Читать книгу Primus, Over the Electric Grapevine - Primus - Страница 7

Chapter 1

Welcome to This World

LES CLAYPOOL [Primus singer and bassist 1984–present, Sausage singer and bassist, Oysterhead singer and bassist, Frog Brigade singer and bassist, Colonel Claypool’s Bucket of Bernie Brains singer and bassist]: I was born a poor black child. [Laughs] I was born in Richmond, California [on September 29, 1963], and the hospital I was born in is now a mental hospital . . . so maybe that says something. My parents were very young. My mom was seventeen years old when I was born, my dad was nineteen. He used to like to brag that when he was nineteen years old, he had a wife, a newborn son, a mortgage on a house, a car payment, a payment on a washer and dryer, and a job at a transmission shop. I grew up in the East Bay.

There’s a lot of Claypools in Missouri, that’s all I know. My grandfather—who’s still alive, he’s ninety-seven—is from Missouri. He was a cowboy carpenter. But beyond that, I don’t really know. There’s been a rumor of Claypools on the Mayflower, but I don’t know. We’re all mutts. My mom’s side, my grandfather, he’s Italian—second-generation Italian. Actually, it’s funny, because I moved up here to West Sonoma County, and that’s where my great-great-grandfather settled when he came over from Italy. It was fairly close to where I live, and I didn’t even know that until I moved here. The old Simoni farm—Simoni is my mom’s maiden name. There’s a big hunk of Italian in there somewhere. I used to wear the old Italian good luck horn when I was in high school. I have a brother, a sister, a stepbrother, and a stepsister.

I started playing bass when I was right around fourteen years old. I’d always wanted to play something, but I remember when I was a kid, and the teacher—I think his name was Mr. Capelli—came around the grammar school to see what kids wanted to play. Some of the options were trumpet, clarinet, cello, or violin. And I was told that cello and violin were very difficult. I wanted to play trumpet, but he said my teeth were too “bucked” to play the trumpet, so maybe I should play clarinet. Unfortunately, I didn’t see the appeal of clarinet, so I opted not to play anything. Hindsight, I wish I’d taken up clarinet, because I now love the clarinet and perhaps I wouldn’t have bastardized the instrument as bad on Seas of Cheese.

Years later, in high school, there was a kid in my algebra class who was kind of this burnout dude, with these big, thick pop-bottle glasses. A little Filipino guy, with long hair and a dirty white T-shirt. He’d sit in the back of the class, and he’d always have these guitar magazines. He’d show these pictures. He’d go, “Hey Claypool, look at this, man, that’s going to be my guitar,” and he’d show me a Stratocaster he was going to buy. “Man, I’m telling you, I’m going to be big, because I know all the key elements, man—sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll!” And that guy was Kirk Hammett. He used to sell me weed, actually. I bet a lot of people that went to our high school don’t even know that they went to high school with the guitarist from Metallica, because he was just this little skinny guy, with thick pop-bottle glasses, that hung out, out back—which was where everybody who smoked cigarettes hung out.

KIRK HAMMETT [Metallica guitarist]: I first met Les in algebra class. He sat right next to me. He saw me one day looking at a Guitar Player magazine. He was interested, and at that point he was interested in music more as a fan or a listener, rather than as a musician. I remember telling him, “I got a band together and we need a singer. You want to join my band?” And he said, “What’s the name of it?” And I said, “Exodus.” And he goes, “Wow, that’s crazy!”

LES CLAYPOOL: He had this band Exodus that kind of sounded like AC/DC back in the day. I was always singing songs—I’d come into class singing songs, like Aerosmith or Zeppelin. So Kirk said, “Hey, man, you’ve got to come audition for my band and sing.” He used to give me these cassette tapes of various things. He turned me on to Hendrix, and wanted me to learn “Sunshine of Your Love” by Cream. He wanted me to audition for his band, but I was too bashful. I couldn’t do it.

KIRK HAMMETT: Literally, the next day he bought a bass, and the next day after that he joined some other band. I was so mad at him, because I thought he was going to come by and try and sing and be the singer of my band. And then, when I actually got to see him play a few months later in the band that he joined, I was so impressed at how well he could play, and how much technique he already had at that point. I was so impressed by his whole approach. Even in the early days, his playing was highly stylized. You could tell whenever he played—it was Les playing, it wasn’t the other bass player down the street playing bass. He did a lot of finger pops and thumps—it was totally like Larry Graham and Stanley Clarke. It was very evident that he was on his way to becoming a very accomplished musician. Even at that time.

LES CLAYPOOL: I ended up meeting this guitar player who was sort of the local hot-shot guy, and we became buddies, and he needed a bass player. I had this friend who was selling this little piece-of-crap bass for thirty bucks, and I think I had fifteen bucks. So I went to my dad and said, “Dad, I really want to play bass. This guy has this bass for sale, and it’s thirty dollars. I have fifteen dollars, can you loan me fifteen dollars?” And he said, “Is this something you really want to do?” And I was like, “Yeah, Dad, I really want to do this!” He says, “Well, if we’re going to do this, let’s do this right. We’re going to go down and see Al at Al’s Music.” And I remember him and my stepmother getting into an argument about it, because she thought I wouldn’t follow through—like the swim team, I wouldn’t stick it out.

So we went down to Al’s Music and picked out this bass. Al was a buddy of Dad’s, but I don’t think he gave him that great of a deal. Anyway, I got this Memphis P Bass. And I was instantly in a band, because back then everybody wanted to be Eddie Van Halen and nobody wanted to play bass. They usually stuck the guy who couldn’t play guitar very well on bass. But I was all about it. I worked that whole summer—I remember working for my dad and pulling weeds at this doctor’s house, just trying to earn the money to pay off this bass. And I would sit and play that sucker nonstop. I didn’t have an amp, so I would sit on the edge of the couch, listen to music, and play along even though I couldn’t hear what I was doing. That’s kind of one reason I don’t really know a lot of other people’s music, unlike guys who knew every Rush song lick for lick, or every Zeppelin song lick for lick. And I just never learned that stuff, because I was jamming along with those records, and basically playing them my own way. And probably completely out of key. So I would get the sense of the rhythms, but not necessarily the notation.

I learned to read music around that time, because a buddy of mine was a drummer in the jazz band. He said, “Hey, they need a bass player in jazz band, and I told them about you.” So I went in and saw Mr. Johnson, and I said, “I’m a bass player.” He signed me up, I sat in the class, and unfortunately the amp was broken. So I had to sit there for a while until the amp got fixed—for several weeks. So I got in trouble one day for chatting it up with the drummers, because there were always a shitload of drummers in jazz band. While one guy is playing, the other three had to sit around.

So I got in trouble for being disruptive, and he said, “Why don’t you at least grab the sheet music and read along?” And I said, “Well . . . I don’t know how to read music.” And he’s like, “You don’t know how to read music?!” He was all flustered. He took me aside after class and showed me the fundamentals of reading music. He said, “You need to learn this, or you can’t be in the class.” So I went out and got a Mel Bay book and learned how to read from that. But I’m not very good at it. I was okay at it back then, but I haven’t read in years. I tried reading some stuff recently, and I could barely get through it.

CHRIS “TROUZ” CUEVAS [Primus tour manager 1989–1996]: The only friends that I am still friends with and in contact with from high school are Kirk and Les.

LES CLAYPOOL: Chris Cuevas, his nickname was “Chris Quaalude.” I saw him around high school—he didn’t really show up to high school very much. I think he made it through the ninth grade. I kind of knew him as the guy who stole my drummer’s girlfriend. So I’m thinking, Who is this guy? But then, years later, I became friends with Chris—his mom was big in the music scene, and she was helping out some different bands, and she started helping us out. She used to hang out and work with the Metallica guys and all these different bands.

CHRIS “TROUZ” CUEVAS: It doesn’t really mean anything [the nickname Trouz]. If you know Les, he’s very rhyme-y. He likes to make things rhyme and come up with nicknames. So the two of us used to make up names for a lot of our friends. Somehow, because Trouz rhymes with cows, Les thought that was funny. So he would create certain songs, like, “Trouz, Trouz, drives the cows,” and, “Trouz, Trouz, is scared of the cows.” Silly stuff like that. It never really meant anything . . . Maybe it had some kind of connection to some sort of cock joke, like “trouser snake.”

LES CLAYPOOL: Yes, it was all about the trouser schnauzer. Actually we used to say, “Trouz, Trouz, drives the cows,” but one time when a bunch of us were frying on mushrooms out at the beach, we walked back to the car through a field of cows and I said, “Hey Trouz, now’s your chance! Get to drivin’ them cows!” He wouldn’t do it so I said he was scared of the cows. He didn’t like that too much. [Laughs]

So, back to my first concert, I drank three Löwenbräus on the way to the Cow Palace, which I’m sure Dan Maloney purchased. [Laughs] We used to get our beer from Nick’s Delicatessen, because Nick was Italian and thought it was bullshit that you had to wait until you were twenty-one to drink. So he would sell us teenagers beer. But he didn’t keep his beer very cold, so it was always kind of warm. So we drank these lukewarm Löwenbräus on the way to the Cow Palace. We stepped out, and I bought a scalper’s ticket—even though the show wasn’t sold out, we were worried it was sold out—on the street. So I paid too much for the ticket, barfed in the parking lot, and bought a bootleg T-shirt. I saw Pat Travers open for Rush, so I saw two of the greatest drummers on the planet and two of the greatest bass players on the planet at the time. Peter “Mars” Cowling on bass and Tommy Aldridge on drums with Pat Travers, and Geddy Lee and Neil Peart from Rush.

As a youngster, I started out like most, listening to all this rock, but I also had been into a lot of the soul and funk back in the day—I got turned on to the Isley Brothers, Brick, Stevie Wonder, the Ohio Players, and all these different things. As a bass player starting out, I was listening to John Paul Jones, Geddy Lee, and Chris Squire. I was such a huge Geddy fan. But, not having much money, I hardly had any albums. We had a couple of friends who had great record collections, and their walls were completely wall-papered with album covers. We’d go to their houses and sit around and listen to albums. So I was sitting there spouting off, like a young kid will, about Geddy Lee. And my friend said, “Y’know, I like Geddy. Geddy’s amazing. But you need to listen to some Larry Graham and Stanley Clarke.”

So he played me some Larry Graham, and just completely blew my mind. And one of the most amazing shows I’ve ever seen in my entire life was seeing SOS Band, Graham, and the Isley Brothers at the Oakland Coliseum. Me and my buddy Flouncin’ Fred, we were two little white suburban kids in the Oakland Coliseum and we stood out like sore thumbs! There wasn’t a lot of crossover back in those days. But it was like a religious experience. I would put it down as probably one of my top three shows—ever. And at the time, it was my top show ever, seeing Larry Graham come out there and strut and get the audience pumped up, and thump and pluck the hell out of that bass. That show was probably one of the most influential shows on my playing to this day. A few nights ago I got to meet Larry for the first time. I was doing an interview for this upcoming documentary about him, and the director invited me to a private jam Larry was doing at a radio station in Berkeley. Me and my buddy Jake went down there, and once again we were the only two white guys in the room. It was just a little KPFA studio, and there’s Larry Graham thumping away, kicking the shit out of everybody—literally four feet in front of my face. It was just another religious experience. It was unbelievable.

KIRK HAMMETT: It was funny, because in high school I was more of a nerdy kind of person, whereas Les was kind of popular. He went to all the dances and he went to the prom, he had a car and a nice-looking girlfriend. I’d see Les and I would think, Wow, this guy just has it all covered!

CHRIS “TROUZ” CUEVAS: Kirk looked like more of a hippie—big glasses and long hair, and kind of grungy. And Les was the direct opposite—he always wore tight jeans and colorful shirts. He had a pompadour hairstyle. They couldn’t have been more opposite. I was somewhere in the middle—a kind of hoodlum, lowrider rocker. So the three of us were very different in our sets of people we hung out with in high school. Kirk had Exodus out of high school, and Les was in a cover band called Tommy Crank. I would go see both of those bands and help move gear for Kirk’s band. And Les was in Blind Illusion for a while—I would roadie for them when they would play parties.

LES CLAYPOOL: He’s confused. I barely knew Chris in high school, mainly because he was never there. Early on, I hung out with those guys “out back,” where we would all go to smoke cigarettes. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the hot chicks weren’t hanging out with us “outbackers,” so in my sophomore year I befriended my longtime pal Flouncin’ Fred Heim and started hanging out in the halls where the girls were. At that age, pretty much everything I did was in direct pursuit of trying to get laid. Also, I didn’t have a pompadour in high school. It wasn’t until after high school, when I played for Hells Angels in biker bars with the Tommy Crank Band did I start sporting the pomp. That’s what all the tough guys flew. I wasn’t tough enough in high school to fly a pomp.

KIRK HAMMETT: And the band he played in at that time had all the best musicians . . . Not all the best musicians, but the driving force of this band Blind Illusion was the guitar player, Marc Biedermann. Just an amazing guitar player. I mean, even to this day I remember me and my friends watching Marc play, and thinking, Wow, this guy is going to be the biggest thing in the music scene once we all get out of school and go on our way. That guy is going to be a huge rock star for sure. But it turned out it just didn’t happen that way. But Les was in Blind Illusion—their songs were somewhat progressive. When he played with them, he brought the progressive factor up a few more notches. We all hung out in the same circle of friends, because all the musicians would kind of hang out and check out each other’s bands, and see who was up to what, and who had the best equipment, and who had the best songs, who was playing the best shows. It was a very friendly but competitive sort of atmosphere to be in.

LES CLAYPOOL: When I bought a bass, I was instantly in this band called Blind Illusion, which at the time, they called themselves “progressive metal.” It kind of sounded like a cross between Rush, Jethro Tull, and Sabbath. Lots of very, very intricate music. I played in that band for about a year, and just kind of got tired of that scene, and there were some personal issues—just band shit. So I went off, and I had this band S.T.A.R., Sax Trumpet and Rhythm. At that point, I was so much into the funk and the soul, and even a lot of the fusiony stuff that was going on, with Stanley Clarke, the Dixie Dregs, George Duke, Ronnie Laws, and all these different people. So I had this sort of soulful jazz band.

Then I played with Blind Illusion again, with a different lineup—I was with Blind Illusion three different times. Did that for a little while, then that fell apart again, and I went and played with the Tommy Crank Band, which was probably one of the best things for me. Basically, it was just a paycheck for me. Because I had this drummer that I would play with quite a lot, Mark Edgar, and he was playing in the Tommy Crank Band. And the Tommy Crank Band was basically an old rhythm-and-blues band that played Booker T. & the MG’s, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave, the Meters. And a lot of this stuff, I didn’t even know who the hell a lot of these artists were. Though I’d heard a lot of the music on AM radio growing up as a kid—a lot of Motown and whatnot. But it was funny, because I was learning Meters songs, and I didn’t even really figure out who the Meters were until years later. But I would learn these songs for this band. And I was the youngest guy in this band by far—some of the guys were in their thirties. And here I was, a nineteen-year-old kid.

We had a horn section—a sax and trumpet—Tommy played B3 and Rhodes, a guitar player, bass player, and drummer. One of the drummers we had at one point was Dave Bartlett from Tower of Power, and Norbert Stachel was in the band for a while, and he went on to play with Sheila E. It was a really, really cool band. But we basically played biker bars up in Northern California—and this was back when . . . there were no weekend Harley riders. None of these dentists on Harleys. It was like, Hells Angels. And that’s what I did every weekend, was play these bars. You’d play four sets a night, sometimes three to five nights a week. It really was a huge learning experience for me, because I learned all this old rhythm-and-blues music, playing with guys like Dave Bartlett, that just kept on me. Because I knew how to do all the noodly-noodly-noodly stuff, from playing all that progressive music in high school, and listening to Stanley Clarke and whatnot. But having to go play this other music for a living, and having the background of playing in the jazz band when I was high school, that stuff was very educational. Really rounded me out.

CHRIS “TROUZ” CUEVAS: Back then, I wasn’t as interested in that kind of cover-band sort of rhythm-and-blues music, necessarily. Back then, a copy band was kind of dumb to me. Les looked so different from the rest of the guys in the band—they were all bikers and macho-looking dudes. And he was a skinny, pompadour-wearing guy. So I didn’t really get into their music much. I was more into funk and soul and different rock. But Les was always cool because he was eclectic. He loved funk and soul, and he loved rock. I think that’s why we hit it off so well musically. Kirk was always more into straight rock—straight metal.

LES CLAYPOOL: The trumpet player wanted to play some more contemporary tunes, so we would be playing “Standing on Shaky Ground” or some Righteous Brothers one minute, and then we’re playing a fucking John Cougar song! That was the least exciting element of playing in the band. But playing “Gimme Some Lovin’” and Teddy Pendergrass’s “Get Up, Get Down, Get Funky, Get Loose,” and some Tower of Power, that shit was great . . . We got to open for Gregg Allman one time; we played a couple of shows with John Lee Hooker, which was unbelievable.

The only real downside to playing in a band called the Tommy Crank Band (yes, that’s his real name) and playing biker gigs three to five nights a week was that there was a tendency to be surrounded by methamphetamine everywhere you went. Hell, I remember some gigs where part of our pay would be a big baggy full of speed. We had one drummer, who was actually amazing, his name was Jack Hile, who’d hit that bag and sit and tell stories from his past. He was an ex–minor league pitcher who toured with some heavyweight rock bands in his past, and was also drafted and sent to Vietnam as a helicopter gunner. He had some incredible tales to tell and he and I had a great musical rapport. Cool cat, always wondered what happened to him.

But anyway, we’d do these gigs and Tommy would always have a big party at his house afterward and his house was this big crash pad in El Sobrante. We’d stay up all night smoking cigarettes, doing key-loads of crank, and chatting up biker chicks. It was weird and somewhat counterproductive, because you’d work all night to get laid, and then your pecker would be so tweaked out it would hardly work or you couldn’t cum. I didn’t last too long in that scene. I realized that crank made my pecker shrivel and the cigarettes made my car stink. Also, the whole crank thing has been a big issue within my family. I’ve seen my uncle and a couple of cousins go down from that shit, and addiction is very prevalent in my gene pool. Anyone paying attention will see the multiple addiction references that tend to thread throughout my lyrical endeavors over the years. I do have to say that some of the coolest, sweetest, and most giving people I ever met were in the Tommy Crank Band; especially Tommy himself, and his big brother and manager, Harold.

Going back a bit, early on, I had always wanted a Rickenbacker 4001 so I could be like Geddy Lee and Chris Squire. I just didn’t have any money. I remember Rush was my very first concert. I was with this other bass player, Bill Petersen, he was in another band. And he had a nice, big, giant amp, and he just got a Rickenbacker 4001. He was pointing to the stage, because Geddy’s gear was sitting there before the show. And he’s like, “That’s just like my bass!” And I’m just sitting there going, “Goddamn, man. I wish I could get a Rickenbacker.” So when I finally had saved up enough money to go get a Rickenbacker . . . I had played that Memphis for a couple of years before I got a job and saved up enough money to go get a bass. And I went to the store, and I’m talking to this guy at Leo’s Music, and he’s like, “Ah, you don’t want a Rickenbacker. Those things are terrible. They’ve got two truss rods, and they always break.” And he totally talked me out of getting a Rickenbacker, and talked me into getting this Ibanez Musician EQ. I remember Sting was playing one at the time, so it wasn’t terribly bad.

So I got this Ibanez bass. I used to polish it and I worshipped that thing. It was easy to thump and pluck on. Then one day, I was at Leo’s Music, because you used to go to Leo’s Music and just hang around, stare at the stuff, and dream. I go in there, and there’s this Carl Thompson bass sitting there. I had become a huge Stanley Clarke fan, and I remember on his I Wanna Play for You album, there was one picture of all of his basses laid out on the porch of his house, and he had a couple of Carl Thompsons. I thought, Whoa, look at that thing! So there’s a Carl Thompson sitting there, and it was marked six hundred bucks. I picked it up, started playing it, and I was like, “Oh my god!” It was the most amazing bass. It was the easiest bass that I ever picked up. I could play all these things that I couldn’t imagine before. It was unbelievable.

So I went home, and I had some money but not a lot. I scraped, scrimped, and dug around. I even had a checking account at that time. I went and borrowed some money from my mom, to get six hundred bucks. I come back down and I had exactly six hundred dollars—I didn’t even have enough for tax. I get there, and they had marked up the bass to a thousand dollars. So I go find this guy—I think his name was Kip or something—and I go, “Man, I looked at this bass the other day, and it was six hundred bucks.” And he goes, “Yeah, well, Leo came in and said, ‘These things are really rare,’ and wants a thousand bucks for it.” I’m like, “Man, you told me I could get it for six hundred bucks. I have six hundred bucks, I’m here to buy it. What can you do?” So he went in the back, talked to somebody, and says, “Yeah, I’ll sell it to you for six hundred.” And I said, “Well, all I’ve got is six hundred,” and he says, “It’s six hundred . . . plus tax.” So I wrote a bum check for the tax! [Laughs] I somehow got it to clear, I don’t know how I got that sucker to clear. So I got the Carl Thompson bass, and that was the beginning of me using that Carl Thompson bass for . . . shit, I used that thing for thirty years or something. I still own it. I put it in semiretirement, because it’s such a precious instrument to me. I don’t like taking it out on the road so much anymore.

I worked for this audio company at one point called ADA, so we’d go to NAMM [National Association of Music Merchants] shows and all that stuff. I remember seeing this thing advertised—this bass Kahler [tremolo system]. And I thought, Holy shit. That looks amazing! So I got one through the company, and I actually had Dan Maloney put it on for me, because I knew he was good. He put it on there, and we had to change the nut around a little bit, because intonation is always an issue when you put these things on. They stay in tune to an extent, but not terribly well. So you’ve got to watch that. But that’s part of the Primus sound too—the intonation is pretty loose. [Laughs] And there’s a little bit of glory to that. Some of my favorite guys are these guys that play pretty janky instruments, and you kind of hear that looseness in pitch. I like that.

My dad was always a very practical fellow. He always said, “This music thing is fine and dandy, but you better learn a trade.” Because they were all a little bummed that I didn’t go to college. I was the guy in the family who was kind of smart, and I would have been the first one to go to college. But unfortunately I needed to work, because we didn’t have money. I couldn’t work, go to college, and seriously pursue my music thing. Since I was fourteen, I knew I wanted to be a professional musician, so I worked and played music.

My dad encouraged me to learn many trades, so I think my very first job, I worked in a cheese shop. But then I immediately went heavy into the automotive world, because it was such a huge part of my background. I was an assistant manager at the Shell station—El Sobrante Shell—and then worked for Big O Tires, busting tires. I mixed auto paints for a while. I went to work for an audio company, basically in assembly, shipping and receiving, and quality control. Did a little bench-teching while I was there. Then I became a carpenter. I really enjoyed carpentry, and you make good money as a carpenter. Then after that, we started making T-shirts—we’d print T-shirts for the shows. After that, I became a professional musician.