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Chapter 5

Then Along Came Ler

LES CLAYPOOL: I had been touring with Blind Illusion, because they had called me a year or so prior to that—their bass player had quit the band. So Marc Biedermann said, “We’ve got this record deal. Come be on the record. If you’re on the record, we’ll buy you a new bass amp.” So I was like, “Okay, cool.” I got a new bass amp out of the deal, and I made the record, and then I did a couple of tours with them. During that time, they had this guitarist in the band, who was playing rhythm guitar, whose name was Larry.

LARRY LaLONDE [Primus guitarist 1989–present]: I’m from El Sobrante, California. Basically, got into music because of this guy who lived next door to me. This kid that had long hair, he had a guitar, and it looked cool. [Laughs] Then a friend of mine in seventh grade said, “Hey, I’ve got tickets to go see Rush.” I was like, “Awesome. What’s Rush?” I had no idea—I didn’t know what a concert was, I didn’t know what any of this stuff was. So we went to see Rush, and I was like, “This is killer!” So when I put that together—with the guy next door having a guitar—it made me want to get a guitar.

I was taking lessons from this guy around where I lived, George Cole, and he was a student of Joe Satriani’s. I slowly started finding out through all the other kids my age group around the Bay Area that took lessons, all of our teachers took lessons from Joe Satriani. So he was kind of this mythical kind of guy, who we had heard was better than Eddie Van Halen—which at the time, it was like, Is that possible?! And then I just went in one day to this music store in Berkeley to buy an amp, and on the wall it said, Sign up for guitar lessons: Joe Satriani. And I was like, I think that’s that dude! So I signed up and totally just lucked out that it was him. Joe wasn’t famous yet, none of his students were really famous—it was probably right on the cusp of Steve Vai [who was an earlier student of Satriani’s] getting famous. But it was definitely one of those things where it was like, I couldn’t believe that Joe wasn’t famous, because I never heard anybody play guitar like that.

Definitely, the first [guitar influence] was Eddie Van Halen. By far. That was the main one for a really long time. And Randy Rhoads. And then eventually Frank Zappa, Adrian Belew, Robert Fripp, Jerry Garcia—that’s the main crew. As far as guitars, the very first one I had was a Hondo II. I’m not really sure why they had to put the “II” on there—“Hondo I” was taken already? [Laughs] That guitar was so great. I eventually traded it for a phaser pedal or something, and then I ended up with this Strat that I bought at Guitar Center, back when guitars weren’t really that expensive. And had that one guitar until even after the first couple of Primus records. I had set it up myself, and didn’t know what I was doing—nobody else changed the strings. So it turned out that this guitar was pretty much unplayable to anybody else but me. Because other people would pick it up and say, “You actually play this guitar?” I added [a Floyd Rose tremolo system]—I took it in to Oakland and they routed it out and put the whole thing in. Basically, every terrible idea you could do to a guitar, I had done to that one.

In high school my best friend was Jeff Becerra—who was the singer in Possessed—and we had another band called Blizzard. [Laughs] That’s the kind of name you come up with when you’re in tenth grade. So I think we kicked him out of Blizzard because he was a troublemaker. And then he ended up in Possessed, and then when Possessed got rid of the guitar player he asked me if I wanted to join. I was like, “Let’s do it!”

It was crazy, because I was fifteen. There wasn’t much of a scene, as far as anyone knowing about death metal. We had heard Slayer, and that was a big influence. But we had only heard Slayer on college radio, and then you’d have to actually take a train and walk pretty far to a record store that had Slayer records. It was still super underground. Basically, we went into record, and Combat Records gave us some kind of budget. We went in and blasted it out in a week [the Seven Churches album]. It was really about this underdog music—getting out this crazy music that, of course, we had to throw this satanic thing on top of, just to make it even harder to digest for anybody. It was kind of one of those things where you see how far you can push it.

We had a week to do it—we had to do it on Easter vacation, because myself and Jeff were in tenth or eleventh grade. So the week we had off for Easter vacation, we went into this recording studio where you could actually live—they had a little place where you could hang out. Looking back, it probably wasn’t the most appropriate thing for a fifteen-year-old to be doing—hanging out, living at this studio, doing god knows what, and recording satanic death metal. I just remember that and the whole trying-to-freak-people-out-with-the-satanic-death-metal thing, and different album cover ideas, and trying to make it as crazy as possible. Mostly, I just remember from that time trying to see what you could get away with, and seeing how freaked out and offended people could get by the music. The funny thing about it was, no one was into satan or even knew what any of that stuff was. We just knew it got such a reaction that we were like, “Oh, let’s go with this!”

After a couple of years in Possessed, my influences started going more toward King Crimson, Grateful Dead, and Frank Zappa. So the metal thing kind of went from being super trying-to-break-new-ground-and-invent-new-stuff to really being pigeonholed and boxed in, as far as what you could do. So my friend Mike Miner, who was also in Blizzard, he ended up in the band Blind Illusion. I think it turned out that everybody that played an instrument in the Bay Area had been in this band at one point. They needed a guitar player—as I heard they did many times—so I ended up in that band. And Les just happened to be in and out of that band at the time. That’s where I met up with Les.

He was kind of in the same zone, of not really caring about anything except trying to make crazy music. He was wearing two different-colored shoes, which I appreciated for some reason. I thought that was a good idea—I don’t know why. We kind of hit it off, because we were on the same plane, as far as just trying to have fun and trying to push music boundaries.

DAVID LEFKOWITZ: At some point in ’88, the Blind Illusion record [The Sane Asylum] was coming out, and that band didn’t have any management. Les wanted to devote some time to touring in Blind Illusion, to support that album, but he was worried that it would take away from Primus. So the remedy seemed to be to get me to manage Blind Illusion, so that I could help keep things in control, so that Les could still do all that he needed to with Primus at the same time.

I ultimately had a roster of many of the club headlining acts in the Bay Area. For example, Nightbreak was a big club on Haight Street that everybody loved to play. It maybe held 200 or 250 people at most. But I was representing five out of the eight weekend-night headliners in a given month. So, as a result, when national acts would come to town and play any number of venues—and they didn’t have opening acts—I was able to get bands that I booked as the opening act.

I specifically remember both Primus and the Limbomaniacs opening for Fishbone at the Stone on Broadway. Primus opened for the Chili Peppers at the Fillmore. And I remember in late-1988, there was a lineup of the Chili Peppers that never actually made it on to an album, where they had two black members—Dead Kennedys drummer D.H. Peligro and Parliament Funkadelic guitarist Blackbyrd McKnight. At the time, Flea’s wife was pregnant and Todd Huth’s wife was pregnant. Primus opened for the Chili Peppers at the Omni, as well as a place in Sonoma County called the Cotati Cabaret. I remember both Flea and Todd Huth had pagers on, in case their wives went into labor.

MATT WINEGAR: I remember going back there [at another early show] and watching Flea and Les sitting back there, playing bass face-to-face—all intense. Slapping basses, like, “What do you do? Slap it this way?”

LARRY LaLONDE: I think [Kirk Hammett] probably had something to do with some sort of funding during it [the recording of The Sane Asylum, which lists Hammett as a coproducer with Marc Biedermann]. [Laughs] I remember hanging out with Kirk a lot, but I don’t know how much producing he actually did. Who knows—I wasn’t there for a lot of it.

KIRK HAMMETT: Les was great—he walks right in, he played his parts very quickly and very accurately, and then was gone again. It was very difficult for him to be in Blind Illusion, because the guitar player was the main songwriter and called all the shots. I think there might not have been enough creative room for Les and the guitar player, Marc Biedermann, coexisting. I always thought that Les was better on his own, anyway. And his songs, when he did play his songs with Blind Illusion, they stuck out like sore thumbs. I remember there was a song that he wrote called “Pinstripe Man” or something like that, and it was so funky and so different from the rest of Blind Illusion’s songs. It was just very obvious that it was being written by someone else other than the guitar player. A lot of Blind Illusion songs were kind of Black Sabbath-y, but progressive at the same time. And Les’s songs, like I said, were funky, melodic, and quirky.

LES CLAYPOOL: There wasn’t much to it for me—I just came in and did my bit. I think there’s been more made of my involvement in Blind Illusion than there actually was. In the early days, in high school, I was much more involved. But by the time we made The Sane Asylum, I didn’t write any of those songs, I wasn’t around when any of those songs were written. Some of the songs I don’t even play bass on. I came in, played my parts, hung out, it was a good time—those guys are super-fun guys. And I got my free bass amp out of it, and did a couple of tours. And that’s where I learned to smoke weed. I smoked weed with those guys in high school, especially Marc . . . and I’m not trying to undermine Marc. Marc was a spectacular guitarist, an amazing guitarist. And unfortunately, he had some issues with substances and whatnot. He could have been one of the best players on the planet for that kind of music. But unfortunately, he had some issues—he kept falling out, he kept undermining himself with these issues. It’s sad. And I’ve seen that a lot over the years, guys that were spectacular, and they fall out of the game for some reason or another, not necessarily always because of substances, but for various reasons.

I don’t want to take anything away from Marc, because he was the guy that basically got me started playing bass. I was learning how to play his songs, but then I started watching these other players, and learning how to thump and pluck and all this stuff. But recording the Blind Illusion album, it was fun. What had happened was I was in the band in high school, when I first got started. I didn’t even know how to play music, I just learned how to play his songs. We were very good friends, and he’s the one who first got me started playing the bass. Then I discovered Stanley Clarke and Larry Graham, and I just didn’t want to be a metal guy. Metal back then was a different thing. I went and did my own thing, and played in the band again just out of high school, and it sort of fell apart again. But that’s where I met my good friend Bryan Kehoe, because he was playing in the band. And then I did Primus, the Tommy Crank Band, and these other things.

Then a good friend of ours, Gino, was playing bass in Blind Illusion, and that’s when metal became what people knew metal was. That’s when Metallica and those things were becoming popular. And I was somewhat oblivious to all of that. And when I did the Metallica audition, Biedermann had heard that I had auditioned for Metallica, and was like, “Shit, I’m going to get Les to play with us.” Gino had left the band, and I went in to take his place to make this record. But I was definitely a hired gun the last time through.

When Marc asked me to do the Blind Illusion thing, I went down and played with those guys, and I had to learn all these intricate metal parts. It was fun for me. And playing that stuff with Blind Illusion is partially why some of the songs, like “Frizzle Fry,” came about. The original “Too Many Puppies” was double time of what it is now, as far as the backbeat. And then playing this metal, and when Herb showed up, he just played it half time.

LARRY LaLONDE: It was a pretty insane scene then. We were both kind of on the outside and came in and played on this record. Marc had gotten a budget to record this thing, so we weren’t really a huge part of it.

BUZZ OSBORNE [The Melvins singer and guitarist]: The first time I saw those guys play was in a different band—Blind Illusion. If I’m not mistaken, it was Les and Larry, with a bunch of other guys. They had some hippie guy playing a stick with a string on it, dancing around out front. Blind Illusion was cool, but I like Primus a lot more than that. That was the first time I saw those guys play. They seemed like competent musicians.

ADAM GATES: They needed a bass player. [After Les exited Blind Illusion in 1988, Gates filled in as bassist.] We would show up in like, Cincinnati, and the promoter would come out and say, “What show? What are you talking about?” And we’d just play for the promoter. It was a tour fueled by LSD. Good times!