SUPER FREAKS: For Claypool, a bigger audience just meant more people to behold his weirdness.
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Les Claypool, the 43-year-old bass-playing architect of Primus (who come to the Orpheum this Sunday), is the kind of guy who went through a weird-teenager phase and then just never moved on. His music is about feeling awkward among his peers, then accentuating his eccentricities as a means of muffling that awkwardness: if he’s always weirder than the people around him, Claypool figures, then their refusal to accept him is simply a reflection of their inability to understand him. Because he sings in a nasal-voiced tenor that’s more about character than technique, it’s an approach that isn’t as smug in practice as it might sound in theory. There’s an aroma of intellectual superiority to Primus’s music, but it’s always tempered by Claypool’s evident genuine love for freaks and losers of all stripes.
The irony of their representing the socio-cultural underclass is that freaks and losers of all stripes have made Primus a triumphant band. Improbably signed to Interscope in 1990, the Bay Area trio — bassist/singer Claypool, guitarist Larry LaLonde, and drummer Tim Alexander — were one of the unlikeliest beneficiaries of the early-’90s post-Nirvana alt-rock boom; though they offered what might be described as the most rhythmically complex white-trash sea chanteys ever committed to tape, 1991’s Sailing the Seas of Cheese and ’93’s Pork Soda achieved the sort of commercial success that typified the era. In an age defined by labels’ throwing acts against the wall of the marketplace, Primus stuck.
They Can’t All Be Zingers (Interscope), the trio’s new greatest-hits set, confirms that success as the product of Claypool’s willingness to play the misfit role. A bigger audience never provided the inspiration to go straight; it just meant a bigger audience for his weirdness.
Zingers is good fun for anyone who has misplaced (or sold) his or her original copies of Seas of Cheese and Pork Soda. “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver,” “Mr. Krinkle,” “Tommy the Cat” (one of Claypool’s duets with idol Tom Waits) — these familiar tunes hold up as amusing slices of oddball punk-funk perfection. But the best-of’s revelation is the quality of the band’s later stuff, after Alexander had left the group and Primus CDs weren’t selling the way they used to. I remember thinking at the time that Claypool’s appealing idiosyncrasies had curdled into self-satisfied shtick — that the twinge of superiority had soured as a result of alternative radio’s neglect. Yet as two cuts from ’97’s Brown Album and another Waits duet from ’99’s Antipop suggest, he kept his cool.
Perhaps that’s because he saw the future in advance. In 2003, the original trio reunited for a string of sold-out shows at which audiences validated his vision on a nightly basis. Filmmaker Matthew J. Powers documented that trek for Blame It on the Fish (Frizzle Fry, Inc.), a new DVD that offers what he calls “an abstract look at the 2003 Primus Tour de Fromage.” Given his dependence on time-lapse photography, tie-dyed colors, and any number of other vaguely trippy special effects, “abstract” is just one word for it; “tedious” is another. (Would a single untampered-with shot have killed him?) Still, it’s satisfying to see Claypool and his mates receive the hero’s welcome-back their legacy has earned them. Besides, hoping for a straight-faced Primus DVD might be missing the point this band have been trying to make for nearly 20 years.
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PRIMUS + RASPUTINA | Orpheum Theatre, 1 Hamilton Place, Boston | November 12 | 617.931.2000