DAVID LEFKOWITZ: I remember one four-day period in early- or mid-1989, where they opened for three different bands that were very far-flung. One of them was Testament at the Omni, one was Schoolly D at the Nightbreak—it’s referenced in “Harold of the Rocks”—and there was a third show . . . I don’t remember. There was a woman named Debbie Abono who had managed Larry’s band, Possessed, and almost all those East Bay thrash metal bands. I remember talking to her after Primus was on that Testament bill, and her making a comment to me, like, “When Primus was on stage, everybody was smiling. Whereas when all the metal bands were playing, it was a very serious thing.”
LARRY LaLONDE: Right when I joined, the band was already starting to get known, because I was still in high school, and there were people in my high school that knew of the band. So at that point, to me, that was like you were already on the way to somewhere if somebody knew about it. Slowly, the shows started to get a little bigger and then there started to become this Seattle-esque buzz sort of thing, where a lot of record labels were coming into town to check out all these bands. That was the first time I got the idea of, Oh, there is something starting to happen here. Of course, everyone got signed but us . . . which was awesome. [Laughs]
Chapter 7
Suck on This
LES CLAYPOOL: A month later [after the Les-Ler-Herb lineup was solidified], we recorded our first album, Suck on This.
MATT WINEGAR: After we did the Sausage demo, Les said, “I want to do a live thing at Berkeley Square.” What we made the Sausage demo on was this little all-in-one recorder. It was an eight-track. So you had eight tracks, and a little eight-channel mixer board—all built into one unit. A TASCAM 388. It’s sort of become popular with indie, lo-fi, like, New York musicians. It’s strange sounding—it definitely had a personality, that deck, that we always liked a lot. It was straight out lo-fi, but we always liked the quality of it. It’s kind of like using eight millimeter or something. That’s all we had, and at that point, everything was borrowed anyway. So he’s like, “Why don’t you just grab the eight-track, we’ll go into Berkeley Square, and we’ll do this thing?” And I was going, Oh man . . . this is going to be impossible. Once again, Les just making something impossible go down. So it was two nights, and they were playing with Faith No More, which made it interesting. Primus would have packed the place by themselves, but Primus and Faith No More, it was just pure insanity. It was packed beyond belief. Not to mention that somebody gave me ecstasy on that first night, as well. I had never had that before, so I was like, staring at a beer can for twenty minutes at one point. [Laughs]
DAVID LEFKOWITZ: There were two shows recorded at Berkeley Square—one was headlining, and one was opening for Faith No More. And by the way, Faith No More, when they were losing their original singer, Chuck Mosley, and were looking for a new singer, they definitely saw Mike Patton for the first time opening for Primus [with Mr. Bungle]. And we had done some shows in LA opening for them, back in the Chuck era.
MATT WINEGAR: We loaded everything in there, and I think we pretty much decided to use whatever stage mics they had, because to do a professional live recording, you have to rent an isolated splitter that splits the signals, or run separate lines if you want recording microphones up on stage. It’s a pretty complicated process. And the fact that we sort of stumbled in there with this junky equipment, and used these old, beer-soaked stage mics. We needed more than the eight channels—we could only get eight channels, and it was supposed to be something like twelve total. We needed another mixer—of course, none of us knew anyone with a mixer. But then Tim Alexander said, “Oh, I do know somebody who has a mixer.” He brought this giant piece-of-shit mic mixer. So we submixed all the tom mics on that thing, and then just ran it onto one track. It was so ghetto, it was unbelievable. Technically, I can’t even believe we got something that could ever be pressed to vinyl and sold—let alone be listenable. Some people might argue that it’s not listenable at this point. [Laughs] But I think the performances are awesome, but it just sort of doesn’t matter. It can be a cassette deck, who cares?
So we loaded all this stuff into the back of Berkeley Square. The plan was to record two nights, and that way we would have two takes for each song, to be able to choose from. But it was just unbelievably hectic and crazy. I remember you’d come out of the back area where the recording equipment was—I had some headphones back there—and just went back, got levels, and we adjusted the mics the best we could. There was no drum overhead from the PA, so we ended up duct-taping a SM58—a cheap vocal mic—by the cable on the ceiling of the stage. It just hung down. And that became the audience mic, because there is no audience mic, so in between songs it would just be this faint “Yeah!” and clapping sound. So we would take that drum overhead mic and just blast it, because it was the only one that had any kind of crowd noise. It was really rinky-dink and duct-taped together.
We recorded those two nights, and I think if anything was used from the first night, it was maybe one song. I remember they did the Ted Nugent cover [“Wang Dang Sweet Poontang”], that wasn’t included. It was already slated to be our tape-changing song, because the reels would run out at a certain point. We timed it out so that I’d step up on stage and go, “The reels are running out!” Les would go, “Okay, we’ll do the Ted Nugent song while you go put a new reel up.” So I’d have to put that thing in rewind and get that reel off there, and pop a new reel of tape on there. And then be like, “Okay, it’s recording!” I do remember Les screwing up—a song wasn’t going well halfway through—and he stopped and said, “All right, we’re going to do that again.” It’s like getting a one-take recording—you’ve got one chance with the dang thing, and it’s going to be released. You want to get something that doesn’t have some horrible wrong note on it or a huge mistake. But I don’t think he did that for more than one tune. Maybe two.
LES CLAYPOOL: I talked my dad into loaning me money. And my dad doesn’t have a lot of money—he was an auto mechanic. He loaned us three thousand dollars so we could record and print up a thousand records [and issue it via Claypool’s own label, Prawn Song].
LARRY LaLONDE: It was originally going to be a demo, because back in those days you needed a demo to give the clubs to get a gig. Then that turned into Les being like, “Why don’t we just press this into an album, and take it around to college radio?” So I was like, “All right. Good idea.” Les was very good at having ideas like that, because I would have never thought that was possible.
MATT WINEGAR: [Suck on This] wasn’t up to Sausage level. I don’t think there’s even a surviving version of Sausage that sounds like the original tape, because it was mixed to a cassette and then dubbed to another cassette. I know there are versions on YouTube, but they just sound underwater, crazy bad. The actual, original Sausage recording was pretty dang cool. It’s just sad that we didn’t have the technology to mix it down to anything. That’s a really interesting thing about Suck on This—when we mixed it down, we didn’t have a DAT [Digital Audio Tape] machine. Which was kind of the standard, you’d go rent a DAT machine. It was a horrible format. But it was the best you could get for a home situation, by far.
We certainly didn’t have a professional analog mix-down two-track deck at that point. Suck on This was actually mixed down, to my mom’s VCR! We fucking unplugged the thing from my mom’s television set and carried it into the little spare bedroom, where we mixed Suck on This. We mixed that sucker to my mom’s piece-of-shit VCR, onto a videotape. Not only that, but we’re at my mom’s house, mixing this record. And I remember Puffy—Mike Bordin from Faith No More—was there. My older brother,