I am eternally grateful to Mark at Newbury Comix in Boston Mass for turning me on to Primus back in the very early ‘90’s – on the lookout for some new material with local flavour he passed me a cassette for ‘Frizzle Fry’ and told me “Man, give this a listen and if you don’t dig it don’t bother coming back ‘cause you don’t like music”. Skip forward a couple of years and queuing to see Primus at Brixton I spot Mark a few places in front of me in the line – he didn’t remember me but when someone does you that big a deal you remember them.
One of the things that have made Primus so special over the years is their individuality and the completely original stance that they took over their music. They attracted an audience that was as deep as it was broad – a band that could never be put in a bucket and whose music was as attractive to the young grunge fans as an old hippy like me. ‘Sailing The Seas Of Cheese’ was their first release on a major label and it was receioved with a certain open-mouthed shock by the establishment. The music was complex and aggressive, almost unearthly and led by the bass of Les Claypool. Larry LaLonde’s guitar was not performing anything like usual duties, seeming to float in and out of the song and seemingly playing a track on its own while the drums of Tim ;’Herb’ Alexander served as the glue that pulled the bass and guitar together.
It took nearly ten years before the album went Platinum but since it had been on the charts for over a year (without getting any higher than 116 on the Billboard 200) the disc suggests that the album had been selling steadily for all that time.
This release sees Claypool remixing the album from the original master tapes and creating a 5:1 mix on DVD to accompany the stereo mix. This review features on the stereo mix and the minor changes he has made are remarkable. The first thing to note is how much less like a jam it sounds. The music always had an internal logic to it but the new mix tightens up the relationship between the instruments and tie the vocals in to the sound. On the original there were definitely issues with the vocals being lost in the mix a little but here they are strong and make more sense. Claypool’s bass is a wonder at all times but his handling of melody is incredible check out ‘Here Come The Bastards’ or ‘Sgt Baker’ for examples.
Numbers such as ‘Jerry Was A Race Car Driver’ show the ability of the band to work up a morass of sound into something that works on many levels and ‘Fish On (Fisherman Chronicles Part II)’ is hypnotic and an assault on the senses all at once. The album comes complete with live versions of ‘The Damned Blue Collar Tweekers’ and ‘American Life’ from Austin Texas last year and the Bassnectar remix of ‘Here Come The Bastards’.
‘Sailing The Seas of Cheese’ is about as crucial as ‘Nevermind’ or ‘Appetite For Destruction’ in the way that it showed what could be done if the band were true to their music and don’t give a damn about the perceived wisdom of the labels. It is also a bloody fine listen – again.