Hi there, this is my first blog about facts related to music, mainly about Primus/Les Claypool.When I first heard Primus on the radio in 1991 I turned it off. A friend of my gave me a cassette with Frizzle Fry on it and forced me to listen to Primus again. Since then it is one of my favorite bands ever.
In the early 90s the only way to get into Primus live recordings without contacts in the tapetrading community was to buy illegal bootleg CDs on recordfairs. There was no internet widely available and if you had internet the speed was far to slow for downloading and streaming. I bought a lot of them in that timeperiod. On some bootlegs the information about date and venue of the recording where missing or wrong and some of these bootlegs contain recordings of the same show.
Toasterland
As Primus/Les Claypool fans we are very blessed with the website www.toasterland.com, maintained by Toaster. All information about Primus and Les Claypool related shows is there, including dates, venues, setlists, ticketstubs, setlist art by Les Claypool and a lot of live recordings for streaming.
On the list of Primus shows of 1990 there are two shows that don’t have a specific date: Rome 11/xx/1990 and Rome 11/xy/1990. Both shows are included on multiple bootleg CDs. I’ve always wanted to know the exact dates and venues (data quality is part of my daily work on data management) so I did some research (read: “Google”).
Rome 11/xx/1990
The first Google search on “Primus Italia 1990” and language on “Italiano” brought me to this website: https://www.romasuona.it/primus-live-evolution-club-1-11-1990-roma/. Wow, that’s a direct hit! In this blogpost “Prince Faster” writes about his experiences seeing Primus live in Evolution Club on november 1st in 1990. The setlist looks similair to the setlist of the bootleg CD “Does Primus really fry?” And wait, there are two recordings included! One is a recording the writer of the blog has taped himself. It’s a audience recording and stops during the beginning of Mr. Knowitall. The second recording is also a audience recording, but from a different spot at the venue.
There are some typical moments in the recordings where you can hear that they are recorded at the same show: a lot of chatter around the break at 4:30 in “To Defy The Laws of Tradition”, the typical drums after “Pudding Time”, the screaming woman at the beginning of “Tommy the Cat” and the typical bassplaying and Les saying “El Sobranti, you should come to El Sobranti” at the start of “Mr. Knowitall” and the introduction of “Those Damned Blue-Collar Tweekers”.
The bootleg CD “Does Primus really fry?” seemed to be a complete show, but thanks to the two recordings in the blog we now know that Primus also played “The Pressman”.
On Setlist.fm there is another Primus show that took place at the Evolution Club in Rome, on november 14th. I doubt if that show has really happened, but the recordings are definitely not from november 14th, because Les Claypool tells that it’s the first time they play “Those Damned Blue-Collar Tweekers” in Europe and they played that song also in Stuttgart on november 13th.
Rome 11/xy/1990
After finding the blog described above and solving the 11/xx/1990 show, it was time to go after 11/xy/1990. This show is present on multiple bootleg CDs, as complete show (“Master of Puppies”, “Spagetti Western”) or partly as fillers on other ones (“Madhouse” and “Europe 90/93”). There was already confirmation in the nineties that these recordings were from the same show, see http://www.ram.org/music/primus/discog/madhouse.html.
Another hit on Google after searching for “Primus Italia 1990” was this link: https://archivio.bloomnet.org/2020/11/06/mudhoney-primus-and-more-altre-leggende-sul-palco-di-bloom/. This poster on the right got my attention:
Another Google search on this date and venue brought me to this recording on Discogs: https://www.discogs.com/Primus-Live-At-Bloom-90/release/2326584. Hey, that’s interesting! The last three songs of that bootleg cassette correspond to the first three songs of the earlier mentioned bootleg CDs. The bootleg cassette was said to be owned by three Discogs users. One of them appeared to be a very friendly collector from France who had two copies of the cassette and was willing to trade one! When the tape arrived and I took time to listen to it, it made clear that the cassette bootleg was taped at the same show as the bootleg CDs, so 11/xy/1990 had to be recorded at Bloom in Mezzago (near Milan) in Italy on november 2nd. The first “three” songs from the cassette were actualy both “Pudding Time” and “To Defy the Laws of Tradition”.
There are some typical moments in the recordings where you can hear they are recorded at the same show: the long intro and funny bassplaying in “The Toys Go Winding Down” and the strange bassdrum kick plus Les saying “This song is not called Tommy the Cat” and a strange “Woooaaah” before the Cherry Pie tease in “John the Fisherman”.
Funny detail about the cassette bootleg: apparently the batteries of the recorder were dying during the recording, resulting in slower recording and faster playback. You can hear that on the original recording. Thanks to LeifH for correcting the speed of the edited recording!
Conclusion
So now we know pretty sure what the real dates and venues are of the two “Rome” live recordings and we have new info about the setlists. I’ve sent my conclusions to Pat, so maybe he will update the data for these shows on the website. All mentioned recordings are here for download: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1nmXtHgmY-7mVgPJE7mQptXD1pEB0iktl?usp=sharing. I will also update the info on the various Discogs items soon.
Next blog will feature info on Dutch shows by Primus, but as it took me months to come to this point I can’t promise when that blog will appear…
All comments or extra info are welcome at mcmarkyv(at)hotmail.com
Thanks for reading!
