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ОглавлениеChapter 6
Herb the Ginseng Drummer
LES CLAYPOOL: Larry and I had become pretty good friends, just from touring around in this box full of sweaty men, traveling the country, skateboarding and whatnot—smoking a shitload of weed. So when Todd bowed out, I said, “Well, dude, I’ve got to keep going. Is it okay if I keep going, and use the songs and the name?” And he said, “Sure, no worries.” So the first person I called was Larry, because we were such good friends. But the strange thing was I never really heard Larry play that much. Because he was the rhythm guitarist in a metal band, and usually you don’t hear the rhythm guitarist so much. [Laughs] It’s just part of the soundscape.
I would hear him play these little Robert Fripp licks once in a while during soundcheck, but I wasn’t sure the caliber of player he was. But he was a really good friend of mine and was a great hang, and I was like, Fuck it—I’m going to get Ler in there. I know he can play some Robert Fripp licks, at least. So I called him up and said, “Do you want to be in Primus?” And he was like, “Hell yeah.” I remember him telling me once that one of the reasons he joined was because I had just gotten this girlfriend—this tall, blond woman—that I met at one of our shows. I think he was pretty impressed by the notion that women like that were coming to our shows. [Laughs] Because you didn’t see gals like that at those metal shows.
LARRY LaLONDE: I had seen them a couple of times, and he was like, “I’ve got this band, Primus.” He’d played me a tape that sounded kind of crazy. So just from hanging out with him, I think I did lights for them a couple of times—I had no idea what I was doing. I think I’d seen them three or four times. Now, people have heard lots of crazy music. But back then, I didn’t really get it at first. I didn’t know what was going on. The few times I did see them, it was kind of different every time. So it was kind of hard to grasp on to what it actually was.
ADAM GATES: There’s so much [to remember about early Primus shows], but most of it was, “Remember we were on acid?” Me and Larry . . . Primus were playing a country club—this was before Larry was in the band—and we were doing lights for some reason, and we had taken acid. The country club had a tennis ball serving machine, and it was inside this small room, so we plugged it in, turned off the lights, and turned on the machine—balls flying everywhere, dosing, me and Larry. That is a fond memory!
LARRY LaLONDE: Todd was married and having kids—he had a real life. I don’t think he really had the time to sit around in a smelly van, driving around the country, playing for three people a night. But I did have time for that. [Laughs] They were left without a guitar player and Les called me up and said, “Hey, Todd left the band. Do you want to be in the band?” I was like, “Yeah!” He said, “Do you want to think about it?” And I was like, “Nope, I’m good. Let’s go.” That’s about all it took. Thank god there wasn’t an audition, because I probably wouldn’t have made it.
LES CLAYPOOL: So then Ler’s on board, and like I said, I didn’t know how well he could play. So I said, “Okay, learn these songs, we’re auditioning drummers.” I remember when we were auditioning these guys with Ler, he is fiddling with his amp and he’s kind of playing the song, and we start playing with this one guy, and he was just this super-fuse-o guy, and he was like, “Hey, let’s do a song in thirteen.” And he’s playing all this stuff. We’re like, What the hell? and we’re noodling along with him. Couldn’t even tell where the downbeat was or what the hell was going on. And then after he got done playing, a girl was there to audition, and she’s setting up and says, “I can’t play quite as well as him, but here we go.” And it was the polar opposite—we start playing with her, and she basically couldn’t even hardly play a backbeat. But you’ve got to be polite and at least go through a few songs before you say, “We’ll call ya if we need ya.”
So it was after that day, I looked at Ler and said, “There was this one guy that Todd and I auditioned that was actually really good. I think we should go with him.” Tim Alexander played with this other band called Major Lingo. But he heard the Sausage tape and got very excited about it, so he came down and auditioned for us. We were like, This guy’s pretty good. Kind of a strange guy . . . but he’s pretty damn good! But it was a totally different feel than Jayski. It was this Neil Peart/Bill Bruford style, whereas Jayski is this super crispy, funky guy. Jayski is more of a cross between Stewart Copeland and Dave Garibaldi. But you could feel the energy, you could feel the chemistry was good. And so we’re like, This guy is good, and we auditioned a few more people. Then I get a phone call from Todd, and he says, “I’ve got to quit the band.” So I’m halfway through interviewing drummers, and then the guitar player quits. I’m like, Holy shit.
So I called Tim Alexander and said, “All right, dude, you’ve got the gig. But I’ve got tell you, Todd’s not in the band anymore.” And he says, “What?” I say, “He quit, because he had a couple of babies. But I’ve got this guy Larry, and he’s amazing—it’s going to be really cool.” I remember just the sound of Tim’s voice, like, “Uh . . . okay.” So we got together with Tim and we played. I remember Ler spent most of the time fiddling with his damn amp and he kind of could half-ass play the songs. Some of those songs were pretty damn tough. I remember Tim coming to me after the jam and going, “Is he going to be able to pull this off?” And I was like, “Don’t worry, he’ll get it.”
TIM “HERB” ALEXANDER [Primus drummer 1989–1996, 2003–2010, 2013–present]: As long as I can remember I’ve been banging on things. I have a vague memory of reaching up over my head to hit a snare drum. One year, for Christmas, my mother gave me one of those toy sets made with paper drum heads and I immediately began to hit, hit, hit, which led to rip, rip, rip, and the fun was over. I remember being very disappointed because I knew I needed a real kit but I didn’t know why. There was a very strong feeling toward the drums.
When I was about eight years old, my mom and I lived in an apartment in a small town near Charleston, West Virginia. We had a couch that was very firm and hollow sounding, and I would put in the eight-track recording of Elvis Live at Madison Square Garden, and set up different-sized pillows so that the sound went high to low, like a drum set. I had a pair of drumsticks I got from somewhere, and I would play that concert from beginning to end. The drumming on that was really crazy with a lot of big tom rhythms and very energetic grooves. At the time I didn’t know anything about drums, but I could hear it. The drummer was Ronnie Tutt. I guess he might have been my very first influence.
We then moved to Riverview, Michigan, a few years later. That’s where I started to hit real drums. I listened to Aerosmith, the Cars, Led Zeppelin, Rush, Van Halen . . . all the big radio rock growing up in the seventies. I would air drum to all of those albums. With Rush, I knew every note of every album until the late-’80s. The same with Van Halen. I had pretend concerts in my living room. Sort of visualizing the future.
I had some friends that were also into music, and we would get together at my friend Brian Kirksey’s house, and also at my friend Vance Riley’s place—to drive the neighborhood crazy. Rehearsals were like a concert for us, and no concert would be complete without pyrotechnics, so we would set up flash pots in front of Brian’s garage and we would jam and set these things off like a real concert. The garage would fill with smoke and it felt awesome. We did our school’s version of The Gong Show, which was big at the time. And we played “Takin’ Care of Business” and “Train Kept A-Rollin’.” We took home the prize.
We also got offered to do a show at the Riverview Moose Lodge for some kind of Taco Tuesday or something. Brian, my friend Goob, and myself played our first show as “Oregon.” We were envisioning playing shows at Moose Lodges all over the state and then maybe the country, even the world! There were no limits to our vision. But Oregon didn’t last long, so the nation’s Moose Lodges were shit out of luck. The jamming was moved to our friend John Christy’s basement. His parents were so awesome and encouraged us to play and have a good time. Although sometimes his mom would yell down the stairs, “TURN THAT SHIT DOWN!” That phrase is probably the most used phrase of any young musician’s parents, and I still hear it to this day.
Off to Arizona when I was sixteen. My family moved to Phoenix when my stepfather got laid off in Michigan. After finishing high school, I was working random jobs like at the Foot Locker, pizza places, even digging plumbing ditches in the middle of summer in Phoenix in 105 degrees. I really wasn’t happy with the direction things were heading. I ended up at a navy recruiter testing for the nuclear program. I passed the first test and then I had to do a second test because of the advanced program. Thank god I ended up one point shy of passing—I get seasick! I can’t go into the navy! They said to come back in three months and retest. Sure.
I ended up working in a record store, which I liked but it still didn’t move me much. I was talking to my mom about things and she said the weirdest thing that I don’t think I would have ever thought to do: “Why don’t you look in the Yellow Pages and see if studios need a drummer?” Needless to say, I laughed. If only it was that easy. But after thinking about it, I decided to give it a shot. The second studio I called was auditioning drummers. How crazy. It was in the Yellow Pages all along. This was before the Internet. I did the audition and all I really could do was copy Neil Peart’s solo. Well, needless to say, they weren’t impressed. Not too many requests for Neil Peart wannabes.
But a guy said he knew a band looking for a drummer if I was interested. So I got the number and called the band. I set up an audition, packed my drums in cardboard boxes and pillowcases, and took a Greyhound bus to Flagstaff, where my girlfriend’s father gave me a ride to a ghost town called Jerome. It must have looked like I was moving in when I arrived with boxes and pillows. They let me audition, anyways. I ended up getting the gig. It was Major Lingo—a popular band in Arizona. The music was all original, which helped me learn to create original ideas. It was a mix of world beat, reggae, folk, rock, ska, and the kitchen sink.
After five years in Arizona, we decided to move to San Francisco and build our following. After a good effort, we ended up getting jobs to pay the rent. I worked at a café in Oakland on the late shift. It was then a friend of mine was playing a demo tape of Primus. A local band. I thought it was interesting and at the time I was looking to play. So he said they were looking for a drummer, and I said, “I play drums.” Well, he kind of laughed, and I said, “No, really, I do.” He got a number for me and I set up an audition. That was when I met Les and Todd. We played a bunch of Rush songs and had a good time. Les called me after doing the rest of the auditions and said he had good news and bad news. The good news was they liked me and offered me the gig. The bad news was that Todd had quit. So now what? Les set up our first rehearsal and invited a friend of his, Larry LaLonde. It went great and that became the new Primus.
LARRY LaLONDE: He was dressed really crazy. He had sort of MC Hammer pants on. He looked like he should have been playing with Enya or something—he had flowing, crazy clothes on. But he was the only guy who auditioned that was into the same music as us. We were all into Rush. So he stuck out as the only guy who stood out from everyone who was even close to being in our world. Our thing was pretty specific then too. It was going to take someone like Tim, who was an oddball kind of person.
TIM “HERB” ALEXANDER: My biggest influences were Neil Peart, John Bonham, Stewart Copeland. There were others over time. Rayford Griffin, Billy Cobham, Bill Bruford, Mark Brzezicki, and just various styles of music had an effect on me as well. Let’s not forget Ron Tutt.
LARRY LaLONDE: Les and Tim are definitely way different. Tim is very mellow, he’s very laid back. He’s a super nice guy. And they’re both guys that have a vision. When they have a vision of how they want things to go, they go down that road 100 percent. Both in different ways. They’re pretty normal dudes, for the most part. I get along with everybody though . . . at least that’s what I tell other people.
ADAM GATES: Les has certainly always driven it. It’s always kind of been his beast. He’s always been very specific about what he wants. For someone I’ve known most of my life, he hasn’t changed at all. His personality, sense of humor, and pretty intense seriousness have always been there. Larry is probably the sweetest guy I’ve ever met in my life. I consider him a best friend. Just the kindest human being on the earth, really. And also a really irreverent sense of humor. Just bizarre sense of humor. Tim was pretty dry. But he didn’t get phased by all of our rampant idiocy. Tim was just a constant there—he never jumped into the idiocy as much as maybe Les and Ler were doing. Which is probably a good thing, because it evened things out in a way.
LES CLAYPOOL: There’s actually some videotape out there of my very last show with Todd and Jay at the Omni. It was after we knew it was ending, and I actually even say, “I hope all you people still come and see me. These guys are leaving, but I’m continuing on, I got a couple of guys. We’re going to keep going.” We continued on, but it was definitely a shift.
DAVID LEFKOWITZ: The very first shows that we did with the new lineup would have been January 1989 at the Berkeley Square. We literally had the old band and the new band together, where I think the old band played a few songs, then the new guys joined, and then all five of the musicians played simultaneously. It was a real passing-of-the-torch kind of thing on stage.
Whereas Todd had a thinner guitar sound and was a little bit more of a one-note-at-a-time kind of guy—linear guitar lines—Larry had a much thicker tone and a chunkier metal sound. Tim obviously was less of a funk guy, and had prog elements. He certainly had this Rush/King Crimson thing going on. He was much more of the double-kick guy, which lent itself to the metal side a little bit. And then the polyrhythms and world music inclinations, and rototoms. He just had his own sound—it was a Tim sound. And suddenly, that was the sound of Primus. It was a whole other thing.
ADAM GATES: Todd’s parts were so beautifully considered in how they weaved in and out and sculpted the melody around Les’s complex bass lines, that when Les called me one day and said, “Well, Todd left the band,” I went, “My god . . . how are you going to replace him?” And the person he told me was Larry. We had both toured with Blind Illusion—Les did the first half of the tour and I did the other half, playing bass. I came to know Larry that way. When he told me Larry was doing it, it was absolutely the most perfect person for it. First of all, he could play Todd’s parts—which aren’t terribly easy to play. Larry’s technically really good. And then he plugged into the aggressive part the band was really headed to. So the transition wasn’t as bumpy as it might have been with another guitarist who couldn’t handle the parts right. When Tim came in, they always had good drummers—Les always played with good people. But I think Tim brought a personality—certainly the larger kit, this sort of even-churning rhythm thing that he does so well. That plugged in and gave it this component of . . . not Rush, but this churningness that locked in with Les’s bass in a way. Jay Lane touched on that churningness a little as well, but Jay was more funky. He would play with the space a little more than Tim would.
TODD HUTH: When Jay and I were playing, I think it was a little more funky/dissonant/note-y. Les handled most of the low end to it, and I did textural stuff within it. It wasn’t as “big band,” I would say. Because Jay was Mr. Funkster—with his hi-hat and all that kind of stuff. When I left, Les asked me if Larry could play my parts, so that they wouldn’t have to start over again. So I taught Larry the parts, and he kind of played it different. I couldn’t even tell you how he played it different—he didn’t play note-for-note what I did. He played it in “Larry’s style.”
LARRY LaLONDE: I think the handful of songs that they had, I tried to pretty much learn his parts from what tapes I could gather. And then over time, I sort of segued into doing it my own way—some of it. But a lot of it was Todd’s parts. It was really kind of bizarre, because I was coming in with this bizarre way of playing, which was a mix of weird Frank Zappa and King Crimson-y guitar. A lot of times, when I would go to play over some of the parts, my style was very similar to Todd’s, so I lucked out big time that way. A lot of times, I would hear what the part was, and I kind of already knew what it was, because it was the same bizarre things I was playing.
KIRK HAMMETT: I really think that Larry LaLonde was the best guitar player for Primus. I had known Larry because he had been in Possessed, and we also had the same guitar teacher, Joe Satriani. Larry and I were coming from very similar backgrounds. When I found out that he was going to join Primus, I just thought, YEAH! That’s the next level. Larry LaLonde had a lot of technique, and he had a lot of musical knowledge. When you compare that to Todd’s playing, it’s very evident that Larry fit better, because his chops were at the same level as Les’s and as Tim’s. And I always thought that Tim was just a fantastic drummer too. Totally polyrhythmic, had a great groove, and when you needed him to play a complex jazz beat, he could. And when you needed to throw down a heavy rock beat, he could. For me, the best lineup of Primus was with Larry, Herb, and Les.
ADAM GATES: They were ramping up the aggression—it was naturally occurring. Certainly, Les was exploring distortion more in his bass approach. Just getting a little bigger. I think he was certainly a big fan of Metallica, and he had a lot of references that I wouldn’t say were metal, but they were more aggressive. So that starts to ramp up. They were getting more popular—kind of the thrash/funk thing was starting to mean something in the Bay Area. So they were naturally going in that direction anyway.
TIM “HERB” ALEXANDER: I guess [the nickname “Herb”] could represent the world’s most powerful and versatile plant known to man, that cures illness, has multiple industrial uses, and is replenished in a few months rather than chopping down 200-year-old trees to wipe our asses on. A plant that is illegal, while [politicians] spend millions of dollars on bombs that are somewhat accurate and blow kids apart, while people lose their homes and jobs and retirement savings, and the executive bonuses skyrocket . . . [It] is not only legal but the American way. Oh yeah—the name Herb I got when I used to carry ginseng with me.
TODD HUTH: I think Herb was more of a rock drummer than Jay. Definitely. And a real big sound. Technically thoughtful, more than Jay. Jay is more finesse. With Jay and I, I think we were a more textural and finesse type band. With Larry and Herb, I’d say it was more of a rock band—a bigger stadium band.
CHRIS “TROUZ” CUEVAS: Tim really brought in that real “big rock” element, with Neil Peart [style drumming]. It eventually took it to the next level. It made them even more interesting to me.
ADAM GATES: That’s when you started noticing, Okay, they’re selling out Berkeley Square two nights in a row, and there’s this natural, organic thing going on, that any band that is successful usually experiences. And then it just started taking off.
MATT WINEGAR: Les would say just ridiculously funny shit on stage. He would talk to the people in the crowd, or get mad at somebody. Sort of like take care of it in a funny way. Back then, there were a lot of stupid motherfuckers jumping up on stage. And Les had a really good way of defusing that, by taking a playful shot at the person. The shows were always crazy and hectic. I did live sound for them a few times, and I just remember it being so stressful and hectic. I just said to Les, “I wasn’t cut out for this.” The guy who runs the house sound is always yelling at you and telling you you’re not doing something right, and there’s always a microphone that doesn’t work. I remember trying to fight my way to the stage when a kick drum fell out at the Omni, when I was doing sound for them. And I tried to run up to the stage to put the microphone back inside the bass drum, and I just got caught in this swirling mass of shirtless, sweaty people, punching each other in the face. It was totally not my thing. I was like, Fuck this shit. These are the people I walk in the other direction from in high school! I don’t need to be caught in a giant mess of thousands of these people. [Laughs] So that was the end of my live-sound thing.
DAVID LEFKOWITZ: I remember one four-day period in early- or mid-1989, where they opened for three different bands that were very far-flung. One of them was Testament at the Omni, one was Schoolly D at the Nightbreak—it’s referenced in “Harold of the Rocks”—and there was a third show . . . I don’t remember. There was a woman named Debbie Abono who had managed Larry’s band, Possessed, and almost all those East Bay thrash metal bands. I remember talking to her after Primus was on that Testament bill, and her making a comment to me, like, “When Primus was on stage, everybody was smiling. Whereas when all the metal bands were playing, it was a very serious thing.”
LARRY LaLONDE: Right when I joined, the band was already starting to get known, because I was still in high school, and there were people in my high school that knew of the band. So at that point, to me, that was like you were already on the way to somewhere if somebody knew about it. Slowly, the shows started to get a little bigger and then there started to become this Seattle-esque buzz sort of thing, where a lot of record labels were coming into town to check out all these bands. That was the first time I got the idea of, Oh, there is something starting to happen here. Of course, everyone got signed but us . . . which was awesome. [Laughs]