Did you know that Phish and moe. had both interpreted albums in their entirety?
I didn’t know about moe. but I knew that Phish had done it. I was hanging out with Trey and he told me that Phish had done Remain In Light in its entirety, which was great. It’s not an original thought I definitely got the idea from Trey.
Are there any other albums you’re tempted to cover?
Not really. I feel like we did it. We performed Animals for the last time on the night before New Year’s. We might do it again although I kind of doubt it. I’m a bigger fan of doing the oddball interpretations. Right now we’re doing the cosmic highway tour where half the set is about space so we’re rotating in and out “Major Tom” and I wrote this song called “Cosmic Highway” and we’re doing “Planet Claire” by the B52s. We’ve already been playing “2000 Light Years” and various songs like that. And I wear a spacesuit.
Indeed you do. There often is that additional visual element to your shows. Which reminds me, I recently read an interview you did with a disgruntled Primus fan for your web site and I’m curious, to what extent do you think about expectation of the audience? If you do, how has that changed now that you’re playing before a different audience?
I think if anything I’m trying not to think about what people want as much. With Primus, the last couple of years we were thinking that way and we were second-guessing ourselves. We never used to second-guess ourselves at all. We’d just go, “Ahh we’re going to do this record called Sailing the Seas of Cheese because we’re signed to a major label and it just a cheesy world.” It was just sticking it to the industry. Ah fuck it who cares. We’d make the craziest shit. Anything that made us laugh or got ourselves off, that’s what we did. I feel that was the better Primus.
With this there’s a portion of the audience that are Primus fans and a new contingent that I’ve come across being in the scene this past year. The most conscious thing I think about is trying to mix it up as best we can every night because the band had only been around for such a brief amount of time. I’ve also been so busy working on the Oysterhead project that there hasn’t been a lot of time to develop material. So it’s difficult to do a completely different set every night. We mix it up as best we can but we just don’t have the repertoire that a band that’s been touring for ten years has. I don’t want to dip into the Primus stuff- there’s hundreds of Primus songs but I’m not just ready. I think after we do the Oysterhead tour I’ll know better what I want to do with the Frogs and I’ll focus.
Speaking of Oysterhead, when did you first meet Stewart Copeland?
On the last Primus record the concept was we wanted various artists we respected to produce. The record company had been pressuring us work with a producer because we had been doing it by ourselves for so many years. I remember telling them, “Well show me the George Martin or Brian Eno of today and I’ll work with him.” That’s when the concept of working with various artists and producers came in. We had this wish list of people like Peter Gabriel, Roger Waters, Tom Waits and Stewart Copeland. Stewart came and did it and we became friends. When the whole Superfly thing came up. the first two people I called were Trey and Tom Morello because I knew we weren’t going to have any time to rehearse, we were going to jam in front of a bunch of people. I thought it was going to be a nightclub scene. I didn’t think Stewart would want to do it but he chomped right at the bit. Trey was all excited and had always wanted to play with Stewart.
In a recent interview, Trey explained that in terms of that gig, Stewart wanted things to be polished and composed while Trey wanted the opposite. Where did you stand on that one?
Probably for the first gig I was more in the middle. The whole concept of going out and freeforming before people was still pretty damn new to me. It didn’t really hit me that we could just go out and jam before people and they would like it until I did what we called the Rat Brigade at the Gathering of the Vibes last year. I went out there with Jeff and Jay and we just didn’t know any material. It was extremely freeform and incredibly loose and people were freaking out. It was one of the loosest things I’d done in my life. That’s when I realized there was an audience for it. I mean I would love to go see Robert Fripp just off the cuff just jamming with people, I would think that would be amazing. I was oblivious to the fact that there are lots of people on the planet who feel the same way about other musicians.
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