody dancing through.” Just the same old shit.