The September release and the tour that follows, including a stop at the Fillmore Silver Spring on Saturday, finds the band in a very different mindset from when they recorded their last record, 1999’s “Antipop.”
After constant touring and five studio albums starting with “Frizzle Fry” in 1990, the San Francisco Bay-area band was feeling fried by the end of the decade. Looking for a new approach, LaLonde says Primus broke from their tradition of self-producing albums with “Antipop.”
“From the beginning, we had record companies and people telling us, ‘Oh, you should use a producer,’ and we were always like, ‘Well, that’s not the way we work,’” LaLonde says. “That [‘Antipop’] was the one where we were like, ‘Oh, we’ll finally try this producer idea,’ but we kind of got away with it by saying, ‘What if we work on each song with a different person?’ That way if it doesn’t work out with somebody it’s only one song. So that whole thing, it was really crazy. We had been touring for so long and everything was starting to go in different directions a bit. So it wasn’t the greatest time for the band.”
Following a tour for “Antipop,” the band announced a hiatus and its members went their separate ways. LaLonde and then-drummer Bryan “Brain” Mantia continued to work together, making avant-garde music under the name No Forcefield. LaLonde would later tour with System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian.Claypool went on to explore the jam band scene, cutting albums with his group Colonel Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade among others. He also worked in two super groups, one with Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio and Stewart Copeland of the Police called Oysterhead and the other with Mantia, guitarist Buckethead and Parliament Funkadelic co-founder and keyboardist Bernie Worrell.
Primus would conduct a few more tours and some festival appearances throughout the decade, but Claypool later went on record saying that the shows were more nostalgic than anything else. With the five-track EP “Animals Should Not Try to Act Like People” in 2003, fans heard the last batch of new material from the band before a long silence. Still, LaLonde believed the band had not fully run its course.
“I had always hoped it was not totally done because when I was sitting around writing songs, nine out of 10 times, the things I write, I’m like, ‘That would be perfect for Primus. I need Les to finish this one off and make it cool,’” LaLonde says. “I’m sure I probably thought it was never totally done.”
Rested and reenergized, things started heating up for Primus once more in 2010. Seeing if the spark was still there, the group tested the waters and jammed in February of that year.
“After our first rehearsal,” LaLonde says. “It was the same day as the Super Bowl, probably the one before last, so that was the day that we jammed and were like, ‘Yeah, let’s do this.’”
Filling in on drums in the latest Primus lineup is Jay Lane. Before working with Grateful Dead offshoot RatDog in the 1990s, Lane was one of Primus’ first drummers when the band got its start in California in the 1980s. He left Primus to pursue another project and was replaced by longtime drummer Tim “Herb” Alexander shortly before the group’s 1989 live album and demo “Suck on This” was released.
But ties were not cut with the Primus camp. Lane later collaborated with Claypool on his 1996 solo album and Sausage’s 1994 album “Riddles Are Abound Tonight,” a band featuring the 1988 lineup of Primus including guitarist Todd Huth.
LaLonde says Lane was a natural fit for Primus’ current incarnation.
“It was something we always wanted to try and see what it would be like to have Jay back in the band,” LaLonde says. “And he’s like the coolest, funnest guy too.”
With the lineup cemented, Primus began touring once again, moving through the country with its mini-festival The Oddity Faire in 2010. By November, the group entered Claypool’s Rancho Relaxo studio in California to begin recording what became “Green Naugahyde.”
LaLonde says they took their time recording the new album and finished in March. With Lane’s drumming anchoring “Green Naugahyde,” LaLonde says it has hints of the group’s first album “Frizzle Fry.” Primus’ quirky rhythms, biting lyrics and oddball atmosphere have not been lost, but there is an evolution in the music as well. Claypool’s solo experiments with jam sensibilities, squishy effects pedals and dead-panned choruses also bleed through on tracks like their single “Tragedy’s a’ Comin’” and “HOINFODAMAN.”
LaLonde says some of the tracks on “Green Naugahyde” — including “Moron TV” and “Eternal Consumption Engine” — had been saved for quite some time.
“I think I’ve been trying to get [‘Eternal Consumption Engine’] on a couple of Primus records before,” LaLonde says. “It was something that me and Les kind of goofed around with before. We just never really got around to finishing it off, but this time around, I kind of threw it in there as one of the first things, so it would maybe get finished.”
Since “Antipop,” the landscape of the industry has changed, and LaLonde says he is unsure if album sales will serve as a barometer for the band’s success as they once did. On their recent tour, he has seen Primus’ fan base continue to thrive and, for now, it’s nice just being back at square one.
“That’s sort of how we started, too,” LaLonde says. “It wasn’t about, ‘Hey, how many of these can we sell?’ or, ‘How much money can we make?’ We just figured make the best stuff and the rest will come.”
Show is sold out.
Photos by Tod Brilliant
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