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Chapter 7

Suck on This

LES CLAYPOOL: A month later [after the Les-Ler-Herb lineup was solidified], we recorded our first album, Suck on This.

MATT WINEGAR: After we did the Sausage demo, Les said, “I want to do a live thing at Berkeley Square.” What we made the Sausage demo on was this little all-in-one recorder. It was an eight-track. So you had eight tracks, and a little eight-channel mixer board—all built into one unit. A TASCAM 388. It’s sort of become popular with indie, lo-fi, like, New York musicians. It’s strange sounding—it definitely had a personality, that deck, that we always liked a lot. It was straight out lo-fi, but we always liked the quality of it. It’s kind of like using eight millimeter or something. That’s all we had, and at that point, everything was borrowed anyway. So he’s like, “Why don’t you just grab the eight-track, we’ll go into Berkeley Square, and we’ll do this thing?” And I was going, Oh man . . . this is going to be impossible. Once again, Les just making something impossible go down. So it was two nights, and they were playing with Faith No More, which made it interesting. Primus would have packed the place by themselves, but Primus and Faith No More, it was just pure insanity. It was packed beyond belief. Not to mention that somebody gave me ecstasy on that first night, as well. I had never had that before, so I was like, staring at a beer can for twenty minutes at one point. [Laughs]

DAVID LEFKOWITZ: There were two shows recorded at Berkeley Square—one was headlining, and one was opening for Faith No More. And by the way, Faith No More, when they were losing their original singer, Chuck Mosley, and were looking for a new singer, they definitely saw Mike Patton for the first time opening for Primus [with Mr. Bungle]. And we had done some shows in LA opening for them, back in the Chuck era.

MATT WINEGAR: We loaded everything in there, and I think we pretty much decided to use whatever stage mics they had, because to do a professional live recording, you have to rent an isolated splitter that splits the signals, or run separate lines if you want recording microphones up on stage. It’s a pretty complicated process. And the fact that we sort of stumbled in there with this junky equipment, and used these old, beer-soaked stage mics. We needed more than the eight channels—we could only get eight channels, and it was supposed to be something like twelve total. We needed another mixer—of course, none of us knew anyone with a mixer. But then Tim Alexander said, “Oh, I do know somebody who has a mixer.” He brought this giant piece-of-shit mic mixer. So we submixed all the tom mics on that thing, and then just ran it onto one track. It was so ghetto, it was unbelievable. Technically, I can’t even believe we got something that could ever be pressed to vinyl and sold—let alone be listenable. Some people might argue that it’s not listenable at this point. [Laughs] But I think the performances are awesome, but it just sort of doesn’t matter. It can be a cassette deck, who cares?

So we loaded all this stuff into the back of Berkeley Square. The plan was to record two nights, and that way we would have two takes for each song, to be able to choose from. But it was just unbelievably hectic and crazy. I remember you’d come out of the back area where the recording equipment was—I had some headphones back there—and just went back, got levels, and we adjusted the mics the best we could. There was no drum overhead from the PA, so we ended up duct-taping a SM58—a cheap vocal mic—by the cable on the ceiling of the stage. It just hung down. And that became the audience mic, because there is no audience mic, so in between songs it would just be this faint “Yeah!” and clapping sound. So we would take that drum overhead mic and just blast it, because it was the only one that had any kind of crowd noise. It was really rinky-dink and duct-taped together.

We recorded those two nights, and I think if anything was used from the first night, it was maybe one song. I remember they did the Ted Nugent cover [“Wang Dang Sweet Poontang”], that wasn’t included. It was already slated to be our tape-changing song, because the reels would run out at a certain point. We timed it out so that I’d step up on stage and go, “The reels are running out!” Les would go, “Okay, we’ll do the Ted Nugent song while you go put a new reel up.” So I’d have to put that thing in rewind and get that reel off there, and pop a new reel of tape on there. And then be like, “Okay, it’s recording!” I do remember Les screwing up—a song wasn’t going well halfway through—and he stopped and said, “All right, we’re going to do that again.” It’s like getting a one-take recording—you’ve got one chance with the dang thing, and it’s going to be released. You want to get something that doesn’t have some horrible wrong note on it or a huge mistake. But I don’t think he did that for more than one tune. Maybe two.

LES CLAYPOOL: I talked my dad into loaning me money. And my dad doesn’t have a lot of money—he was an auto mechanic. He loaned us three thousand dollars so we could record and print up a thousand records [and issue it via Claypool’s own label, Prawn Song].

LARRY LaLONDE: It was originally going to be a demo, because back in those days you needed a demo to give the clubs to get a gig. Then that turned into Les being like, “Why don’t we just press this into an album, and take it around to college radio?” So I was like, “All right. Good idea.” Les was very good at having ideas like that, because I would have never thought that was possible.

MATT WINEGAR: [Suck on This] wasn’t up to Sausage level. I don’t think there’s even a surviving version of Sausage that sounds like the original tape, because it was mixed to a cassette and then dubbed to another cassette. I know there are versions on YouTube, but they just sound underwater, crazy bad. The actual, original Sausage recording was pretty dang cool. It’s just sad that we didn’t have the technology to mix it down to anything. That’s a really interesting thing about Suck on This—when we mixed it down, we didn’t have a DAT [Digital Audio Tape] machine. Which was kind of the standard, you’d go rent a DAT machine. It was a horrible format. But it was the best you could get for a home situation, by far.

We certainly didn’t have a professional analog mix-down two-track deck at that point. Suck on This was actually mixed down, to my mom’s VCR! We fucking unplugged the thing from my mom’s television set and carried it into the little spare bedroom, where we mixed Suck on This. We mixed that sucker to my mom’s piece-of-shit VCR, onto a videotape. Not only that, but we’re at my mom’s house, mixing this record. And I remember Puffy—Mike Bordin from Faith No More—was there. My older brother, who always gave me shit and was like, “Why are you doing this stupid music bullshit?” When Puffy came over, he goes, “I’ve seen that guy before.” You can’t miss Puffy. And I’m like, “Yeah, he’s the drummer for Faith No More.” For once in my life, my brother was like, “Whoa, okay!” So we mixed it down in a spare bedroom and I gave Les the videotape and said, “Here’s the mix. Good luck.” God knows what the poor mastering engineer did when Les sent him a shitty videotape. The guy must have been horrified. But it was all we had. It was a small step up from a cassette, so we figured, “Hey, it’s better than a cassette.”

It was totally self-funded, and after the pressings came back, I remember Les coming by and dropping off a bunch of pressings, and telling a story about giving it to family members. I’ll never forget Les telling a story about one of his relatives having a stroke or something. He gave the record to him and his relative said, “Ham sandwich.” I think it was one of those neurological disorder things, where the words just come out—like, the brain’s been rewired to replace some words with other words. So instead of saying whatever he was trying to say, he looked at the album and said, “Ham sandwich.”

LES CLAYPOOL: I had a buddy of mine make the sculpture for the album cover—old Lance Link—and then I painted the sculpture. Bosco, who is Mirv’s brother, who worked for Guitar Player magazine and whatnot, did the photography. And he did the effects on the photography and did all the art layout. And there it was—we had a thousand of these things. Ler and I would drive around in my little Karmann Ghia to record stores and deliver them ourselves. “How many do you want? . . . Wow, they took five!”

MATT WINEGAR: Les and his piece-of-shit Karmann Ghia car . . . He used to have to touch these two wires to start up this Karmann Ghia back then! It didn’t have a fucking ignition in it. He basically was hot-wiring his car every time he was starting it up. He had a big stack of records in that Karmann Ghia, and I remember driving to some record stores with him, and, “Hey, we dropped off five copies to this record store,” and then, “Five copies to this record store.” Les was delivering those albums and making whatever little deals with these record stores. I don’t know what it was—if we dropped them off and he gets paid whenever they sell, and then he had to drive back to pick up whatever money it earned. But it must have been Les on the phone, making the calls, because he was driving around himself. I always thought that was so cool. It’s like, “Hey, man, Les is driving all over the Bay Area to these little mom-and-pop record stores, dropping off five or ten records.”

LES CLAYPOOL: We sold through that first thousand pretty quick, and we took that money and made another thousand, and then sold through those pretty quick. Took that money and made another thousand, and Rough Trade Records said, “Hey, we want to do it.” So we did a distribution deal with them, and paid my father back.

DAVID LEFKOWITZ: Out of that first thousand, I probably took at least a quarter of those for business purposes. Between the band and myself, we would go around to stores in the Bay Area, where they would take these records from us on consignment. With the other 250 copies that I had, I did whatever I could to push things forward business-wise, which included sending them to record companies, music press, distributors, and college radio. I would take copies of the CMJ Report, look at every playlist of every college station in America, and circle the ones based on what they were currently playing that would potentially consider playing Primus. There was a one-year period where I had moved out of that bigger company and was just working out of my bedroom in Haight. We just boxed up a couple hundred of these vinyl albums, carted this gigantic box on a skateboard downtown several blocks to the post office, and mailed them out.

And it charted in the Top 100 on CMJ—nationally! One of the guys from CMJ had moved out to the Bay Area and wound up becoming a friend—Dave Margolis. And he gave us a feature in the CMJ Report, on the cover. The next thing was that we wanted to do some touring on a national basis, and there was a booking agency at the time, Bulging Eye, based in San Francisco. They had a pretty incredible roster—Nirvana was on there, and a number of other Seattle bands. This was in ’89. Anyway, we did this ramshackle kind of tour—we headlined some shows which were probably hit-or-miss, we opened for some bands here and there. But the ultimate show was in October of that year out at the CMJ convention—it was opening a bill that was headlined by Soundgarden, somewhere on the campus of NYU. I know White Zombie was on the bill, so that was pretty cool.

KIM THAYIL [Soundgarden guitarist]: I had Suck on This, and that was given to me by, I think, our manager at the time, Susan Silver. She said it was a band that was getting a lot of attention in the Bay Area and, I think, in LA. She gave me a copy and wanted to know what I thought. I think at the time they were interested in our opinion about Primus because we were thinking about touring with them or something like that. But there was a lot of buzz about them at the time, when Suck on This came out. And it was the bass playing, and Larry came from Possessed. And, of course, Primus is very different from Possessed. So they kind of had your pedigree of sorts. Everybody was raving about the bass player.

They weren’t some funk-metal party band. It’s hard to even describe them as funk metal. It really is like sort of cartoon funk or something. It definitely had that odd element, with a cartoon-soundtrack sort of sound, which is certainly that strange element that has that humorous . . . It’s odd, but there’s a humorous quality to the rhythmic and melodic lines. The kind of thing you might see in the Butthole Surfers or Captain Beefheart. And in spite of the beauty and sincerity of the work of Tom Waits—definitely, also Tom Waits.

DAVID LEFKOWITZ: So we started selling these copies of the album—we quickly ran out of the remaining retail copies that we had. There is a company called Rough Trade, a British label, that was not only a distributor of albums—both in the US and in Europe—but they also had these big retail stores. And there was a Rough Trade record shop on Haight Street. That was one of the places that took our product and was selling it. Because they were an American distributor, they caught wind of how the sales were doing and told us they’d want to distribute the record.

If I’m not mistaken, they gave us an advance to go and manufacture another couple thousand. Suddenly, it was in stores all over the country. I think it ultimately got to like five thousand sales, at which point, now we had some of these independent labels calling me back and getting interested. Caroline was one of those, Relativity was another, and a number of other ones. But the thing I liked about Caroline and Relativity was that they were both companies that were large independent distributors.

I think what tipped the scales in Caroline’s favor was the short-term nature of the deal. Relativity was trying to be more like a major label, and signing bands for longer-term deals. And I know that, because that’s who we signed the Limbomaniacs to. But Caroline, they were more interested in the studio debut album. The idea was, they would give us an advance to go and record the studio album. And then six months after the release of that, they would reissue Suck on This, worldwide. Their distribution in Europe was through Virgin, so it was basically major distribution in Europe.

TIM “HERB” ALEXANDER: We thought it would be cool to make an album and send it to all the colleges and see who liked it. Those that liked it told us good places to play in their town, and we did our first US tour in an RV that Les borrowed money to buy.

CHRIS “TROUZ” CUEVAS: Around the first record/first tour [is when Cuevas began working as Primus’s tour manager]. And I also did all of the accounting too, which most tour managers do. First, I did it all, and then eventually we were able to hire a production manager/sound person, who would deal with the technical side, and I would deal with more of the band/logistical side.

We took a motor home out some time around Suck on This came out. Did some camping, slept on people’s couches. We did one tour after that on the Amtrak to Colorado. We went from a van, to a motor home, to a train. It took awhile to get into the first shitty bus—that was probably around the second record, I think.

I didn’t really know what I wanted to do for a career, so this sort of opened up this whole new avenue to me. I thought I became really good at it. And since Primus was growing, I was growing as a tour manager, and started to get recognized and asked by other bands to work for them. Gradually, my salary went up and up and up. I definitely am grateful for that opportunity. [Cuevas would remain as Primus’s tour manager for twelve years.]

KIM THAYIL: The first time I met the guys in Primus, they opened for us—or we opened for them, I can’t remember—in St. Louis, at a venue called Mississippi Nights. I remember talking with Les and Larry afterward—I don’t think it was a tour bus, but they had an RV or a Winnebago. And specifically, I talked to them about Captain Beefheart and the Butthole Surfers. And they didn’t seem to be well acquainted with either band. But they were very much into Tom Waits. Which surprised me—sometimes I thought of Tom Waits as the acoustic Butthole Surfers. Or the Butthole Surfers being the acid-drenched electric psychedelic Tom Waits. We played a few shows with Primus around then, but that was the one that I remember, because we got to sit down and watch them, and we went to go talk to them.

BUZZ OSBORNE: I thought that Primus—the first time I heard them—was like a combination of the Residents mixed with Captain Beefheart, and Larry Graham thrown in there. That was my impression of it. Unfortunately for them, they’re lumped into that Red Hot Chili Peppers kind of thing a little bit more than they probably deserve. That is not my thing. That’s not my world. That kind of music is like the soundtrack to a date rape at a frat party. I’ve never been interested in the beer-bong set. And when I lived in San Francisco, when I first moved there in the mid-’80s, it was funk metal bands and bands that sounded like Metallica. And that was it. And the funk metal bands I thought was some of the worst crap that I’d ever heard—even worse than the metal bands. Actually, I once saw one of those bands play a barely ironic version of “Brick House” by the Commodores. I was like, I’m done.

ROBERT TRUJILLO: The first time I heard Primus would have been back somewhere around the late-’80s. I had a friend who was a skateboarder buddy, who was really into alternative music—a lot of punk he was into, as well. And he had on vinyl, Suck on This. I’m listening to this, just thinking, I’ve never heard anything like this. And I’m a lover of a lot of different strands of funk and R&B. This was really, really special to me—it was exciting, it was fresh, and it was whacky and zany. That was my first kind of experience listening to them. And soon after that, I joined Suicidal Tendencies, and I had the pleasure of actually seeing them perform in New York City, and kind of started to get to know them a bit back then. So it would have been around ’89 that I think I first met them.

HANK WILLIAMS III [Solo artist]: The first one I heard was the live recording, Suck on This. I was working at a record store, and that’s when I first noticed them. I was by chance at that time playing bass and taking lessons from Regi Wooten’s brother, Victor Wooten. I don’t know, his voice stood out for me in that nasal, twangy, almost country sound. And, being a drummer myself, the rhythm in that band just really grabbed me. It stood out from a lot of the metal and stuff that was happening at that time.

CHAD SMITH [Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer, Chickenfoot drummer, Bombastic Meatbats drummer]: The Red Hot Chili Peppers used to play with Primus. I remember when we would come up to the Bay Area—especially in the late-’80s, they were a really popular band up there. People would say, “Oh, Primus is like the Bay Area Chili Peppers. You’ve got to hear them!” Obviously, they were doing their own thing and they were really cool. At the time, Tim Alexander was the drummer, and he was incredible. They were real musicians’ musicians. I was really impressed with their musicianship. It was quirky and people just loved them. I remember them playing with us and how much the people loved them. You could tell they had a real loyal, rabid fan base—real fans that really dug what they were into.

In the late-’80s, when we got popular, Hollywood is a perfect example—whenever you go to Hollywood, you’d see bands on the Sunset Strip. It was Guns N’ Roses and those kind of bands. And then it was the Chili Peppers, and there’s a guy slapping the bass and a singer with his shirt off jumping around. You just saw a lot of it—they were playing Poison songs a year before that. It wasn’t real. But Primus had their own thing, for sure. Nobody really does that Primus thing—they have their own personality, which is something difficult to do. When you hear the music, you say, “Oh, that’s them.” I really admire that. I’m definitely a fan.

MATT WINEGAR: That record, everybody had it that was involved in that scene. And you look back on it, and you’re like, “That’s only a thousand pressings.” But you think about five hundred people who are really tightly [involved] in this music world, and they all had it, so it really seemed to be well known in the circle of community of musicians. And after that, they played the Omni, and it would be packed. Maybe because I was still a teenaged kid, but the Omni seemed big and packed. And I was going, Man, these guys are really making this shit happen. After Suck on This, it really snowballed. That’s when Caroline started sniffing around.

LES CLAYPOOL: With the money from Suck on This, we actually made enough to go back in and record Frizzle Fry.