Primus frontman Les Claypool has spearheaded a myriad of diverse projects in his expansive musical career, including The Frog Brigade and the Trey Anastasio/Stewart Copeland supergroup Oysterhead. With his latest endeavor, Duo de Twang – a collaborative acoustic duo with longtime friend Bryan Kehoe – the iconic bassist has stretched his musical reach even further.
In the midst of gearing up for a short spring tour, Claypool took some time to speak with Jambands about Duo de Twang, the return of drummer Tim “Herb” Alexander to Primus, and hanging out and jamming with his son.
So you’re playing with Tim Alexander again this year. How does it feel to have him back in place of Jay [Lane]? Is Primus working on any new material now that Tim’s back?
It’s great having him back. He’s in a happy spot these days so it’s very pleasant having him around. Of course, he’s Tim Alexander; he’s the 90’s uber drum hero of the world. It’s pretty great having him back in the driver’s seat again. We are working on some stuff right now that we’ll probably be coming out with later this year. I mean, right now I’m right in the middle of this whole Duo de Twang thing.
Is Tim a permanent fixture in Primus again? Or are there plans for Jay returning when he finishes his stint with RatDog?
There’s no plans for Jay returning. Jay left; he quit the band. Herb’s back, so as long as things are happy and moving forward creatively, that’ll be the lineup. [Tim]’s a monster; he knows what the hell he’s doing. He has this signature feel that very few people are able to copy.
Do you feel like having him back – and having that early influence and early element back in the band – is going to push the band forward from here on out?
I think any time you have a fresh perspective that always helps move things forward. When he left the first time in the mid-90’s, the perspective and the feel with all of us was not so great. So we brought in Brain [Brian Mantia], and that kind of breathed some fresh wind into the sails. And then that kind of teetered out. And then in the 2000’s we kind of came back and did the Herb thing again; it was more of a nostalgia thing. And when we did it again – bringing Jayski in again – it was phenomenal because he was sort of the early, early guy. And it brought back a certain hop and a certain feel that’s very hard to replicate with Jayski, too. So, now with Jayski bowing out, having Tim in there is another feel. So it’s this sort of continuous progression, I guess. You know, you don’t plan these things; they just happen.
The Duo de Twang album has been received really well by critics and fans alike. How has the crowd reception been at the shows?
Well, the record is actually just a by-product of the shows. We’ve been doing these shows for a while and it just seemed logical, “Hey let’s just record this because it would be so easy. We’ll just go in and do the damn show!” But you know, I keep saying that this is my “fuck-off vacation band” because it’s basically myself and Bryan [Kehoe] and every now and again Wylie Woods comes out with us and a couple friends of ours open – Reformed Whores – and we go out and we’ve got a couple chairs on stage and a campfire and some various alcoholic beverages and we sit there and tell stories and crack jokes and play the occasional song.
So it’s more of a hang than a show, to an extent. Some nights it’s incredible and some nights it’s not as incredible. You know, it’s like anything else. It’s very impromptu; there’s nothing scripted or anything like that. Kehoe is a pretty hilarious guy and we’ve known each other since high school. So we can sit there and riff on each other and riff on things and sometimes it gets pretty good.
Being an impromptu, off-the-cuff show, do you tend to retell stories at all on different nights or do you make up your mind as you go along?
Very rarely. Sometimes there’s certain songs that have a story behind them, but it just depends on the feel of the evening. Sometimes you’ll get more bullshit from us because we just happen to have an edge on us that night. I mean Kehoe was so drunk in Santa Cruz he fell backwards off his chair twice; I saw the bottom of his shoes. It was like Charlie Brown on the pitcher’s mound. So you never know what you’re gonna get. The good thing about it is when the stories are falling flat or the jokes are falling flat we can play our instruments.
On the Duo de Twang album you do a couple Primus tunes. How do you go back to Primus after you’ve twangified a song like “Jerry Was a Racecar Driver”? Do you find yourself thinking a little bit differently about the song? Do you have a new perspective on it? Or do you try to play it a little differently?
No not at all. It’s two different arrangements. The funny thing is, the original “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver” was written more like it is on the Twang record than it is on Tales from the Punchbowl. I had this lyric and I was just writing this little filler song – kind of like “De Anza Jig” or “Incredibly Hot” – and it just happened to fit really well with this bass riff that I had so we just kind of stuck them together. We built this song around this bass riff and we stuck them together and that became what most of the world knows as “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver.” And then of course it became the single off the record. But originally it was just supposed to be this kind of hillbilly sidebar song.
You know, there’s not a lot of calculating going on here. I basically just have this resonator bass and I’ve been carrying it around gigs and around the house just playing songs and singing; trying to get my Luther Perkins style down. I was doing some Johnny Cash stuff and then I started doing some Stompin’ Tom stuff and then I tried “Beaver” and all of a sudden I could kind of twangify all these songs and I said, “This is pretty cool.” And we started doing these gigs and it’s all been very, very casual.
I think that’s probably the best part about it.
Well, it makes it fun for me and Kehoe. I’m glad people are drawn towards it. You know, my son and I went camping a couple of years ago, and he started playing banjo a couple years ago. We were camping and we had the dog and we had our fishing poles and our rifles and various things that you go camping with. And we were sitting around the campfire with the dog and he had his banjo and I had my resonator bass. And we would just sit around the campfire at night and just pluck around on songs. And he was learning “Big Rock Candy Mountain” and we were playing “Mountain Dew” and some of these tunes and it was one of the most incredibly fun things I’ve ever done in my life. You know, I’m playing this music with my teenage son; it was really cool. So that’s why I thought we had to do this on stage. So we got the campfire going and the whole bit and it has that vibe.
You know that’s how all this stuff got started; there was no television to look at. The campfire was the original television; you’d sit there and stare at it for hours and hours and converse and tell stories and hang out and drink wine or whatever and play music. I was reading this book on Django Reinhart and how much of that whole culture with the Gypsies and whatnot was sitting around the campfire playing music. It was incredible.
Does your son have any musical aspirations of his own, or is this more of a hobby to him? Is he interested in following in your footsteps in terms of being a professional?
He doesn’t have any aspirations to enter into the dying music industry. He’s a computer guy; he’s totally all about gaming, programming and all that shit. He takes all these courses all the time so that’s what he really wants to do. But he plays a little upright bass and he plays banjo; he does these performances at his school musicals and stuff like that. That’s because he enjoys it, which is how it should be. Once you start thinking about it as far as making a living, it takes some of the fun out of it.
Has he ever come out to jam with you and Kehoe on stage?
He hasn’t. He hasn’t really been around for any of these Duo shows that I can think of.
Tell me about the contrast between a stripped-down Duo de Twang show and the high-energy Primus show that you’d usually do. Is it refreshing for you to change things up like that?
It’s a lot less lights and video screens and there are no giant astronauts. It is what it is: it’s two guys sitting around a campfire drinking and playing songs, whereas a Primus show is an elaborate production. They’re both pretty causal, though. At Primus shows it’s not like we play the same set every night or any of that stuff. But this is acoustic music.
And you still get two opposite ends of the spectrum as far as a show goes. You get a stripped-down acoustic show and then obviously a much more wild, party of a show. So you get sort of the best of both worlds.
I never think of Primus as a party band. If anything it’s more cerebral; more psychedelic. There’s a lot of stoned people in the audience looking at us going, “Whoa.” That’s usually my take on it anyway. But the Twang is a lot of the same people in the audience, they just shift gears.
How was Jam Cruise this year?
Parts of it were very enjoyable and parts of it were not, because I had this horrible ear infection. I’ve never had an ear infection before, and I got on the boat and I stayed in my cabin the whole entire time except to get meals and do the shows. The first show was actually a mess; the first show was quite possibly one of the worst shows I’ve ever done in my entire life. But then the second show was fabulous; it was great.
We were both sick actually. It was really kind of weird, the convergence of nonsense that happened for that first couple days. I felt bad that we weren’t giving it our best, but what can you do? Sometimes that happens.
Did you have anybody sit in with you on Jam Cruise?
Yeah, Mike D. [Dillon] was playing with us and Skerik, and Carly [Meyers], Mike D.’s trombone player.
How many times have you played Jam Cruise?
That was actually my fourth time; I was on the original first Jam Cruise when it was a boat not much larger than a tugboat.
Obviously being sick this wouldn’t be one of your more favorite memories with Jam Cruise.
I’m not big on favorites anyway, so it doesn’t really matter. You just kind of cruise through life and sometimes things are better than others. Sometimes they’re better than others for different reasons. Sometimes when you have your worst show, people think it’s your best show. So it sort of depends on your perspective. But we just had a hard time that first night; we were both sick and we couldn’t hear very well and it was just a lot of things; we were having gear problems; it was just the perfect storm of nonsense. Hopefully nobody wants their money back (laughter). But the second night we killed it; the second night we had a great old time.
Any plans to take the Duo to some festivals this summer?
I don’t know what’s going on. I kind of just go where they tell me to go. I’m sure there’s things being talked about. All that stuff is sort of being set up right now. I’m sure the ol’ Twang will up there twangin’ it up somewhere with the campfire going.
