Now that we’re somewhat settled into our new home, The Missus and I finally set up our “music room,” with all of our CDs neatly arranged in a series of bookshelves. This gave me an excuse to go through them and rip a bunch to mp3, which led to me seriously listening to Primus for the first time in probably half a decade.
The early ’90s were a very strange, very wonderful time, insofar as that once Nirvana opened the door for outsider culture, anything and everything was welcomed through. Rockabilly? Great, c’mon in! Industrial? Nice to make your acquaintance! John Waters movies? Happy to have you! Piercings? Yes, please! Spoken word? Where do I sign up? I lived it, I took it for granted, I miss it even now. But of all the bizarre, how the hell did this happen manifestations of freakdom’s sudden and inexplicable supremacy during that era, I think that perhaps the strangest is that this band had a platinum, Top 10 record.
In America, in the ’90s, you could sing songs astutely chronicling the demimonde of degenerate meth-addicted blue-collar Diane Arbus rejects in a cartoon character voice while slapping your lead fretless bass guitar and repeatedly jerking your leg up and down and become a huge band capable of absolutely killing an audience of thousands and thousands of people.
Fun fact: Since the closest I ever got to the Long Island hardcore scene was making fun of it, it’s not like I’ve got a plethora of scary pit stories to recount, but to the extent that I do, the scariest pit I was ever in was during “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” at the Primus gig at Roseland. Each time he’d say “Go!”, it was like that scene in 28 Weeks Later where the infected get into the parking garage.
You posted this just as I was listening to Morphine, another early/mid 90s band with unconventional instrumentation that flourished. Not anywhere near as weird as Primus – not by a long shot – but still.