http://www.ram.org/music/primus/articles/funky.html

"New Rage: The Funky
by Joe Gore.

Taken from Guitar Player, August 1991

Primus Sucks
Primus plays rock the way Dr. Seuss intended. In their crazy backwards world, progressive metal beds down with art-funk, instrumental flash tangos cheek-to-cheek with self-mocking humor, and ever-expanding audiences hail their favorite group with the fervent cry "Primus Sucks!"

Frontman Les Claypool is a headbanger's Cat In The Hat, a bemused master of ceremonies overseeing the band's ecstatic performances with goofy grin, rubbery body, and stupefying virtuosity. He plucks, strums, taps, and slaps a seemingly endless torrent of piledriver riffs while delivering his quirky songs in a Saturday-morning cartoon speed rap. And how many other rockers address their audience as "boys and girls"?

Together with metal-hippie guitarist Larry "Ler" LaLonde and hyperkinetic thunder drummer Tim "Herb" Alexander, Claypool has concocted a heavy but hilarious sound that he calls "progressive freak-out music," but which one critic describes as "thrash-funk meets Don Knotts, Jr." Either way, it's a ferocious but funny mix, the musical equivalent of a Hell's Angels wearing a "Kick Me" sign.

Primus can mock their cake and eat it too. The most successful group to emerge from the San Francisco Bay Area's much-bal-lyhooed "thrash-funk" scene, they've toured with Jane's Addiction, Living Color, and Faith No More, developing a huge following on their West Coast home turf, and play themselves in the soon-to-be-released sequel to Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure. Despite shoestring budgets, their first two albums, Suck On This and Frizzle Fry [Caroline], captured the intensity and spontanneity of Primus' live shows and became alternative radio hits. And now that Primus has hooked up with a major label and produced their best record yet, their smirk ethic may finally pay off big.

Sailing The Seas Of Cheese [on Interscope, a new Warner Bros. affiliate] tops the heaviness, funkiness, and just plain weirdness of previous Primus releases. The sel-produced album is tough and spare, the uncluttered textures highlighting the players' left-of-center stylings without undermining the trio's remarkable interplay. LaLLonde, a former student of Joe Satriani, ventures from cleaned-toned, exotic-scale leads to white-noise wipeouts. His solos weave like drunks, bumping into harmonic walls but never falling face-first. And Les' bass playing is pure guitar hero stuff; his 6-string fretless work behing Tom Waits' cameo vocal on "Tommy The Cat" suggests new possibilities for funk-metal cross-pollination.

Claypool's solos and bass-generated songs never take on the monkey-with-a-parasol quaintness that so often marks over-stated rock bass excursions. Busy but groovy, his parts often imply simultaneous bass and thythm guitar lines. "ever since Primus started," says Les, "I wanted to hit low notes with my thumb while playing rythm parts with my fingers. I had seen Stanley Clarke play chords before, so I knew it could be done. The technique is a lot like what they call 'clawhammer style' on banjo. 'Tommy The Cat' is a good example of that, and so is 'To Defy The Laws Of Tradition,' from Frizzle Fry. 'Pudding Time' [Frizzle Fry] and 'Those Damn Blue Collar Tweekers'

The dense bass and drum parts lock down the groove and tonality, freeing LaLonde to take harmonic liberties rarely afforded rock players in trio contexts. Many of his lines are based on jagged altered scales, and sometimes he just plays "out" with no concern for key. "I studied with Sattriani for four years," relates Larry. "We went through all the modes in every key and worked on theory and reading. But once in a while we'd try to come up with weird things, just making noise. Joe would say, 'Always remember that the wrong note is sometimes the right note.' But I think i've used that more often than he would have liked!""

I saw Possessed at the Paradise club in Boston long long ago. It wasn’t until many years later I realized Larry Lalonde was the guitarist and ended up in Primus. Quite a change.