back then. But he was an ex–Latino gang president who had gone into the military and learned to be an electronics technician. He looked very unassuming, unless he cholo-d himself up. But he could kick the shit out of people. And I remember we would be battling with skinheads left and right. I saw CG smash a couple of skinheads after a bunch of them jumped him, because the Broadway skinheads of the day tended to be pussies when they weren’t all ganged up.
TODD HUTH: The first shows we started playing—when Les and I were shifting drummers here and there—people would sit there and look at us, and go, “What the hell is this?” Nobody really got what we were doing. But people would encourage us and thought that we were good. So we kept going at it, and I was having fun.
KIRK HAMMETT: Les was writing the songs and Todd had such an unconventional sort of guitar-playing style. That was the blueprint right there for what Primus was going to become. I was so impressed, because it wasn’t really heavy metal, it wasn’t really funk, it wasn’t really rock—it was a whole slew of things thrown all together. And then you had Les’s whacky sense of humor and subject matter. I just thought, Wow! These guys are like the Talking Heads, but way cooler with a lot more energy. They didn’t come across pretentious or put on or anything. I was a big supporter of Primus for a long time. It was really something seeing Primus in its early days. But the template was already set. It was already there.
LES CLAYPOOL: Well, Perm Parker was the guy when we were in jazz band together—of all the drummers in the class, he was the only black guy. So we would just sit there and play all this funky stuff together: Rick James, Larry Graham, Brothers Johnson. He and I really connected well. So when he came back from the military, he was the first guy. I had him move into my apartment, and I went and lived at my grandmother’s house. Unfortunately, old Perm didn’t really have it together very well—he didn’t even have his own drums. So it didn’t last very long. So then we brought in my buddy Mark Edgar, he was the guy who had brought me into the Tommy Crank Band, and he actually played our first gig, at the Fab Mab in the Mabuhay Gardens.
That’s when we were getting that airplay on the Quake, so there were probably twenty people there, and we actually had a little following. But Mark wasn’t down with what we were down with. I remember Todd and I went to see Public Image Limited at the Fort Mason Center. It was all this crazy performance art going on. And I remember Mark going, “Why the hell do you want to go see Johnny Rotten? That’s not music, that’s just garbage. The new Chaka Khan record is really awesome!” We were just like, “You know what, dude? This isn’t going to work out.” So then we got Peter Libby. Peter Libby was kind of a local hero in Berkeley—he had this double bass thing going. He was a great player. I don’t remember why it didn’t work out, it just . . . didn’t work out. So then we had this guy Curveball for a while. He was my old roommate.
TODD HUTH: His singing is different. I remember back when we first started, he was always asking me, “Should we get a singer?” Because he’s not the most on-key guy. And I would always tell him, “Man, you’ve got a graphic voice. Just use it like a cartoon character.” So he’s like, “Okay. Well, if you don’t want to get a singer . . .” So he kept going on that. Just the fact that he stuck that out with his singing . . . and he’s probably one of the best entertainers I’ve ever seen. He had a lot—he still does—going for him at that time, so how could he fail?
ADAM GATES [Friend of band, the chap who plays “Bob Cock,” Electric Apricot actor]: I met Les in 1985. The band Primus was . . . this was quite some time before Larry had joined. It was Todd Huth, Les, and I think Peter Libby was playing drums when I first met them. Les was friends with a deejay named Rick Stuart who worked at a radio station called the Quake, and I was in a local band called Monkey Rhythm. Both of our bands had been playing around a bit. We went to the Quake—I think Les was just hanging out with Rick, and I went there with the band to try and see if Rick would play our music. And that’s how I met Les. We became pretty fast friends and started hanging out right after that.
At that time, they were significantly different than what they morphed into. The aggression was still there, it was still implied, but there was less distortion—particularly Les’s tone. He was playing through a weird Peavey guitar amp, I think. And his tone was a very treble-y one, it wasn’t low end. And certainly accentuated by Todd Huth’s guitar, which was very dry and a little overdriven. But they had this quality to them which was absolutely unlike anything going on in the Bay Area at that point. Thrash metal was starting to really thrive.
Me and Les hung out, and I think they were playing at the Mabuhay Gardens. I walked in, saw them playing, and was like, Who the fuck is this? Les was on stage with a bowler hat on—like he walked out of something like A Clockwork Orange. Playing to an empty club, and it was unabashedly weird. It took us awhile to figure it out. We’d gone on tour, and Les had given us the first cassette, and we worked it out. We thought, My god, we dig these guys, but they’re so fucking weird. No one’s ever going to get this. How wrong we were. Then we started playing tons of shows together.
LES CLAYPOOL: Ha, yeah, I remember that Peavey. It was Todd’s old guitar head that I ran though a bass cabinet because I couldn’t afford a proper bass amp. I still sport the ol’ bowler. Anyhow, we were always thinking, How can we get involved in a scene? Because we weren’t involved in the metal scene at all. We were kind of this weird band that nobody could put us with. Michael Bailey of the Berkeley Square was a big supporter in the early days. Now, he’s a Live Nation guy—he books the Fillmore and all that. He would put us on shows because he really liked us, but he never knew who to put us on with. We played with the Pop-O-Pies, the Swans—all these different bands we didn’t necessarily fit with. We were kind of this weirdo band. But then as Primus started becoming popular just in its own right, Chris Cuevas ended up working for us. And one day he was the manager, but that didn’t quite work out. After that, Trouz was our road manager for many years.
CHRIS “TROUZ” CUEVAS: We’ve all been really close for a long time. I worked for Primus for twelve or thirteen years, and then I did some time on the road with Kirk, as well. It’s kind of interesting—we all got into music, I got into the more business aspect of it, and they were both performers. Very interesting growing up around both of their scenes.
Chapter 3
The Gig That Should Not Be
LES CLAYPOOL: I guess I had seen Metallica once. Metallica had played the Kabuki Theater, and I’d gotten tickets. It was around Ride the Lightning. John Marshall was Kirk’s tech—we all went to high school together. So I got these tickets to go see Metallica, and me and Todd went. We had just come from hanging out at Live 105, with all these new wavers and whatnot. So we show up, and we’ve got these long trench coats on, my hair is all slicked back, and I’ve got these Stacy Adams shoes—I look like one of the guys from Morris Day and the Time. And we come walking into this Metallica show at the Kabuki, and there’s this writhing pit of kids, frothing. I’m seeing this energy, and I’m going, Shit, what is this? That was when they had the two pictures of the demons on the sides of the stage. It scared the shit out of me. But it was compelling.
I met Cliff Burton [Metallica bassist] right before he died, actually [Burton died in a tour bus accident, on September 27, 1986]. He came to a show, because Primus was playing this battle of the bands, and Faith No More was one of the bands. So it was us, Faith No More, and some other band that I can’t remember the name of. And Cliff was at the show, because he was good friends with Jim Martin and Mike Bordin. I knew he was the bass player for Metallica because Trouz’s mom was buddies with all of them—she helped them with their stuff in the early days. So he came up to me and said, “Hey, great bass playing.” And I said, “Thanks!” But that was the extent of it, and then he died like a month later or something. And then the battle of bands, neither us nor Faith No More won—this other band won. [Laughs]
I remember hearing through the grapevine, “Oh, Kirk joined this band Metallica, and they’ve got an album out.” Even having an album out in those days was like, “Oh my