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Chapter 2

Dad, What’s a Primate?

LES CLAYPOOL: So the next thing I know, I’m hanging out with Chris Cuevas, who I remembered from dropping out of high school. And he was this total punk guy—he had his sleeves cut off and his hair all spiky. He was always going to all these shows in Berkeley, and I said, “Look, I’ve got a car. You get us tickets for these shows, and I’ll drive.” So that was kind of the deal—he was always winning tickets off KALX and KUSF. Like, every day. I had just broken up with my girlfriend, so I was all bummed out, and he and I would go clubbing every single night. We’d go see a band somewhere or see a comedian—whatever he’d win tickets for. And some of the shit was like, Why are we even going to see this? We didn’t even know who the hell they were. But it was free tickets, so we’d go. And then, he and I became best friends.

He had a place in Berkeley, and I’d go stay out there all the time. And then the next thing you know, we had a place in Berkeley. We had several places in Berkeley throughout the years. We had construction jobs together, and for my years in Berkeley—ten or twelve years there—he was my best friend. He became involved in this whole world beat scene by working with the Looters, and that’s how I got involved in that scene. I used to roadie for Joe Gore, who later would play with me, and through the world beat thing is how I met Jay Lane. Just that whole scene was really amazing.

It was during the time the whole metal thing was going on, but I was oblivious to that—I was more working for these world beat bands, like Big City, the Looters, and the Freaky Executives. The Looters should have been a huge band. And it wasn’t like what you’d now think of “world beat” as—there was a lot of stuff like that going on in England, but Looters was this Afro-Cuban/South African meets reggae meets U2, or something. It was a pretty vibrant scene . . . but then, like what usually happens to cool scenes, some big-time manager/producer got involved and convoluted the whole thing and it just kind of took a shit. It was the beginning of my wariness of producers.

KIRK HAMMETT: We were all kind of running in the same circles. And then he left Blind Illusion and formed another band, Primate. He had found this one guitar player who I had never heard of, Todd. And their first drummer . . . I can’t remember his name. I think it was when Curveball was in the band. They were a three-piece, and I remember getting a phone call from Chris Cuevas—he and I were really close and hung out quite a bit—and going to see Les’s band for the first time. That was Primus right there.

LES CLAYPOOL: I was a huge Peter Gabriel fan, and I went to the NAMM show and was able to get a LinnDrum machine, for half price. Those things were three thousand dollars, so I was able to get it for fifteen hundred. Can you imagine? That’s how much drum machines were back then. And I got this thing, and had a little Fostex recorder, and started recording songs in the bedroom of my apartment. I called it Primate, because when I was a kid my favorite animals were monkeys, so I figured that would be cool. And we had these little characters, Hector and Louie, who were these little anatomical drawings of a human and an ape. So it was just me and this Fostex recorder and a LINN drum. And “Too Many Puppies” was the very first thing I recorded. I played bass, had the LINN drum, and borrowed a guitar from my buddy Ray Wing from the Tommy Crank Band.

In the apartment, I was too embarrassed to sing. The only reason I started singing was because these bands I was in, the singers, I didn’t like how they sang my lyrics. So I decided, Well, I’ll be the singer, even though I couldn’t sing for shit. I even took some singing lessons from this lady, who I think just wanted to see me with my shirt off, because she kept making me take my shirt off when I’d sing. [Laughs] It was weird, singing this Elvis Costello song, over and over again. So I sort of started singing by default. I was never that comfortable with my voice, until more recent years. I always thought of myself as the narrator.

Anyway, I recorded “Too Many Puppies,” and I was too embarrassed to sing it in front of anybody in the apartment, so my roommate, old Kern Kern the Butter Churn, his girlfriend was the preacher’s daughter, so he gave me the keys to the church across the street. I remember going over there and screaming the lyrics to “Too Many Puppies” into my Fostex, while at the podium in this church. [Laughs] But I made this little demo tape, and all of a sudden I get a phone call from Todd Huth, who I had known from years before, by jamming with his band Wraith. And he said, “I hear you’re looking for a guitar player.” And I’m just thinking, This guy? No way. Because he was a total Joe Walsh/Tony Iommi kind of guy. And I was looking for a Robert Fripp/Adrian Belew kind of guy—somebody who was kind of a freak. So I said, “Well, let’s jam.” So we got together and jammed, and came to find out that Todd is actually a freakier guitar player than any of those guys. So there was Primate.

TODD HUTH [Primus guitarist 1984–1989, Sausage guitarist, Frog Brigade guitarist]: I was born and raised in San Pablo. As far as guitar goes, I started playing when I was eight years old—playing more folk-type stuff on the guitar. That’s what the guitar teacher was teaching me. Then I bought my first electric guitar when I was about twelve, and started playing with a couple of guys in junior high. And then the rest is history, I guess.

The first time [Les and I] met was probably when we were about thirteen. We both went to the same school—only for about a month or so. Then he went to another school. In high school, I was in another band, Wraith, and we needed a bass player for one of our shows. Through the grapevine, I heard that Les would do it. So he came along and started playing shows. So we kind of met each other more when we were doing the band thing in high school.

Les and I, we heard that each other were looking for people to play with. Actually, he wasn’t that into it, because he knew that my style and his style . . . In the past, I hadn’t really done what he wanted to do. So we sat down in this little room in El Sobrante, and he had a drum machine. We started playing and I just started making up parts to what he was doing.

We started to record with a guy, Vince “Perm” Parker, and we did seven or eight songs—“Too Many Puppies,” “Old Man in a Pinstripe Suit.” Then we were bumming around and I mentioned, “Hey, let’s start a band and play this stuff.” And he was like, “Really? You want to do a band?” So we started a band.

I started out with a Kramer. Then this guy was selling a Telecaster, and Les and I both went down and I bought it. I played that pretty much the whole time I played with Primus. Probably pretty much all the guitar [playing] I ever heard influenced me. I’d say my main influence was Jimmy Page. But a lot of the influence I got was from different sources—I didn’t really focus on guitar players per se. I listened to a lot of Mozart. I dug that kind of stuff. I heard Eddie Van Halen once say that you can only play bar chords if you’re going to play rock ’n’ roll. And I thought, Ah, fuck that. I’m going to try something different. So I started tweaking around with dissonant notes and all that kind of stuff, and it kind of fit with what Les was doing.

LES CLAYPOOL: I was waiting for this buddy of mine who was in the army, old Perm Parker, to get out of the army so he could join the band, and we would have a three-piece. So when he got out, we already had written these songs, and had saved up enough money to go into the studio . . . Actually, I had sold my ’68 Cougar to my stepbrother, and took that money so we could record our first demo tape, which was the Primate tape. Somehow, we knew somebody at Live 105. A good friend of mine, she worked next door to Live 105, and got to know a couple of the deejays. She gave one of them the tape, and he liked it—it was this guy, Big Rick Stuart, who had I think a Sunday-night show there. He started playing this song “Prelude to Fear” on the radio. So all of a sudden it was like, Hey, we’re on the radio! Sort of an alternative/new wave station.

The next thing you know, we get a phone call. “Hey, I’m the attorney for the Primates, and you can’t use that name anymore.” So we started coming up with all these names, trying to stick with the sort of monkey theme. And we actually talked about “Simian” as a name, and we almost went with “Anthrate”—thank god we didn’t do that. It just turned out that “Primus” was the root of “Primate.” Todd just goes, “Well, why don’t we just go with Primus?” I was like, “Okay.” So we went with it. It’s Latin, and it means “first” or “first in the line of.” It looked good on paper. Of course, in Europe there’s a gazillion things “Primus”—Primus washing machines, Primus camp stove, now there’s some Primus technology, there’s Primus wine, Primus beer. It’s kind of the “Acme” of Europe.

CHRIS “TROUZ” CUEVAS: I was around when Les thought of the idea of Primus, and started rehearsing and did his first gig. I’m not sure if I can remember when the first gig was—it was probably some crappy little house party. Definitely one of the first real gigs was at Berkeley Square in Berkeley, California.

LES CLAYPOOL: The very first show was at the infamous Mabuhay Gardens. The Fab Mab, run by Ness at the time, got into fights with the skinheads out in the alleyway almost every time we played. That was always fun. A good buddy of mine, who actually made it into a few songs of mine, CG the Mexican, he actually was sort of our half-assed manager back then. But he was an ex–Latino gang president who had gone into the military and learned to be an electronics technician. He looked very unassuming, unless he cholo-d himself up. But he could kick the shit out of people. And I remember we would be battling with skinheads left and right. I saw CG smash a couple of skinheads after a bunch of them jumped him, because the Broadway skinheads of the day tended to be pussies when they weren’t all ganged up.

TODD HUTH: The first shows we started playing—when Les and I were shifting drummers here and there—people would sit there and look at us, and go, “What the hell is this?” Nobody really got what we were doing. But people would encourage us and thought that we were good. So we kept going at it, and I was having fun.

KIRK HAMMETT: Les was writing the songs and Todd had such an unconventional sort of guitar-playing style. That was the blueprint right there for what Primus was going to become. I was so impressed, because it wasn’t really heavy metal, it wasn’t really funk, it wasn’t really rock—it was a whole slew of things thrown all together. And then you had Les’s whacky sense of humor and subject matter. I just thought, Wow! These guys are like the Talking Heads, but way cooler with a lot more energy. They didn’t come across pretentious or put on or anything. I was a big supporter of Primus for a long time. It was really something seeing Primus in its early days. But the template was already set. It was already there.

LES CLAYPOOL: Well, Perm Parker was the guy when we were in jazz band together—of all the drummers in the class, he was the only black guy. So we would just sit there and play all this funky stuff together: Rick James, Larry Graham, Brothers Johnson. He and I really connected well. So when he came back from the military, he was the first guy. I had him move into my apartment, and I went and lived at my grandmother’s house. Unfortunately, old Perm didn’t really have it together very well—he didn’t even have his own drums. So it didn’t last very long. So then we brought in my buddy Mark Edgar, he was the guy who had brought me into the Tommy Crank Band, and he actually played our first gig, at the Fab Mab in the Mabuhay Gardens.

That’s when we were getting that airplay on the Quake, so there were probably twenty people there, and we actually had a little following. But Mark wasn’t down with what we were down with. I remember Todd and I went to see Public Image Limited at the Fort Mason Center. It was all this crazy performance art going on. And I remember Mark going, “Why the hell do you want to go see Johnny Rotten? That’s not music, that’s just garbage. The new Chaka Khan record is really awesome!” We were just like, “You know what, dude? This isn’t going to work out.” So then we got Peter Libby. Peter Libby was kind of a local hero in Berkeley—he had this double bass thing going. He was a great player. I don’t remember why it didn’t work out, it just . . . didn’t work out. So then we had this guy Curveball for a while. He was my old roommate.

TODD HUTH: His singing is different. I remember back when we first started, he was always asking me, “Should we get a singer?” Because he’s not the most on-key guy. And I would always tell him, “Man, you’ve got a graphic voice. Just use it like a cartoon character.” So he’s like, “Okay. Well, if you don’t want to get a singer . . .” So he kept going on that. Just the fact that he stuck that out with his singing . . . and he’s probably one of the best entertainers I’ve ever seen. He had a lot—he still does—going for him at that time, so how could he fail?

ADAM GATES [Friend of band, the chap who plays “Bob Cock,” Electric Apricot actor]: I met Les in 1985. The band Primus was . . . this was quite some time before Larry had joined. It was Todd Huth, Les, and I think Peter Libby was playing drums when I first met them. Les was friends with a deejay named Rick Stuart who worked at a radio station called the Quake, and I was in a local band called Monkey Rhythm. Both of our bands had been playing around a bit. We went to the Quake—I think Les was just hanging out with Rick, and I went there with the band to try and see if Rick would play our music. And that’s how I met Les. We became pretty fast friends and started hanging out right after that.

At that time, they were significantly different than what they morphed into. The aggression was still there, it was still implied, but there was less distortion—particularly Les’s tone. He was playing through a weird Peavey guitar amp, I think. And his tone was a very treble-y one, it wasn’t low end. And certainly accentuated by Todd Huth’s guitar, which was very dry and a little overdriven. But they had this quality to them which was absolutely unlike anything going on in the Bay Area at that point. Thrash metal was starting to really thrive.

Me and Les hung out, and I think they were playing at the Mabuhay Gardens. I walked in, saw them playing, and was like, Who the fuck is this? Les was on stage with a bowler hat on—like he walked out of something like A Clockwork Orange. Playing to an empty club, and it was unabashedly weird. It took us awhile to figure it out. We’d gone on tour, and Les had given us the first cassette, and we worked it out. We thought, My god, we dig these guys, but they’re so fucking weird. No one’s ever going to get this. How wrong we were. Then we started playing tons of shows together.

LES CLAYPOOL: Ha, yeah, I remember that Peavey. It was Todd’s old guitar head that I ran though a bass cabinet because I couldn’t afford a proper bass amp. I still sport the ol’ bowler. Anyhow, we were always thinking, How can we get involved in a scene? Because we weren’t involved in the metal scene at all. We were kind of this weird band that nobody could put us with. Michael Bailey of the Berkeley Square was a big supporter in the early days. Now, he’s a Live Nation guy—he books the Fillmore and all that. He would put us on shows because he really liked us, but he never knew who to put us on with. We played with the Pop-O-Pies, the Swans—all these different bands we didn’t necessarily fit with. We were kind of this weirdo band. But then as Primus started becoming popular just in its own right, Chris Cuevas ended up working for us. And one day he was the manager, but that didn’t quite work out. After that, Trouz was our road manager for many years.

CHRIS “TROUZ” CUEVAS: We’ve all been really close for a long time. I worked for Primus for twelve or thirteen years, and then I did some time on the road with Kirk, as well. It’s kind of interesting—we all got into music, I got into the more business aspect of it, and they were both performers. Very interesting growing up around both of their scenes.