Prime time in the time of Primus

These are the facts.

1.     I am insufferable when I talk about music 
2.     A collection of wizards is a wang, and
3.     Primus is not for everyone. 

[Whispers] Spoiler alert. Primus is for me.

We are all made of moments

These moments—a heartbreak that devastates, a victory that sets an ego to teeter on the precipice of narcissism, a decision to get on a bus or not get on a bus that changes the trajectory of your life, whatever—are collected in what we will call your Lifetime Curio Cabinet of Contextual Ambers.

Year after year, the collection grows.

Contained within the hard toffee of these ambers are bits of influence, altercation, and alteration. Frozen. Caught. Documented.

Hold one up to catch the light and at a certain angle a contextual clue to the you-ness of you will appear. Of why you do what you do (or don’t) and the naked subtext of who you are and have become because of it. Because of that moment. 

We are the fleshy and imperfect products of moments.  

Shall we open a drawer in this cabinet and look at some of my ambers?

This is the context of me.  

A girl under the influence

Look. See the girl. See her assemblage of influences collected between the door-frame notches of ages five to seventeen-ish. Give or take. 

She takes. 

Me takes. 

I begin collecting my ambers.

Geographically, I live on a 2,500-acre sheep farm in rural New South Wales. That’s in Australia. It's the 80s. Facts.

Physically, I live in three other places. Books, the television, and wherever music comes from (which is also, sometimes, the television). 

These three places combine to form a sacred fourth place. It is my favorite place on Earth: Inside my head. This place is referred to by my mother as “la-la-land” or “off with the fairies.” 

I wish there had been fairies. That would’ve been ace.

I visit my three places often. I'm there any time my presence is not required to go outside and help my dad move sheep from one paddock to another and back again. I am not anti-sheep, let's get that out of the way, but fun anecdotal fact(s): Sheep snot on you if you stand too close and their wool is often weaponized with Scotch Thistle. Woolly-snotted burr-bags, the lot of them. Did you know that? 

Their wool sent you to university, didn't it? Shut up.

Like a bower bird with a bowl cut, I begin collecting inspiration and references from all three places to line the skull-shaped nest of my fourth. 

Behold! You are witnessing the beginnings of the creation of my Lifetime Curio Cabinet of Contextual Ambers.  

The weirder the story, show, or music is, or the more outlandish the theme or sound it makes, the more I love it.

If it's quirky, bizarre, energetic, frenetic, non-sensical, rude, cheeky, dumb, or contains words I’ve never heard before because they're 100% made up, I declare it, "Genius!" 

From these contextual ambers, I begin to make up stories and words of my own and secrete them away in tattered notebooks. I draw dumb things and think dumb thoughts and love dumb stuff and am dumb with it. Gloriously dumb.

"Genius!"    

Bizarre cartoons burp loudly through my brain, and that very same brain draws a line from The Goons to The Kenny Everett Video Cassette, from The Young Ones to Black Adder. It draws a line from The Banana Splits to The Monkees, and from Max Headroom to the sketch comedy of The Late Show and Fast Forward. “Fox in Socks” and “Alice in Wonderland” are connected, as is so much Roald Dahl that the pages fall out of my Scholastic Book Club paperbacks. From Monty Python and repeats of The Goodies every summer (much of that show has, as they say, not aged well) to Spike Milligan’s “Silly Verse for Kids” and John Lennon’s “In his own Write.” Both feature childish doodles and whimsical, non-sensical tales and imaginings. My delight has no edges.

Anything and anyone who uses words in a wonky way, or leans into sarcasm, exuberant punnery, or oddball absurdism, I catch and collect and set into the amber.

I learn my most important lesson. It will guide me on my journey.

Words are tools. But they can also be toys.

My cabinet fills with dark and light and funny and weird and wild and whimsical. I collect stories told in playful and unexpected ways. Stories filled with jibber-jabber and wordplay and experimental, made-from-thin-air language. I stuff my drawers with artists and writers who not only weigh the meaning of the words but consider even the feel of them in the mouth. Slide over this vowel. Strike this consonant with a hammer. Funny, ironic, tragic, quirky, kooky, nonsensical, playful, and weird. Repeat until the taste develops. Until I find my own.

This is all context. 

Which is to say, Les Claypool may not be Shakespeare, but he knows a thing or two about much ado. We’ll get to that. 

Amber Alert: BOLO for Solo

It’s the early 90s. Look at me. The first of my family ever to go to university with an education about to be built on the backs of merino sheep. (Thank you for your service.) 

Weirdly, I find no BA in Nonsense in the course handbook, so I chose to dedicate myself to a bog-standard writing degree. Feature writing, scriptwriting, and fiction, plus a whole load of poetry and literary study thrown in for intellectual yuk-yuks.

Full Word Nerd activation commences.

Geographically, I am now in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Facts. But mentally, the GPS co-ordinates show my primary residence as in my own head.

In my defense, I deem this—being in my own head—to be the safest place for me. I’d had visions of going to college and becoming one of those art-type people who wrote art-type things. And then I got there. I got there and discovered, much to my great shock, that despite showy displays of rabid outgoingness, I was in truth quite shy. 

Turns out I did not translate off the page and into the real. I have a piece of amber for this. It is labeled: Extroverted Introvert: Handle with Care.

Context.

Years pass in a blur of squalor and freedom. A bedsit, a share house, a dorm room, a graduation, then back to flat mates and share houses filled with furniture from St. Vinnie's. Nearly all these places are incredible shitholes.

I love it.

I survive (mostly) on two-minute noodles, cheap beer, and box wine.

During this time, my music aperture opens wider to accept additional enrollments. My decade-long obsession with The Beatles and Paul McCartney slowly tweaks and refines. I listen to alternative radio. I spend hours flicking through the racks at the record store downtown. Money is tight. The selection process is often a painful one. I do what I can.

At one fateful Battle of the Bands (my friend had some kind of thing with the guitarist) I meet my ride-or-die flat mate—a drummer from that same band. They do not win Battle of the Bands and declare the whole thing rigged. This drummer loves Led Zeppelin and idolizes Stuart Copeland. I don't know it yet, but he will become a life-long friend.

His friends become my friends, and I deep-dive into the back catalogs of bands I listened to but didn't obsess over. Black Sabbath and Cream and Blue Oyster Cult and REM and The James Gang and Pixies and Nirvana and more.

Construction of a Bob Dylan shrine begins. The early seeds of this future Radiohead tragic are planted.

When I look at photos of me from this time, I look happy. Am I happy? I should be happy.

I live in a swirl of good mates and idle times, of trick pool shots and sticky floors in smoke-filled dive bars. A time of oversized tees and flannels tied around waists and harsh haircuts and going deaf from standing too close to speakers at gigs and drinking cheap beers from plastic cups and walking for hours to get home all because I'm too cheap for a taxi and I'd rather spend my last dollars at the chippie outside the bar. I'd rather splurge for extra gravy.

Dole sign-ons and temp jobs and I write two books which I throw away (mentally at least) and a stint in breakfast radio pulling CDs and making coffee and writing one radio ad that aired (success!) and working hospitality jobs before finally falling through an opportunity window backwards and into a job at a newspaper. Not as a journalist (I’d seen "All the President’s Men" and decided I wasn’t ethical enough, ha!), but as a copy kid first, then an assistant in the cut and paste library, and then as an occasional contributor of weird stuff to the science and technology section.

Which they printed. My words. My dumb and—I'll be honest—not great words.

Happy, right? The photos sure make it look that way. The contextual amber would like a word.

A hangover that could kill a brown dog

It’s 1995-ish. The year I get sad. Not all the time, but more often than I'd like. When sad pops in for a howdy-do, I find its presence to be...overwhelming.

Debilitating.

Embarrassing even.

With the benefit of hindsight and 30 years of distance, I can tell you that the feeling is more akin to what I now recognize as a panic attack of sorts. Back then, I just call it The Sads.

I tell no-one. I am. A Scorpio.

When the sadness comes, it's with a relentless rush of a sensation that flushes through my bones to sag me to a beanbag state of flop and static panic. I feel it in my throat. I feel it in my heart. It doesn't stop in 1995, bleeding over into 1996 to continue the party.

Where did it come from? I can’t work it out. The cause of my biggest heartbreak to that point had long moved away—good riddance to bad rubbish, as they say—and I had a job and my rent was paid on time and my friends were amazing and I loved everything and everyone. Right? Why so sad? Embarrassing. Shameful. Weak. 

Noodle—everyone called me that—Noodle no know why Noodle so sad. Noodle confused. Noodle need to cut that shit out. Squash The Sads.

My approach is to do what people do. I tell no-one (Scorpio, remember) and hold the head of The Sads down in a giant vat of happy hour booze.

Except when I don't.

There are days when I am so sad, that not only do I think I can't hide it, I know—I just know—that drinking is a bad idea. I don’t know how I know that, or what kind of self-preservation instinct kicks in, but it just feels like drinking will put me into "Danger, Will Robinson!" territory.

In those times, I enact what we will call The Peril Play. The Peril Play just means I RUN AWAY from everyone to seek solo solace in the one thing I have always used to bring me back and equalize.

Music.

I listen to music.

I listen to it loud, and I listen to it alone. I listen to music until I find one song—the self-soothe song that was built for that moment. A song that grabs me in its groove or beat and holds me there. Once identified, I play that song over and over and over and over and over until my sadness is lassoed and hogtied by the words or melody or sheer brute force of the song’s personality and subdued. I don't know what happens to The Sads after that, but I assume the song drags it to a far-off alley and throttles it on my behalf.

Music alters mood. Music is medicine. My theory is that the overandoverandover of a song is the auditory equivalent of a restless leg jiggling under a table. It self-regulates emotion.

Sonic stimming, if you will.

I have used this method all my life. I still do, though not always for sad-throttling reasons. Sometimes I just love a song so much it consumes me. The right song—a good song with a certain kind of mood or relentless chug—will beat your heart for you when you have lost the count of it.

There's no one song. Just whatever works in THAT moment. By way of illustration, cop an eyeful of this bit of amber. 

There’s a beaver in it! 

Wynona was a gateway beaver*

Contextual Amber is often cloudy, so I will put my hands up to it and say, yes, it’s possible I have jammed different details from different days into this little bit of sticky toffee, but the main bone of it is a beaver bone, that much is clear. 

The point of this story is not the beaver—it’s the power of music. I think that the point. Let’s see if I can stick this landing.

Get in the car.   

On this particular day, sometime in late 1995 or early 1996 (cloudy), the sadness comes on with a dramatic ta-dah and so I RUN AWAY before anyone sees it. Gotta get away gotta go! Need time to settle. To find my balance. To calm down and come back to some semblance of something and no one will be the wiser.

Get in the car.

Another cloudy bit. Is it the Subaru or the Holden? I can't remember. The Subaru is a 1976 front wheel drive station wagon that, like a lot of things in my life, was a hand-me-down from my brother. Or was I in the Holden...? 

Weeds! I get in the car. I drive. 

At some point, I find myself pulling up in a dirt car park at the edge of Lake Ginnederah, facing out to a view of the water. Maybe it was paved? Either way it had logs laid down to stop people from driving into the lake. I guess some people did that. Not me. It’s not that kind of story. 

Music has been playing the whole time. I gaze out, thinking the self-indulgent and bullshit thoughts of GenX sad-sacks the world over in the 90s.  

Why am I a loser? Why do I suck so much? Why do I look like/act like/work like this? There’s a lot more I could throw in there, but I’m not going to. 

And then Primus is in the car with me. 

The mechanics of it are cloudy. How did I have this song? Had I recorded it off the radio broadcast of Triple J’s Hottest 100 countdown for 1995 (“Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver” came in at number 40 that year, wedged between Skunk Anansie’s “I Can Dream” and Alanis’ “You Oughta Know.”) Had I recorded it off Punchbowl itself? I feel like I didn’t buy that CD until later. Until after this day. Because of this day.

Doesn’t matter. Weeds! Primus.

The song plays. There is something about it that jolts me. Brings a smile to my face as I link the song I'm listening to with the video for it. I feel like they played it on RAGE (the after-midnight to dawn music video show) all the time.

In my mind, I see the foam rubber cowboys struttin’ ‘cross that green field. Their staccato movements and quick draws. The feisty, coin-operated horseys.

There's a relentless quirk-filled drive to it. The triplets, the repetition, the build. The double entendre and the weird story. The yodel-ly call, like a train a comin’, and the ratatat of it all. This song—along with the musical magic of it—uses its words. 

Words as toys. 

This is it, I decide. This is the song for today.

It ends. I hit rewind. I play it again. 

Then again. 

And again. 

How many times? I don’t know, but from experience I can tell you that after I begin the ritual—the sonic stim technique—the beating of it into my heart does not stop until my morale improves. Until my morale improves. Until my morale improves.

It improves. It's dark now. I start the car. I reverse out of the car park. I drive back home to my friends.

Safe! 

If I were a poet, I would probably have said something like: “Last night, a beaver saved my life.” but that’d be overstating it and it's a little too drama queen for me. To be clear: I was never in any danger. But here we are, 30 years later, and I'm asking myself why I remember this moment. Every time I hear this song—every time—I think of me in that car. The time the beaver saved my life. (Drama queen.)

Why THAT song? It’s not even my favorite Primus song.

I have a theory. 

Songs like Wynona—and a lot of Primus songs—with their relentless yaw and chug and roll can lay their paddles upon your chest and shock an irregular heartbeat back to a rhythm capable of sustaining life.

Too much?  

A song like Wynona operates as a cardiac crank machine that, for those few minutes of your hesitation, can move the blood through your veins on your behalf. To your brain and to the limbs that jiggle and the head that nods and the foot that taps and back to the heart that thumps and thumps and thumps until you are there, again. Back again.

When your heart stops beating, a song like Wynona senses your struggle, gets in the car, hooks up the jumper cables to the ol’ you-can-do-this battery, and zaps you back to going. 

A song like Wynona can drive you on. 

Janeen. It’s a song about a beaver. 

Shut your dirty mouth! 

But ok. 

I don’t think it’s about the beaver. 

Whatever the beaver is or isn’t (a real beaver or a nudge-nudge-wink-wink beaver) Wynona—the song—is a gateway beaver. Not just to the medicinal and mood-altering power of Primus (and if Primus is not for you, it’s OK to roll your eyes about now), but also, it's a gateway beaver to what I think I got from listening to that weirdness that day in the car by the lake.

A way to see myself within the context of my own dreams.

Almost fifty-four-year-old me can look back at that sad, twenty-five-year-old version of me and recognize the obvious signs of a person who was yes, a self-absorbed sad-sack, but was also just someone searching for a kind of contextual anchor in life. Someone searching for signs of where to go, and what to do next. Or even a nod that said, yes, you’re heading in the right direction.

I didn’t know myself very well, then. All I had were a cabinet full of influences. The things I felt connected to and responded to with my whole body and brain and heart. The art, the films, the music. 

I’m calling it. It’s not about the beaver. It’s about what weird art and music and directors and bands like Primus represented to me in relation to the forward motion of me at that time. Still.

Explain.

I can sum it up in one sentence. I can apply that sentence to every piece of weird creative contextual amber I have ever collected in my life. And it 100% applies to a moment on sad night in a car by a lake listening to a weird song about Wynona and her big brown beaver that might just be a porcupine.

Sentence reads: 

“If this can exist, so can I.”

A collection of wizards is a wang 

Look at the stage. That's Primus up there. We are now in Santa Cruz, California, at the UCSC Quarry Amphitheater, in amongst the redwoods and banana slugs. It is 2025. I guess I got old? Victory!

Geographically, there are three GPS coordinates on stage. Each coordinate contains a wizard. LaLonde, Claypool, and Hoffman. Is it too early to call Hoffer a wizard? If not wizard, why wizard shaped? Whatever. I don’t know shit about shit, and even less about wizards, but I did watch the final episode of the Primus Interstellar Drum Derby and cried like a widdle beebee when they gave him that 'you got the gig' cake. That was pretty magical. Wizard in training, perhaps? Harry Hoffer with the mark of Primus on his brow?

Wizards have power, but it's the wang that makes it work. Every wizard in that band is the best wizard in that band, but when they combine—when they have their sonic chin wag on stage—that's where the real magic is at. That's when three wizards waving wands create the fourth extra-ordinate co-ordinate: Primus itself.

Witness the insane rhythm section building a towering cathedral to Zone. The soaring majestic mayhem of Ler diving in and out of the architecture.

Witness the chaotic good of Primus.

A collection of wizards is a wang. This a wand joke that I just made. Wand, which is an also a wang joke. Circles. And riddles. And rhymes. The fool who follows the fool who follows the fool. Follow me.

When people talk about Primus, they tend to gab on about Les Claypool and his alien bass freakery stomping all over your brain and heart and toes with joyful abandon. Knee bends and transcends. Or something. Whatever rhymes with eloquent. I don't need to get into that, so I'll just rework my favorite John Waters quote and move on:

“If you go home with someone and (they don’t have books) Les Claypool isn't on their list of best all-time bassists, don’t fuck ‘em.”

Oh, matron!

While I don’t want to talk about Les Claypool the Bass Fiend, I do want to talk about Les Claypool, The Lyricist. And contextual ambers. Words as toys. And tools. Remember that?

To witness the sheer swerve of Les Claypool on stage, skulking and stomping around with that bass, is a thing to behold. This toy is perhaps winding his stage march down a bit—time catches the knees of us all, eventually—but he still struts around like his legs are too long for his body. Strike that. Reword. He moves like a Push Puppet man with a Push Puppet base, all knee bends and stomp prowl. He is just so loose/tight in his body and loose/tight in the sound, creeping and stalking as he—I don’t want to say ‘jigs’, but that’s a word and there it is—as he jigs his way 'round stage. And he does this no-strings-marionette thing while laying down the filthiest bass lines on whatever number of strings he chooses.

He is, to package up that paragraph: An in the pocket push puppet of a wizard in a wang.

I will now proceed to talk out my ass. Gird.

I think how he moves and delivers his stories is just as considered as the words he chooses.

He plays with words on the page, then he plays with words on the stage.

Performance. Art.

Explain.

Story is more than words. It's delivery. It's context. There's the story told by the lyrics; the story told by the sound (the sonic chin wag); and the story told through the body. Through the tilted sneer and voice choice as he presents the words—of how he physically plays with his toys.

A lot of it is style. His style. Enunciation. How he releases the words from his mouth. The implied wink and the twist, or even something like the onomatopoeic pistol pops of pup-pup-pup-pup-puppies or the fill in the blanks of a Skiddly dit dat daddle dee dee. Flat vowels. Sharp consonants. And I'm not talking pitch.

Words are living things. Sometimes we must breathe for them.

What I’m doing now is called pretentious overanalyzing and no, I won't apologize. I do this exercise for myself because I like to figure out why things work (or don't) and why I like them (or don't) and extract all the lessons from my language-themed ambers. I agree. It is insufferable! (maybe) But I will press on. After all, my thumb is already in your eye.

Performance.

Art.

Performance art.

The character he becomes onstage, or the way the character of Les Claypool interacts within the wizarding space, is a kind of incantation. A spell. Sometimes he casts words out like an auctioneer or a carnival barker. Sometimes with a snarl, or a shove, or a whisper. Sometimes he's all nursery rhyme time and weird affectation—part Peewee Herman, part mad scientist on the verge. And sometimes, he’s just a narrator, a guy on a porch, singing us through a story. The omnipotent voice of..., well, not God, but some kind of Oz for sure.

The Wonderful Wizard of Ob? (servation).

Too much?

A singer's voice is another instrument, tuned and modulating, hitting notes in a range to add melody to the mix. Les Claypool does that but with a twist. His voice is not just another instrument; it’s another character in the story.

Wordplay and weirdplay, together. That’s Primus.

The words themselves. The output. It’s all so deliciously vivid and obtuse at the same time. He can be economical with words. Other times, he generously over-serves. Go fasts and go slows. Vague. Direct. Sometimes a glimpse. Sometimes a whole world. Weird. Human. Some lines are a little bit ‘boy-brain’ for me, but I don't mind. In order to navigate the landscape of the boy/man mind one must study the maps. 

Cartographer Claypool is just writin ‘em down for us. 

In case you haven’t picked up on it yet, I lerves me a good gestural sketch with words. All the contextual ambers leading up to this moment should've tweaked you to that. I love things that paint the idea of a moment in time. A life lived. The stresses, the mundanity, the mood.

Primus songs are filled with characters. People within the context of their lives. Stories within the context of their time and place. Primus songs pay homage to the bizarre and mundane. To life. To dumb humans doing dumb things. To society on the cusp. Beavers and deadbeats. Slackers and tweakers. Misfits and eccentrics and hoons and fisherman (and fish). Comi-tragic weirdos.

He casts his lyrical lines, and we all take the bait. Catchy. (Did I mention the fish?) 

With a line or a verse, we can feel the joy or the silliness or the stress or the weight these characters carry. The banknote on a shoulder, the frantic mayday not heard, and young Jerry wrapping his car ‘round that pole. Pups going to war and proverbial mind spreads and the absolute banger of an image of some golden hair of macramé. Crusades only of the brave and the broken collarbone of a Little Lord. The demon puffing madly on a mentholated log. The cautionary tale of Swamper and Greeny—what a couple of dumbshits indeed.

It's absurd. It's glorious. Word toys in the toy box and methinks Les doth like to play. 

What’s that you say? You don’t see it? He may slap, but ain’t no Nobel laureate? Yeah, and if Puppies were about actual puppies, Primus would be pop. You can’t put words together if you don’t know words. If you don’t have a few glorious pieces of contextual amber of your own.  

Sure, just like the title of their greatest hits release, "They Can’t all be Zingers," you could argue that not all the lyrics are sticky. But forget the words for a minute. Look at the vision. Look at what’s being reached for.

Songs as stories. Fully formed, complete capsules of a life or a moment, trapped in an amber of their own. Now, I ask you: Is the telling of “Last Salmon Man” miles away from “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts?” Is the line “An overaged boy of 39 has left the wing today” any less evocative than “The wine will be flat and the curry's gone cold’ from The Jam's “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight”?

Too much?

Eh. Apples and oranges. Beavers and Tired Horses. Same same. But different. And now that I have completely hunted this pachyderm to the edge of extinction, never forget the most important thing about open water swimming. Be safe and have fun! 

Let’s wrap this burrito. 

Heart mince makes good burgers

These are the bonus facts:

4.     Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and
5.     All creativity is self-indulgence. 

“We fit in nowhere and we fit in a little bit everywhere.”

I scribbled this down (poorly) while watching an old interview with Les last week and now I can't find the source, but taken as I’ve written it there, it sounds like something that 25-year-old sad-sack, woe-is-me Noodle would’ve nodded her head at. Back in that car by the lake.

But there was more to that sentence. Context is everything. It changes the tone.

What he actually said was (from what I remember): "The good thing about Primus is that we fit in nowhere and we fit in a little bit everywhere.”

Primus is not for everyone. Sometimes, during some expressive wizard wanderings off into the weeds, I wonder if Primus is for me. (Newsflash: They are. This essay is 5500 words.)

What I take away from this poorly remembered quote, is the validity of the fit and not-quite fit existence. It's a good thing. Sure, it's nice to fit. Nice and safe. Probably less stressful. Probably less risk. But if my Primus contextual amber has taught me anything, it's that we don't have to fit. We just have to be.

When I started writing this—three years ago, kidding—all I wanted to say was that music is medicine and view it through the lens of Primus, which is not an obvious first choice, even for me.

And then I started to go off on a tangent about how culture is extra. It is the spiritual icing on the cake of humanity. A bonus. The most basic task of the human skin thing is to survive. The culture—the art, the music, the contextual creative ambers of our lives, the easter eggs of our existence, whatever—is the sweetness that makes it bearable.

Make up your mind. Is it medicine or frosting?

Both, I think. Sweet, sweet medicine.

Primus is just one band of many that soothes the savage Noodle. The frivolous whimsy, the perfect joy, the knowing that not everyone will get it. The not doing it the way things are being done. They are the patron saints of the we fit nowhere and fit a little bit everywhere people.

Primus swerves.

Primus crashes. 

Primus leaves a weird mark on the front lawn of my consciousness.

I look at the mark. I wave at the wang. 

“If this can exist,” I say, slipping yet another Primus Heart-Heal Lozenge into my pocket for later. “If this can exist, so can I.”

Listen to me read this post to you, here 👇

Prime time in the time of Primus - Field of Streams

On a warm night in Santa Cruz, California, I entered the Quarry Amphitheater at UCSC to watch one of my favorite bands, Primus, play as part of the “Onward and Upward” tour, 2025. It got me to thinking about a moment in time, 30 years ago, when a…

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This week’s amends…

I mention a handful of books that were amongst my contextual ambers as a child. John Lennon's "In His Own Write" which I don't own but would check out from the library all the time as a kid, and Spike Milligan's "Silly Verse for Kids" which I lugged across the world over 20 years ago when I first moved from Australia to the United States. Here are a couple of pages from both to give the vibe.

On Rotation: “The Toys Go Winding Down” by Primus.

A few weekends ago, I took it upon myself to find out once and for all which song is my favorite Primus song. During the course of what ended up being an ten-hour bicycle ride, playing my 24 favorite Primus songs for about five of those hours, I was surprised at how many songs I thought I only liked a little bit turned out to be songs I like a whoooole lot more.

"The Toys Go Winding Down", "Southbound Pachyderm", and "Over the Electric Grapevine" are my long-time top three–I knew that before I set out–but folks, can I just say that "Last Salmon Man" is a triumph of compact storytelling and chug.

The more I repeated this playlist on the ride (which I think was maybe only three before I needed silence), the more I saluted the glory that is Primus. What a special band. "Over the Falls". I forgot about you! "Follow the Fool." Good lord, is Primus is for me or what?! Love. I remade the playlist on Spotify.

A reminder that all songs featured in this newsletter over the years (only two Primus songs!) are added to the giant mega super playlist of magnificence which you can access with an effortless depress of this button. 👇

All this Primus talk took me down a rabbit hole, but perhaps the thing that threw me MOST back to the feeling of being in a room with a band in my 20s was watching the energy of this early gig. And then I watched this 1991 festival one. Nothing epitomizes the style of these days more than Les wearing shorts with long johns and a flannel. These were heady style times.

This live performance at Woodstock '94 of "Those Damn Blue Collar Tweekers" drives a pretty hard bargain.

Energy!

And of course, the Interstellar Drum Derby was an excellent series and I finally watched the final episode (after it was announced) and CRIED LIKE A BABY! The editing together of them playing the same songs was a trip. They sounded so different! You can start with episode 1 here if you want to watch em all, but here's the final, 1 hr special.

Primus posters are legendary. Here's a sample of 'em from the Onward and Upward tour, including the Santa Cruz one by artist, Paul Kreinzenbeck. You can see more by scrolling through the Primus Insta.

The problem with a long merch line is that you go in with a rule of "OK, you can buy one t-shirt" and next thing you know you've got three tees and a poster and a hat and you're not mad about it. Well, until you realize you had not considered the portage of the poster part because dummy forgot she rode her motorcycle.

I worked it out!

It'd be remiss of me not to show the Beaver video. What an incredible piece of art. Stand back. Be amazed! Drown in glorious nostalgia of music videos being awesome.

Bonus: There's a behind the scenes. Wonderful stuff.

I've shared this before, but I love Les Claypool's Duo De Twang version of Wynona.

And while we're talking vids. One of my favorite tunes with a video that deserves more views.

Shameless Podcast Plug

Listen to audio versions of early issues of The Stream on my podcast, Field of Streams, available on 👉 all major podcasting platforms 👈

Here’s Apple