Primus: The Gift From a Raven on a Stormy Night
Les Claypool didn’t have to strain finding the inspiration for Primus’ ninth LP, The Desaturating Seven, a proggy conceptual suite framed around Ul de Rico’s psychedelic 1978 children’s book, The Rainbow Goblins. The animated text, he jokes, “was brought to [him] by a raven on a stormy night.” That’s a fitting origin story for such a kaleidoscopic album which, like the Italian illustrator’s innovative fairy tale, follows a group of gluttonous goblins on their ill-fated quest to devour the colors of the rainbow. But the reality is far more practical.
“My kids have shitloads of books,” says the 54-year-old singer/bassist and father of two. “They were avid readers, and before they could read, my wife was reading to them every night before bed. There were stacks and stacks of books. And every now and again, I’d be the guy going in to read. So I went in one night years ago, and there was this goblin book. I’m like, ‘What the hell is this?’ I just started reading through it. The story has the dark elements of some of the old Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which are creepy and horrifying. But I was mostly taken aback by the artwork. It’s dark, but it’s also beautiful and vibrant and colorful. You associate rainbows with freedom and liberal thinking and progressive sexuality, so to see these joyous, vibrant colors in this dark context was very interesting.”
That contrast also defines The Desaturating Seven, which—like Primus’ most distinctive work from the mid- ‘90s—thrives on the border of cartoonish and creepy. But the experimental rock trio also tapped into a real-world relevance, one particularly surprising for an album of “goblin rock.” Where much of the band’s work is driven by pure irreverence (1995’s Grammy-nominated “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver” from Tales From the Punchbowl has lost none of its wackiness over the past two decades), their new color-coded fantasias tap into the modern malaise of Trump’s America.
“It’s about the people in power taking more than their share and the adverse effects of that—and the masses coming together and overpowering those entitled powers,” Claypool says of the LP’s notso-hidden themes. “It’s very relevant to what’s going on with the planet.”
But how do you write a socially conscious concept album about rainbow-ingesting goblins? That’s one tricky balancing act between campy escapism and metaphorical commentary, and Claypool admits he struggled to avoid falling totally into parody.
“If you look at the lyrics, I don’t know if I mention the word ‘goblins’ even once in the entire thing,” he says. “And I tried not to mention ‘rainbows’ either, but it’s in there every now and again. I used metaphors to propel the narrative forward. You’re riding a fine line when you’re writing about rainbows and goblins. You can easily go down the My Little Pony, crystal unicorn path and have it just be this big bucket of fromage. So I was trying to have it not be so literal but amplify some of the morals that de Rico was trying to convey. And it was kind of hard, like, ‘How can I say this without it coming off like a Tenacious D song?’” 
His first step was carving out a play-like structure— crafting the climactic epic “The Storm,” which recalls vintage Pink Floyd with its echoing bass riff and eerie crescendos, then working backward. Piece by piece, the songs fell into place, but Claypool wasn’t even sure where this material would wind up. The obvious move would have been to call up his friend and collaborator Sean Lennon, with whom he’d recently issued a wildly trippy collaborative LP, 2016’s Monolith of Phobos. Besides, he figured his Primus bandmates would balk at the indulgent concept.
“Basically, I wrote the song that became ‘The Storm,’ and I played it for [guitarist Larry “Ler” LaLonde] over the phone,” he says. “I didn’t know if he was going to like it. It’s pretty Dungeons & Dragons, artsy, ‘70s art-rock. But he almost shit himself. He was like, ‘Ahh, this is amazing.’ So I was like, ‘Alright, we gotta do this with Primus.’ I’d been pretty on-the-fence, like, ‘Should I do this with Primus? With Sean?’ But because of Ler’s enthusiasm, it was like, ‘OK, this has gotta be a Primus project,’ and it just snowballed from there.”
LaLonde echoes that he was immediately grabbed by Claypool’s embryonic songs— and de Rico’s cult-classic book. “I’d never heard of [The Rainbow Goblins], and I have kids, so I was amazed there was a kids book I hadn’t read 1,000 times,” he says, laughing. “For a kids book, it was trippy, a little bit creepy and the artwork was so amazing. I was saying, ‘I could see us flying with this for the live show.’”
“When this idea came around, it wasn’t a traditional situation, like, ‘Let’s get together and start from scratch,’” he adds. “I’m sure that’s probably what the next one will be. We had a lot of ideas that probably would have been on this one, were it not a themed thing. There were ideas already mapped out since Les had been thinking about this for a while. But we just put the icing [on the cake] to turn it into Primus proper.”
Primus has been in a polychromatic headspace these days: The Desaturating Seven follows their 2014 reimagining of the Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory soundtrack, a project the band exploited onstage with costumes (Claypool dressed up as the titular candy maestro, top hat and all), and stage props like massive lollipops and mushrooms. A few years ago, the bassist even toyed with recording a full-LP take on The Beatles’ 1967 opus, Magical Mystery Tour, but he changed his mind after learning how much legwork The Flaming Lips put into their collaborative version of Sgt. Pepper’s. “That was something I’d been thinking about,” he says. “But after talking to Wayne [Coyne] and hearing about the pain in the ass it was dealing with Sgt. Pepper and all the people involved in that, it doesn’t seem like I’ll be doing anything like that in the near future.” 
Overall, Wonka felt like a good-natured detour, rather than a fresh route. The Desaturating Seven—the first album of original material in over 20 years to feature the definitive Primus lineup of Claypool, LaLonde and drummer Tim “Herb” Alexander—is different. Its whimsical subject matter only works because the music finds Primus at their most primal. And Claypool and LaLonde credit most of that vibe to their innate chemistry with Alexander, whose intricate, prog-leaning style helped ground the band early on. The classic Primus trio recorded early favorites like 1991’s Sailing the Seas of Cheese and 1995’s Tales From the Punchbowl, before the drummer quit in 1996, replaced by Bryan “Brain” Mantia. (He’d later rejoin in 2003 and stick around for sporadic tours in the mid-aughts before splitting again in 2010. Drummer Jay Lane assisted on 2011’s Green Naugahyde, and Alexander returned once more in 2013.)
Claypool acknowledges that friction, both personal and musical, helps generate this chemistry.
“It’s an interesting dynamic because we all live separate from each other now,” he says. “But it’s not socially, like we all go hang. Tim’s always been the guy on the outskirts of the band, hence him coming in and out over the years. We don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye on a lot of things, musically. I wouldn’t say there’s a conflict because it’s not an aggressive thing. It can just be awkward sometimes, but that contrast is what gives us the sound. When playing with other people who are a little more like-minded in what we’re thinking, you don’t get as interesting a contrast. It just makes you approach things a little differently. But also, I feel like the band has come around a little more to that way of thinking now. It’s like, I can exercise my groove-oriented demons with my other projects, or even the psychedelic stuff with me and Sean doing the Delirium. So with me, Ler and Tim, we can go back to some of that hard-edged stuff we were known for in the mid-‘90s and be comfortable with it. I’m not personally trying to scratch a different itch.”
“It’s also that we’re in a similar headspace right now,” he adds. “When we all first jammed with Herb, we sat down and started playing Rush tunes because it was common ground for the three of us. It was like, ‘Oh, he knows how to play Rush tunes, so let’s play Rush.’ But I was coming from playing with drummers like Jay Lane who were more groove-oriented. We were playing Isley Brothers songs and shit like that. It was a different mindset. So for this record, especially, it was, ‘Alright, I’m gonna write a record about goblins, and we’re gonna be scratching a lot of old art and prog-rock itches we hadn’t scratched in a while,’ and that really lent itself to his style of playing.”
LaLonde, meanwhile, was just excited for the three of them to work on a “real Primus thing” together following Wonka. “It was pretty exciting to play all this crazy stuff and come up with crazy parts that only Tim can play,” he says. “We call him ‘the octopus’ because it sounds like he’s playing eight things at once. He looks like an octopus when he’s playing it. I’m like, ‘How’s he doing that?’”
With its best-known lineup in peak form, Primus is enjoying yet another birth. But to some extent, it’s shocking that any version of Primus even survived the late-‘90s, when a general feeling of displacement from the record industry nearly tore the band apart. The result was 1999’s Antipop, their presciently titled sixth LP, which featured a comically wide array of guest producers (including Tom Waits, Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst and South Park co-creator Matt Stone). The band was flailing for a direction, confused about their status in a rock scene filled with chart-topping bands who had dumbed down elements of Primus’ surreal, cross-pollinated style for mass consumption under the burgeoning style of “nü-metal.”
“There was a lot of tension,” Claypool says. “There was a lot of horse shit going on around that album. It took me a long time before I could even listen to it again. I’ve listened to it recently, and there’s actually a lot of cool shit on there, but it was just a difficult record to make because there was friction. There were a lot of bands that were coming up on our coattails that became very popular, and the record company was like, ‘Hey, you should be like these guys. They came from your world.’ And it’s like, ‘I don’t want to be like those guys!’ We’d never been second-guessed before. It was always, ‘Let Primus do their own thing. It always works. It’s successful. Just leave them alone.’ And all of the sudden, we were being second-guessed. It just sucked. It was just an awful time.”
Primus often seemed too extreme, too fucking bizarre, to continue their unlikely ascent into rock history. But here they are, almost three decades later, still surviving— first through their three-year “hiatus,” then through the endless drummer shifts and high-profile side projects. In 2017, they feel like the pioneers of a genre that no one has the adjectives to describe. And though their talents could easily survive a permanent breakup, they’re aware of their rare synergy.
“There are certain things that just feel like Primus,” Claypool says, referencing the trademark prog-funk of recent single “The Seven.” “When I started playing that song, I just said, ‘That just feels like a fucking Primus riff.’ That song is just definitive Primus. If you hear that, you’re gonna go, ‘Oh, that’s Primus!’”
