CLAYPOOL: Yes, it was all about the trouser schnauzer. Actually we used to say, “Trouz, Trouz, drives the cows,” but one time when a bunch of us were frying on mushrooms out at the beach, we walked back to the car through a field of cows and I said, “Hey Trouz, now’s your chance! Get to drivin’ them cows!” He wouldn’t do it so I said he was scared of the cows. He didn’t like that too much. [Laughs]
So, back to my first concert, I drank three Löwenbräus on the way to the Cow Palace, which I’m sure Dan Maloney purchased. [Laughs] We used to get our beer from Nick’s Delicatessen, because Nick was Italian and thought it was bullshit that you had to wait until you were twenty-one to drink. So he would sell us teenagers beer. But he didn’t keep his beer very cold, so it was always kind of warm. So we drank these lukewarm Löwenbräus on the way to the Cow Palace. We stepped out, and I bought a scalper’s ticket—even though the show wasn’t sold out, we were worried it was sold out—on the street. So I paid too much for the ticket, barfed in the parking lot, and bought a bootleg T-shirt. I saw Pat Travers open for Rush, so I saw two of the greatest drummers on the planet and two of the greatest bass players on the planet at the time. Peter “Mars” Cowling on bass and Tommy Aldridge on drums with Pat Travers, and Geddy Lee and Neil Peart from Rush.
As a youngster, I started out like most, listening to all this rock, but I also had been into a lot of the soul and funk back in the day—I got turned on to the Isley Brothers, Brick, Stevie Wonder, the Ohio Players, and all these different things. As a bass player starting out, I was listening to John Paul Jones, Geddy Lee, and Chris Squire. I was such a huge Geddy fan. But, not having much money, I hardly had any albums. We had a couple of friends who had great record collections, and their walls were completely wall-papered with album covers. We’d go to their houses and sit around and listen to albums. So I was sitting there spouting off, like a young kid will, about Geddy Lee. And my friend said, “Y’know, I like Geddy. Geddy’s amazing. But you need to listen to some Larry Graham and Stanley Clarke.”
So he played me some Larry Graham, and just completely blew my mind. And one of the most amazing shows I’ve ever seen in my entire life was seeing SOS Band, Graham, and the Isley Brothers at the Oakland Coliseum. Me and my buddy Flouncin’ Fred, we were two little white suburban kids in the Oakland Coliseum and we stood out like sore thumbs! There wasn’t a lot of crossover back in those days. But it was like a religious experience. I would put it down as probably one of my top three shows—ever. And at the time, it was my top show ever, seeing Larry Graham come out there and strut and get the audience pumped up, and thump and pluck the hell out of that bass. That show was probably one of the most influential shows on my playing to this day. A few nights ago I got to meet Larry for the first time. I was doing an interview for this upcoming documentary about him, and the director invited me to a private jam Larry was doing at a radio station in Berkeley. Me and my buddy Jake went down there, and once again we were the only two white guys in the room. It was just a little KPFA studio, and there’s Larry Graham thumping away, kicking the shit out of everybody—literally four feet in front of my face. It was just another religious experience. It was unbelievable.
KIRK HAMMETT: It was funny, because in high school I was more of a nerdy kind of person, whereas Les was kind of popular. He went to all the dances and he went to the prom, he had a car and a nice-looking girlfriend. I’d see Les and I would think, Wow, this guy just has it all covered!
CHRIS “TROUZ” CUEVAS: Kirk looked like more of a hippie—big glasses and long hair, and kind of grungy. And Les was the direct opposite—he always wore tight jeans and colorful shirts. He had a pompadour hairstyle. They couldn’t have been more opposite. I was somewhere in the middle—a kind of hoodlum, lowrider rocker. So the three of us were very different in our sets of people we hung out with in high school. Kirk had Exodus out of high school, and Les was in a cover band called Tommy Crank. I would go see both of those bands and help move gear for Kirk’s band. And Les was in Blind Illusion for a while—I would roadie for them when they would play parties.
LES CLAYPOOL: He’s confused. I barely knew Chris in high school, mainly because he was never there. Early on, I hung out with those guys “out back,” where we would all go to smoke cigarettes. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the hot chicks weren’t hanging out with us “outbackers,” so in my sophomore year I befriended my longtime pal Flouncin’ Fred Heim and started hanging out in the halls where the girls were. At that age, pretty much everything I did was in direct pursuit of trying to get laid. Also, I didn’t have a pompadour in high school. It wasn’t until after high school, when I played for Hells Angels in biker bars with the Tommy Crank Band did I start sporting the pomp. That’s what all the tough guys flew. I wasn’t tough enough in high school to fly a pomp.
KIRK HAMMETT: And the band he played in at that time had all the best musicians . . . Not all the best musicians, but the driving force of this band Blind Illusion was the guitar player, Marc Biedermann. Just an amazing guitar player. I mean, even to this day I remember me and my friends watching Marc play, and thinking, Wow, this guy is going to be the biggest thing in the music scene once we all get out of school and go on our way. That guy is going to be a huge rock star for sure. But it turned out it just didn’t happen that way. But Les was in Blind Illusion—their songs were somewhat progressive. When he played with them, he brought the progressive factor up a few more notches. We all hung out in the same circle of friends, because all the musicians would kind of hang out and check out each other’s bands, and see who was up to what, and who had the best equipment, and who had the best songs, who was playing the best shows. It was a very friendly but competitive sort of atmosphere to be in.
LES CLAYPOOL: When I bought a bass, I was instantly in this band called Blind Illusion, which at the time, they called themselves “progressive metal.” It kind of sounded like a cross between Rush, Jethro Tull, and Sabbath. Lots of very, very intricate music. I played in that band for about a year, and just kind of got tired of that scene, and there were some personal issues—just band shit. So I went off, and I had this band S.T.A.R., Sax Trumpet and Rhythm. At that point, I was so much into the funk and the soul, and even a lot of the fusiony stuff that was going on, with Stanley Clarke, the Dixie Dregs, George Duke, Ronnie Laws, and all these different people. So I had this sort of soulful jazz band.
Then I played with Blind Illusion again, with a different lineup—I was with Blind Illusion three different times. Did that for a little while, then that fell apart again, and I went and played with the Tommy Crank Band, which was probably one of the best things for me. Basically, it was just a paycheck for me. Because I had this drummer that I would play with quite a lot, Mark Edgar, and he was playing in the Tommy Crank Band. And the Tommy Crank Band was basically an old rhythm-and-blues band that played Booker T. & the MG’s, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave, the Meters. And a lot of this stuff, I didn’t even know who the hell a lot of these artists were. Though I’d heard a lot of the music on AM radio growing up as a kid—a lot of Motown and whatnot. But it was funny, because I was learning Meters songs, and I didn’t even really figure out who the Meters were until years later. But I would learn these songs for this band. And I was the youngest guy in this band by far—some of the guys were in their thirties. And here I was, a nineteen-year-old kid.
We had a horn section—a sax and trumpet—Tommy played B3 and Rhodes, a guitar player, bass player, and drummer. One of the drummers we had at one point was Dave Bartlett from Tower of Power, and Norbert Stachel was in the band for a while, and he went on to play with Sheila E. It was a really, really cool band. But we basically played biker bars up in Northern California—and this was back when . . . there were no weekend Harley riders. None of these dentists on Harleys. It was like, Hells Angels. And that’s what I did every weekend, was play these bars. You’d play four sets a night, sometimes three to five nights a week. It really was a huge learning experience for me, because I learned all this old rhythm-and-blues music, playing with guys like Dave Bartlett, that just kept on me. Because I knew how to do all the noodly-noodly-noodly stuff, from playing all that progressive music in high school, and listening to Stanley Clarke and whatnot. But having to go play this other music for a living, and having the background of playing in the jazz band when I was high school, that stuff was very