MATT WINEGAR [Suck on This and Frizzle Fry coproducer]: Actually, I had a cassette tape that was a Primate cassette. I wish I still had that thing. It was crazy—I think it was just Les and Todd and a cheap drum machine. It has a version of “Too Many Puppies” that is the polar opposite of the version that ended up on the record. Super lightweight—almost like the B-52s or something. [Laughs] So Les said, “Let’s meet up on Saturday. What would you charge us? We need to do a five-song EP or something.” I was like, “I won’t charge you anything. Just come by and hang out.” I’m just a sixteen-year-old kid, getting to hang out with other musicians like myself, which was fun. And I always thought that Jay Lane was an amazing drummer too. It’s nice to sit and watch a really tasteful and funky drummer like Jay. So they came by on Saturday, and I remember they brought me a six-pack of Miller High Life. [Laughs] That’s what I was paid to do what’s now known as the Sausage demo.
Man, we just set everything up, threw some microphones on things, and it was maybe the easiest recording ever. It was like, set them all up and get them comfy, and they just did their thing, which I think was the big difference—they had been in all these professional studio environments, and it just altered them so much. Just the environment of being in a professional studio is weird to a musician a lot of times. Sometimes you’re separated and you have headphones. I’m pretty sure we did that thing with zero headphones. I think they felt really comfortable, and they got to play together, like they would in a rehearsal space. So we busted that thing out, and we just got along really good. We liked a lot of the same music and had similar interests.
DAVID LEFKOWITZ: The cover [of the Sausage demo] was no longer black and white, it was brown paper and had an interesting drawing by Les. Les was always very active making T-shirts for the band—his drawings or whatever. Sometimes it would be a shirt just for one show. So not only were the sales for the shows picking up, but they started being able to sell these tapes at shows.
LES CLAYPOOL: I didn’t draw that cover. It was the first of many Lance “Link” Montoya collaborations featuring a sketch of a sweaty bald man with a bratwurst clinched between his teeth.
MATT WINEGAR: The Sausage demo, it really wasn’t like a huge event. We did it in one day . . . we did it in one afternoon, it wasn’t even a day. It was probably a four-hour session, where we did the whole thing, mixed it, and that was it. It was a certain kind of chemistry going on with those guys, right around that point. Jay and Les really had a good thing going on with the rhythm section. I just loved the way Jay played the drums. I was a Jay Lane fan—Jay’s style was something that I thought there was a certain feel he had, where you go, Man, that guy’s got feel. He’s got something else going on besides, hey, he’s a really good drummer. Technically, he plays this and that. They had a personality that I thought was really interesting. And Les and him together, they just had this really good thing going on. I got the feeling that Les really enjoyed playing with Jay, a lot, during that time. And that they were sort of on the same page and not fighting each other, because I imagine being a drummer with Les, Les is going to lay down the tempo and feel, and he’s not going to budge.
That’s always been the thing with Les—most bass players are taught to follow the drums. And Les never did that. In fact, he would stay at one tempo and let the drummer drift off of him, and the drummer would have to come back and meet Les—Les just wouldn’t budge. And I know that it bothered Tim [Alexander] a little bit down the road. I remember Tim saying, “It’s so annoying. If the song starts to move a little bit, Les just stays right where he wants to be, and you better fucking match him or else the whole thing is going to fall apart.” Tim wanted Les to follow him, and Les wasn’t having it. [Laughs] But Les, he’d get on the drum set, and he could play the same two drum beats, but he played them really, really well. I remember the first time he was playing a drum set, and I was going, Hey, he’s playing the most simple drum beat in the world, but he’s got an amazing sense of tempo that just feels really spot-on and doesn’t move. And it translated right to his bass. He had a really, really good, even sense of timing and a good sense of rhythm—which has become apparent over time, now.
LES CLAYPOOL: I always attribute that to Kirk Hammett. Besides the golden nugget of the key to success being sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, Kirk told me when he was first learning that the key was to always tap your foot. I tell my kids that now when they play; that, and Mr. Johnson being a stickler for tempo in high school jazz band.
TODD HUTH: The recording was great and it turned out great. Personally, I still think that’s the best Primus record ever made.
MATT WINEGAR: It certainly wasn’t production in the sense of what you think of production now, where you tear the songs down and rebuild the structure. I guess in the sense that it was judging performance, which is more what record production was back in the day. It was more like judging performance and, “You can get a better vocal there,” or, “You guys can play that better.” Now, it’s like record production has gone into this insane thing, where you’re responsible for every note of everything, and you’re changing everybody’s shit. [Laughs] I think the sign of the times was that the band didn’t really have any problems that needed to be addressed. They were what they were. It’s not like they were trying to be a pop band and you had to restructure everything to fit a pop format. They were almost like a jazz band or something, where you let them do their thing—it didn’t have to be edited down to a three-minute-and-fifteen-second radio length, because we never thought it was going to get played on the radio. So we obviously didn’t give a shit.
I don’t even know if there was a credit on the Sausage demo. But they were always really kind, and usually they’d give me more credit than was due to me because we were friends, and we were there to help each other out. It wasn’t some business agreement. Still to this day, I don’t like to make contracts. It’s just like, “Hey, man, if we can’t see eye-to-eye as human beings, then why are we working together? Let’s just try to be cool to each other, and help each other out.” So as far as I’m concerned, those guys threw me a bone. It was just icing on top of the cake, being able to hang out and help those guys out.
I remember Les had said, “Man, you have to meet my friend Adam Gates. You guys would totally be great playing music together.” That’s how I met Adam Gates. And then Adam and I ended up making a band called the Spent Poets eventually, that was on Geffen. Adam and I actually met through Les, which was interesting. And we’ve been lifetime friends from then on. Les obviously had a good gauge of what musician personalities were going to work well together. So yeah, they came in and did that, and that tape was just instantly popular.
LES CLAYPOOL: When we did the Sausage demo, people were actually buying it, and people wanted it. So we knew there was a good buzz about it. But unfortunately, not that long after that is when Jay Lane left the band, and then subsequently, Todd Huth left the band, and left me high and dry, to go find some new guys. [Laughs] And at that point we really started taking off—we were selling out Berkeley Square easy, started selling out the Omni, we were doing shows with Limbomaniacs and whatnot. And all of a sudden, this scene was forming, with Mr. Bungle, Fungo Mungo, and Psychefunkapus. There was this really vibrant scene going on in the Bay Area.
Todd Huth had a baby. And Todd is a family guy—he’s a very family-oriented guy. So when he had a baby, it became really difficult for him. He wasn’t around as much. I found even making T-shirts, me and Jayski were doing a lot of that stuff, and Todd wasn’t even around. It finally got to where Jayski was in this other band, the Freaky Executives, and they had a deal with Warner Brothers, so he was starting to get a little more distracted. And I was like, “Jay, you really need to commit to either us or them,” because he was getting really flaky and it was getting to be a drag. Since they had the deal with Warner Brothers, he decided to go with them.
JAY LANE: I was committed to the Freaky Executives. We had a Warner Brothers record deal, I was a cowriter in the band. Even though the band