Primus - Frizzle Fry (CLASSIC REVIEW)

Hi, everyone. Clapthony Traptano here, the Internet's busiest music nerd. I hope you're doing well. It's time to kick off 2025, the Needle Drop Classics Week, where, yes, I review a bunch of older albums. That is the point.

In this video, I am talking about the fantastic 1990 debut studio album of the band Primus. That would be Frizzle Fry. Frizzle Fry is the album.

So yes, Primus, one of the oddest bands and trios to ever come out of rock. At the time of this record's release, the band featured Tim Alexander on drums, Larry LaLonde on guitar, and of course, Les Claypool on bass and vocals. And as much as I was excited to review this album (because in many ways I know it like the back of my hand), explaining and contextualizing Primus is a difficult task, because for decades, the band has continued to inhabit this weird limbo space between mainstream and underground. They truly do have a sound that is too idiosyncratic, I think, for a lot of rock fans. But simultaneously, the band is credited with having written and recorded the South Park theme song, and who hasn't heard that?

Not to mention Primus's sound wasn't necessarily born out of a singular regular robust music scene or genre. I mean, you could definitely argue there was something in the water around the late '80s and early '90s in California, because you did have numerous bands that were beginning to experiment with combinations of rock and metal and funk like Faith No More and Red Hot Chili Peppers. But Primus's sound didn't pull quite as much from heavy metal music, and it was ultimately more of a hodgepodge of a lot of disparate influences. I mean, the first track on this album opens up with a clip from a live record that Primus had released a year earlier, Suck On This. And that song features a variation of the song YYZ, which is a pretty famous instrumental from the Canadian progressive rock outfit, Rush.

There are also big King Crimson Discipline era vibes coming off of this record's aggressive grooves, rant style vocals, and tapped bass lines, which very much were inspired by Tony Levin's Chapman Stick playing. And according to UltimateGuitar.com, as well as some other sources, jazz bass legend Stanley Clarke is where Les Claypool caught wind of the Carl Thompson basses that would ultimately go on to define Primus's sound for years.

Plus, additionally, another reference point is the back-end of this album (the 2002 reissue anyway) features a two-part cover of "Hello Skinny" as well as "Constantinople", which are two tracks written and recorded by The Residents, one of the most difficult to place outsider groups in all of music history.

It's funny that on this album, Primus is so in your face with their inspirations and where their ideas are coming from, and somehow ended up with an album that is so unique and stands out to this day. And with great production, too, because the songs and performances on this thing are raw as hell. You can really hear everything, even some of the flubs clubs that occasionally happen here or there as the trio gets a bit ambitious with a drum, bass, or guitar embellishment here and there. But the magic of Frizzle Fry isn't just in its precision and its virtuosity, but also its chaos and dramatic dynamics.

The opening track really gives you the full range of Primus's power on this album with a slow, psychedelic, entrancing intro that's eventually shattered with explosive drum fills, searing guitar leads, and of course, Les's trademark bass playing, which is switching back and forth between grunty slaps and strummed intervals, down-stroked really aggressively for a blaring tone. And even at this early stage of the band's career, you can hear that commanding talent that would make Les Claypool a world renowned bass player. And the song is not just this weird foreboding anthem with some really aggressive jammy passages, but it's also a mission statement of Primus's creative crusade, defying the laws of tradition, as it were, upsetting people, ruffling artistic feathers, which may be a pretentious thing to throw out there before you truly know what your impact on music is going to be as a band.

But it can't be denied that Primus's career truly did live up to that proposition as they earned their audience of stoner freak metalheads, prog snobs, as well as bass player magazine subscribers. So yeah, to defy the laws of tradition is a very bold start to this record, but the tracklist from here goes into what I think is the real meat of the album, and that is creative, fun, and eccentric songwriting.

"Groundhog's Day", for example, is a low-key jam led by Les' spoken word vocals, delivering some very slice of life musings about a guy who sounds like a lazy underachiever. He is holed up in his house enjoying some corn chex because it's the closest thing he can find to apple pie, which is what he really wants. And he is slowly but surely making plans to go out there into the world and seize the day, have his Groundhog's Day, as it were. The tension of this storytelling builds up into a really awesome, vigorous jam toward the end of the track with all the steady drums and fuzzy guitar leads and slap bass lines, you can really hear the band firing on all cylinders. And narratively, you can also see how the track is essentially like a self-insert moment for Les to essentially tell his tale of becoming a do-nothing to a wild, weird bass playing legend.

Following this, we have "Too Many Puppies", which is one of the band's most political tracks ever. The whole track is a very thinly veiled metaphor for the United States imperialist foreign policy, with references to war in the name of Big Oil. But what hits even harder than that are the sour chromatic chord progressions, and thumping riffs that sound like giant dog paws stomping on the ground.

Following this, we have "Mr. Knowitall", which is one of several great character portraits on the record. If there's anything Les Claypool loves doing on this album, it is painting a picture of an individual, which we also hear on "John the Fisherman", as well as "Harold of the Rocks", as well as "Sathington Willoughby". And these are tracks that tell you a tale about somebody who you might find mundane in any other context.

But here they take on an interesting life alongside colorful instrumentals and wild progressions. Of course, it also helps that Les's voice lends itself to these tracks, and in such an expressive, weird, and cartoony way, which is especially the case for the album's title track, where the band's psych influences come back into the fold on really a musical experience that feels like a bad acid trip.

The storytelling of this song is a bit nightmarish as well. It feels like I'm being taken on this Willy Wonka tunnel of terror type journey on this track. But even as the band is embracing the nightmarish, their trademark absurd sense of humor is still in tact, with Les saying in the final verse of the song, "I don't believe in pinochle / I don't believe I'll try / I do believe in Captain Crunch / Dor I'm the Frizzle Fry".

The guy just loves cereal.

So the band's weird mix of strong musicianship, bad vibes, and silly humor continues through the second half of the album with "The Toys Go Winding Down", which is an interestingly innocent way of delivering a song framing that is so dystopian. We have "Pudding Time", which is another cartoonish portrayal, this time somebody who seems quite greedy and materialistic and is very oblivious to the state of the world, at one point making reference to the declining numbers of striped bass in the San Francisco Bay, which is also brought up on "John the Fisherman", I believe, as Les uses this as a reference point for climate change and just the health of the globe's ecosystem.

And there's also "Spaghetti Western", which is very much in line with Groundhogs Day earlier on on the album in that it is loaded with high musings of what sounds like some lazy unemployed dude with an internal dialogue that is equal parts unsettling and hilarious. We need new pornos!

Anyway, in conclusion, Frizzle Fry, in my opinion, continues to be one of the boldest, weirdest, wackiest, and most out there rock albums of the '90s. It's a record that effectively and creatively breadcrumbs to tell you where exactly it's coming from while simultaneously forging a new way forward. This thing is funky, trippy, intense, and fun all at once, and absolutely positively worth your time, if I do say so myself.

These are my thoughts on the record.

Anthony Fantano, Classics Week, forever.

What do you think?

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