Primus - Suck On This

One of the most audacious debut albums in the history of underground rock, and one of the most unlikely origin stories to boot. In early 1989, Les Claypool, Larry LaLonde, and Tim Alexander had been playing together for approximately two months. Claypool borrowed three thousand dollars from his father, the band set up a TASCAM 8-track Portastudio at the Berkeley Square in Berkeley, California, recorded two live shows in February and March, mixed the results onto Hi-Fi VHS, pressed one thousand copies, and released it themselves on their own Prawn Song Records imprint. That was Suck On This.

Along with Jane's Addiction's self-titled live album, the record is widely credited with helping to bring alternative metal out of the underground and into wider consciousness. It is easy to hear why. Even at this embryonic stage, with a lineup that had barely had time to learn each other's names, Primus sound fully and bizarrely themselves. Claypool's bass clucks and slaps with a personality unlike anything else in rock music, LaLonde's guitar work is as idiosyncratic and texturally inventive as it would ever be, and Alexander's drumming is stupefyingly assured throughout, anchoring the whole gloriously strange enterprise with a cool and fluid precision that belies the band's two months of shared history.

Opening with a burst of Rush's "YYZ" before sliding into "John The Fisherman," the album announces itself with complete confidence in its own weirdness. Nearly all of the songs would eventually find their way onto studio albums, but there is something about this raw, live document that captures Primus at their most genuinely unhinged and exciting. As one listener put it, in 1989 these guys were truly bizarre and didn't seem entirely conscious of the fact, and that made all the difference.