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Chapter 8

They Call Me the Frizzle Fry

LARRY LaLONDE: The thing I remember mostly is, “Okay, now we’re actually going to go make a real record.” We didn’t really look at Suck on This as a real record. It was more a demo. So that was our foray into, “We’re a real band, we’re going to have a real record. Here it is.”

LES CLAYPOOL: It was at that point that various labels were interested in us, and our manager at the time—Old Smilin’ Lefkowitz—was wheelin’ and a dealin’. But we felt, Let’s just go in and make this thing, and then we’ll have a stronger leg to stand on when we start negotiating. So we did—we actually went in and recorded the Frizzle Fry record before we had a record deal. I remember we were very adamant about working with a young engineer, because I had some bad experiences in the past with guys in the studio who were just a bit intimidating to a young musician such as myself and the rest of us. And had some experiences where we were sort of dominated by people who were supposedly more in the know. And plus, we were just young and arrogant. [Laughs] And felt we knew best. So we ended up working with Ron Rigler, but we brought Matt Winegar in again as a coproducer. We did that at Different Fur in San Francisco.

MATT WINEGAR: Frizzle Fry was great. It was really, really fun. We went in and tried to do one song with Howard Johnston, who was the studio owner. We tried to do that first, because it’s his studio, he’s going to know the place, and is going to have a better understanding of the console. They had a big SSL console, and I’d sure as hell never seen anything like that—other than in pictures. So we tried to use Howard, and Howard was just one of those eighties engineers, like, “Get everything real bright and pristine, and put it through the cleansing system.” We went in there, and we sort of struggled. We were like, “No. We want the sound to be a little more tough and a little more raw. A little more chaotic.” And he was just like, “I don’t get what you guys are talking about exactly.” So we did one tune . . . I wish I could remember what tune it was. It was probably like, “Groundhog’s Day,” or one of those five songs on the Sausage demo. We took cassettes home and we called each other the next day, and were like, “I don’t know, man, I’m just not feeling it. It’s not working.” So Les says, “Dude, you’ve got to engineer it yourself. We put on Sausage and Sausage is way cooler. So you’ve got to engineer it.”

I was fucking terrified to go in that studio and try to run that SSL, because I’d just never seen one before. I asked our friend Matt Wallace, who was a really successful record producer—and still a really close friend of mine to this day—and he goes, “Dude, it’s the same shit as your TASCAM eight-track. Do you have an echo setting on your TASCAM?” And I go, “Yeah, I have two.” And he goes, “All right, well, the SSL has eight. It looks crazier, but it’s just more of the same shit.” So that made me feel a little better.

We had everybody bring in a CD that they really liked, just to get inspiration for what we were going for. And it couldn’t have been weirder shit that they brought in. The elements didn’t fit together at all. I remember Tim brought in Siouxsie and the Banshees, which was so fucking weird. And Les brought in Yes’s Close to the Edge or whatever—early Yes—because the bass tones are just so fucking amazing. I can remember just looking at Chris Squire’s bass, and going, “I honestly don’t know how the fuck he’s getting that tone, but it sounds like he’s playing through a guitar amp.” And sure enough, I found out later that Chris Squire stuff was all a hundred-watt Marshall just cranked up—that’s why it’s so awesomely gritty and nice and warm, but it’s still got a wiry top end, but still nice and distorted. Les was definitely chasing that sound, for sure. Which we sure as fuck didn’t come close to. [Laughs] It shows how inexperienced we were. None of us had any clue how to achieve anything like that. And Larry brought in Frank Zappa. And we’re like, “Okay, I don’t know how this pertains to what we’re trying to do sound-wise, but it’s cool—Frank Zappa!” It almost didn’t help us at all. I remember listening to those three things that the band members had brought, and it was hilarious.

DAVID LEFKOWITZ: There was that one group session, where about ten of us were in there doing some crazy backup vocal. The Fart Sandwich Posse. [Laughs] Mike Bordin from Faith No More was in on that. I remember when Larry joined, Larry and Les were almost inseparable from that point, and ultimately moved into a place in Berkeley. One of the things they were doing at the rehearsal studio was printing the T-shirts. I think they may have shared a rehearsal studio with Faith No More, so I guess Mike Bordin asked them to do some Faith No More shirts for them. And Mike was such a huge baseball fan with the San Francisco Giants . . . I don’t know who designed it, but there was this Mike Bordin–derived San Francisco Giants T-shirt, which Les and Larry printed for him.

MATT WINEGAR: We went back in there and we scheduled two weeks to do Frizzle Fry. Which is pretty tight timing-wise, but it was more than enough time to do what we needed to do. I just remember a lot of really late nights. I remember a few nights that were like three in the morning, and then sleep on the couch up in the lounge of the studio. The last time I was walking through the Mission District, I walked past [Different Fur] and was like, No fucking way! I knocked on the door, and they let me in. The room looked absolutely tiny. It seemed like this huge place [while recording Frizzle Fry], but I was probably seventeen years old. I was still looking at things through younger eyes.

But back to the story, we spent a lot of time getting everybody in a comfortable position, where they could play like they did in rehearsal. I always felt like Primus was always going to do their thing best if they could be close to each other and not closed off in a box with headphones on. It just fucks everything up when it comes to a band that really plays together—there’s no quicker way to destroy them than to just completely partition them off. It just sucks. You can immediately feel it. So we tried to keep them really close to each other. We put Les’s amp in the hallway. There was a side hallway kind of thing that connects the control room to the live room. So we stuck his amp in there and mic’d it up. And then we ran a cable up, so he could be close to the drums. We did have to use headphones, so he could hear himself, but they were still really close to each other, and it was still sort of like a rehearsal situation. And then Larry’s amp, we just put a bunch of gobos or baffles . . . we just made padded walls around it, and mic’d that sucker up.

I remember Tim’s drum set was fucking huge, man. It’s probably not even that big if you compare it to Rush’s drum kit. But I normally recorded drum kits that were like five-piece kits up until that time. I remember looking at Herb’s drum kit and going, “Holy fuck.” And Herb had these rototoms. These eight tiny drums. And I remember him telling me, “I want each drum to be in a different speaker.” And I was like, Oh god, help me! I put 57s in all eight of those drums, and put them up inside the drum, just so we could pan them around. It’s funny, because I can’t even mentally place where he played those on the Frizzle Fry record. But he obviously did, because I remember the specific request.

TIM “HERB” ALEXANDER: That would be the famous bong-water incident that you’ve been told already. [Alexander’s response to being asked what his memories were of the Frizzle Fry sessions.]

MATT WINEGAR: The bong-water incident. Mike Bordin—Puffy, from Faith No More—had brought over this giant bong. It was definitely the biggest bong I’ve ever seen. It was tall. And they were smoking this giant bong. We were working, and I came out of the live room, and I was trying to express some idea, and I tend to express myself with my hands. And I just, bonk, hit the bong with my arm. And Puffy had set it up on the side of the console—there’s a little table on the side of the SSL console. And I remember that thing falling in like slow motion. It tipped, and it went right across the console. The center section of the console—the heart and soul of the console. And it went into a bunch of faders as well. I just couldn’t fucking believe it.

So Puffy grabs his bong and is like, “I’m out of here, man!” And he takes off—he didn’t want anything to do with what was going on. He knew it was bad. And poor Ron, who was the assistant, was like, “How much went in there?” I was like, “I think a pretty good amount, man.” We’re getting paper towels and toilet paper, trying to soak it up. I’m like, “I don’t know—it still works and it’s still on.” So we’re like, “Maybe we’ll just keep working. Maybe it’s not that bad. Maybe it just drained to the bottom of the console and it just needs to be cleaned out at the bottom.” We didn’t know how a console worked or how it was set up. So we kept working, and I remember looking up at the computer screen—the SSLs had this really primitive computer screen, that would show the levels of each fader. And I remember seeing the fader displays up on the monitor changing by themselves. And then we’re still working . . . and I totally smell smoke.

LARRY LaLONDE: That was crazy! I was sitting in the back of the room, and I just remember everyone going, “Oh shit!” They had spilled the bong into the number one fader, and the smoke came out eight feet away from inside another fader. I was like, “That is not good.”

MATT WINEGAR: Man, I could smell the burning electronics. We look over, and there’s this really intense, thin stream of smoke, coming out of the center section of the console. I was like, “Oh my god! The console’s smoking!” And freaking the fuck out—this is an SSL. It’s a state-of-the-art console. To this day, most big albums are mixed on an SSL. It’s an unbelievably famous console to this day. And god knows how much that thing cost back then, new. It must have been worth a fortune. And the console is smoking, and everybody is flipping the fuck out. I’m yelling, “Turn it off! Turn it off!” And Ron is like, “You don’t understand. There is no on/off switch for this console. You have to go down to the basement and throw this Frankenstein switch to turn the damn thing off.” So he runs out to find the electrical panel, and throws the Frankenstein switch that shuts the thing off. And it was smoking, man—it probably would have caught fire at some point. It was bad news. We all ran out to find the power, we come back in, and Les is taking the faders out with a screwdriver! And he’s got RadioShack contact cleaner, which is like electronic spray cleanser—I don’t even know where he got this shit. He’s like, “Dude, I can totally clean this shit out.” And Ron is like, “What the fuck are you doing?! Put the screws back in—do not fuck with that console!” We were just in shock.

LES CLAYPOOL: I used to be a bench tech for this audio company, so I was like, “I’ll fix it!” I started unscrewing the console—I’m taking the console apart, and these guys are going, “What the hell?!” I ended up pulling a bunch of faders out and we mopped it out, and it smelled like a big old dirty bong still. We were spraying some Ozium around, which was probably the stupidest thing we could possibly do. We ended up not being able to fix the console.

MATT WINEGAR: I didn’t even smoke weed, but being in that control room and the concentration of weed, I’m pretty sure I was stoned. I remember being really freaked out and really scared. I took the BART home—we take rapid transit around that area—and I went right to sleep. I woke up, and my first thought was, I think that was just a bad dream. Then I thought for another second, and I was like, Nope. That totally happened. Ugh, fuck. I’m probably going to be paying off this million-dollar console for the rest of my life. $250 here and $250 there. [Laughs]

Susan [Skaggs, the studio’s co-owner] called, and she had just spoken to Les. She goes, “I just wanted to call and say it’s the second engineer’s job to make sure that all beverages are not anywhere on the console’s side tables or patch bay.” So immediately I go, “Beverages?” I just rolled with it. And she goes, “We have a tech in, and we’re going to have that thing running. It should be up and running by three.” I was like, “Sweet!” So I called Les, and I was like, “Dude, the studio is going to be back up and running at three . . . and she apologized! We must have woken up in a different reality or something.” And Les goes, “Yeah, dude, I told her it was tea.” Really, if you think about it, bong water is pretty much tea. It ended up fine, but it seemed like the end of the world at the time.

They were really serious, man [about smoking pot]. I had never seen anything like it before. Marijuana I think taps into the part of the musical brain—it’s sort of slightly unconscious. When you’re about to go to sleep, and you have the most amazing, clear ideas of things, and how they should be. And there’s none of that doubt clouding your thought process. It seems like a lot of times, in the studio, if it’s the right personality, then the weed sort of just lets them be free. When you’re working on the music, the worst thing you can do is over-question and concentrate too hard. People say, “Just let it flow out, just let it be natural,” and that’s really true. Most things creative, if you’re painting or writing a story, you want to let that open channel just flow and let it come out.

So I think a lot of times, the weed removes that self-doubt. It lets you free up a little bit. It was really good for them. It doesn’t seem to work for every band, but in that situation, it really seemed to, because it was much more open-ended than your average rigid music—by-the-rule-book kind of stuff. You look at bands like Pink Floyd, there are certain bands where it completely works with the aesthetic of the band. I don’t think I ever saw them work in the studio without a little bit of weed being around . . . or a lot of weed. Or more, an unthinkable amount of weed. [Laughs] Herb didn’t smoke, if I remember correctly. It was Larry and Les. And I didn’t smoke at the time either, because it made me insanely paranoid. Weed has always made me think about dentistry and taxes—all the horrible shit you don’t want to think about. [Laughs]

LES CLAYPOOL: “Too Many Puppies” was actually the first Primus song I’d ever wrote. That was when it was just me. [Laughs] That also reflects my youth and [my thinking at that time]: How can I write a song like “War Pigs” or something like that, that is really against the war and the notion of war? And how the establishment is always sending the young men to die under the pretense of freedom, in the name of oil—to an extent. That was my perspective. That was the only video that we had ever done that we had zero control over. In fact, we really didn’t do it—the record company just hired this guy to do it. I think he went on to become a pretty famous director. I don’t remember much about it. In fact, I had completely forgotten about it until I saw it years later, when we put it on the Animals Should Not Try to Act Like People DVD. I remember when they first presented it to us, we hated it. We were like, “What the hell is this?”

There’s always been this whole thing with me about avoiding the cheese, avoiding what was normal—or what people thought was normal. Sort of to defy the laws of tradition. That song [“To Defy the Laws of Tradition”] is one I had written quite a long time ago, so it definitely reflects a much more youthful perspective of the world. That sort of Fuck you, we’re going to do what we want attitude. I don’t think it really refers to anything in particular. There’s no real story behind it, except for just making a statement of, Hey, we’re going to be different. And it’s a rougher, braver path to be different, than to just go with the flow.

MATT WINEGAR: Nothing really sticks out, other than there was an unbelievable amount of weed. And Les had this odd thing that he thought was hilarious called “fart sandwich.” Les would be farting into his hands and cupping it, and then he’d come up from behind you and “gas mask” you with his hands. Like, the most intense, disgusting fart smell would just choke you. And he thought that was hilarious—he’d fart-sandwich everybody. I’ll never forget getting fart-sandwiched, man. It was traumatizing. And he’d always finish it up and go, “Fart sandwich!”

LES CLAYPOOL: Yes, the fart sandwich. That was actually invented by Trouz, but was originally called the “cup a’ smell.” In fact, I think Trouz used to deejay at parties as DJ Cup a’ Smell at one point. It was truly horrible if you were on the receiving end, but hell, when you are in a motor home—or “odor home,” as we called it—for hundreds of hours on end with a bunch of stoned dudes, flatulence becomes a huge source of entertainment. That’s nothing compared to the “fart syringe.” Somehow Trouz got hold of this plastic syringe that was about the size of a small flashlight and he would literally suck the gas out of his ass as he was expelling his fart. It had this little bent tip on it so he could sneak up behind you and squirt it right up into your nostril from the side. It was beyond horrible. He even got to the point where he would save the farts in the syringe by storing it in the freezer and getting you with it the next day. Good times.

MATT WINEGAR: I have some really cool recordings of Les in the studio, doing all his vocal tracks for Frizzle Fry. But I’ve never given them to anybody or released them—I’ve just had them. I’m sure Les would be completely horrified, so out of respect to Les, I’ve never copied them or given them out. I think I may have given Lefkowitz a copy at some point. But it’s Les stoned out of his mind, saying the craziest shit. Being ridiculous for hours. They’re pretty cool. I’ll have to give Les a copy. It’s no fun listening to yourself being recorded, I’m sure he’d hate it. But I’ve listened to them a few times over the years, and they’re hilarious. Amazing shit.

Les suggested that everybody in the studio—during Frizzle Fry—take acid. He wanted everybody—the staff . . . He wanted nobody there who wasn’t on acid. That was the plan. And I remember talking to him, going, “Dude, we can’t have everybody taking acid. Logistically, it’s just not going to work.” When Les said it, I remember poor Ron looking at me, going, “Please don’t make me take acid.”

LES CLAYPOOL: “John the Fisherman,” I remember years ago, I was watching the news and they had talked about, “There’s this fishing boat that’s gone down outside the Golden Gate Bridge”—I believe it was a salmon boat. Apparently, it had gotten struck by a cargo ship. They played the audio of this guy calling the coast guard, and it was unbelievably haunting to hear this guy going, “There’s a ship coming through the fog! It’s going to hit us! It’s going to hit us!” And then that’s all you hear. I remember hearing him say, “Oh my god, we’re going down,” or something to that affect. And that was it—that was all you heard. It just gave me chills. So I thought, What would be the story of this guy? So I built this whole story of John the Fisherman, and the notion that they get struck—I don’t know if it actually says it in the song, but, “Oh my god, we’re going down.” It’s taken from the account of this fishing vessel getting struck by a ship and it going down. And they never found anybody.

Now “Harold of the Rocks,” years ago, a good friend of mine . . . We had various managers throughout the years. And this friend of mine was acting as our road manager, and we said, “Hey, why don’t you just be our manager?” So he was living in this warehouse down in Oakland with this other guy that I used to call Greensleeves, because he was an artist—one of these guys that did the wild-style graffiti back before everybody started doing it. And his tag kind of looked like Greensleeves. They were living together, and all of a sudden we didn’t see him very often. We used to do this thing every Saturday where we would go to this bakery. So I saw this buddy one day at the bakery, and he just looked emaciated. He was like, “Oh, I’ve been fasting,” because he was one of these guys that was a health guy—but he also liked to party. So we didn’t think anything of it.

We ended up one night . . . The song, it’s almost verbatim if you go through the song. I was hanging out with this little punk rock girl, Wendy O, and we decided we were going to go see Schoolly D, so we called my buddy Trouz—we called him “Swamper” back then. So he said, “We’d love to go. Can we bring this guy Harold?” So they bring this guy Harold, and he was sort of this ghetto dude. And I brought my old boss Stan, who on the job, he and I always called each other “Gus.” So we go and see Schoolly D and we spend the evening with him, and I remember Stan saying, “Man, who’s this Harold guy? This guy is pretty bizarre, Gus.” Didn’t think much about it, it was just an odd night. And then there was a party awhile later that Harold was at. And he was this kind of down-and-out ghetto dude. He was really happy that we had taken him out to San Francisco. We come to find out later that all these guys were fully strung out on crack, and Harold was the guy who would get crack for them. So the song is all about a good friend of mine who nearly went down the tubes, because he and Greensleeves got strung out on crack. It was a bad time—he pawned off a bunch of stuff that he had. At the time, he was acting as our manager, and some money came up missing. He ended up paying us back, but he went down in the rabbit hole for a while and it was pretty bad. So that’s what the song reflects.

MATT WINEGAR: The “You Can’t Kill Michael Malloy” song was a thing I made at home, on a borrowed keyboard. It was just a piece of music that I woke up at three in the morning and had going through my head. I just went down and recorded it really quick. It was made right during those sessions, so I brought it over to the studio and was playing it in the morning. I usually listened to music before they showed up. And Les was like, “Hey, man, what is this?” And I was like, “I made this on my eight-track last night.” And he goes, “This is fucking cool. We should use this.” And I’m like, “You’re welcome to it. Use it.” He’s like, “Maybe we can use it as an intro for ‘Toys’.” We just spliced that sucker in. It was actually a two-and-a-half-minute thing, but on the Primus record, it’s just a thirty-second snippet of one part of it. But it was just this little homemade piece of music. So that was cool that it got left on there.

TODD HUTH: I think Frizzle Fry is probably my favorite one. I think that the first one, Suck on This, I like the songs, I don’t like the recording as much. Frizzle Fry I like just because they’re songs that I wrote. Other than that, I like a lot of the songs that Primus did later. I guess I’m just partial to the second one because it has my signature on it a little bit.

LES CLAYPOOL: For me, making videos for Primus was a huge thing. It was one of the things I was most excited about doing. And I always talked to guys in bands [who said], “Oh, I hate doing videos.” I loved it. Because I’m a film guy—I’ve always said that if I hadn’t of been a musician, I’d have been a filmmaker. I was making little claymation films and whatnot when I was a kid. I love film. It’s funny, I got into this argument with a person years ago—she was like, “Well, have you seen such-and-such new film?” I was like, “No.” She’s like, “Have you seen such-and-such new film?” “No.” “Well, how can you call yourself a film buff?” And I’m thinking to myself, Well, you name your favorite Elia Kazan film. It’s not necessarily, What’s the latest film in the theater? as much as all these classic old films—Frank Capra, Stanley Kubrick, Sergio Leone, and all these people that were my heroes. So when it came time to make videos, I was very excited. And I was always a huge animation buff. I remember watching SpongeBob before anybody even knew who the hell SpongeBob was. I didn’t even have kids yet, and I was watching SpongeBob Square Pants, because I thought it was incredibly creative and stylistically cool. Maybe I had kids . . . but they were too little.

So anyway, “John the Fisherman,” we started talking to videomakers. Because back then, making a video was outrageously expensive. It’s not like today where you just go get a camera, Final Cut, or even iMovie, and you can make something. Back then, you couldn’t make anything. And me and Ler had these Super 8 cameras and we were filming all kinds of stuff. We’d buy these Super 8 cameras at flea markets and we were taking cameras and wrapping them in plastic baggies and putting them on the end of fishing poles, and tossing them out into the water. Just getting footage for what was to be our version of a “John the Fisherman” video, because we couldn’t find a director that we liked. We met all these guys—and I’m sure some of them have gone on to become huge directors—but it was just all the same. “A big shadow against a wall, and you’ll play in silhouette, as there’s somebody dancing through.” Just the same old shit.