In high school I drove a brown 1980 Datsun 510 that could easily be described as “disaster chic“.  It didn’t have a dashboard but it did have a stock tape deck that would slide around loose on the exposed plastic heating vent duct as I’d swing around corners or drive over curbs.  For a long period of time, I had only two tapes in the car and I would listen to them every day on my cold morning rides to school.  Since one of them was a recording of “Spooky Halloween Sounds” I would primarily listen to either of two sides on a TDK D90 cassette tape.  One side had a copy of Jacko’s 1979 breakthrough solo album Off the Wall while the other was a recording of Primus‘ Sailing the Seas of Cheese.  It’s a cassette with a one-two punch that I would never seem to get tired of.

A few years ealier, my family had acquired a VHS copy of Bill & Teds Bogus Journey, most likely by dubbing it off of Encore or the Starz Network.  Primus only appeared briefly, during the battle of the bands sequence of the film and, although it only featured mere seconds of Les Claypool singing the last few lines of Tommy The Cat, I would watch it repeatedly.  Just that brief clip fragment.  Over and over.  Rewind and Re-Rewind.  A decade and half after this appearance Les Claypool actually wrote, directed, scored, and edited an original film of his own.  When it eventually came, the film arrived in the form of a mockumentary about a struggling jamband. Read the rest of this entry →