Primus at Arizona Financial Theatre was sonically sublime, perfectly quirky

Primus brought their Onward and Upward tour, with special guest MonoNeon, to the Arizona Financial Theatre on Friday, August 1.

The tour’s title may refer to the departure of longtime drummer Tim “Herb” Ale“ande” last year and the beginning of John Hoffman’s tenure as Primus drummer. The drum stool in Primus is no easy seat, and Hoffman didn’t miss a beat at Friday’s show, which featured a setlist of favorites from the 1990s, the era of “Frizzle Fry” through “The Brown Album.”

MonoNeon, the name of both the four-piece band and the bassist and singer who leads it, opened with six improvisation-heavy tunes, including “Jelly Roll,” “Basquiat & Skittles,” “Tell Me That This Love Ain’t Real” (including a quotation from “Crazy Train” to honor the recently deceased Ozzy), and “Life is a Glittery Fuckery.”
After a brief break to reset the stage, with strange novelty jazz playing on the house sound system, and to the crowd’s impassioned chanting of “Primus sucks,” Primus took the stage and opened with “To Defy the Laws of Tradition.” Screens on either side of the band showed them from various angles while the center screen played the first of many music videos, a sepia-toned one of a Jules Verne sort of submarine moving about with ducklike flippers. A lightning ball sat atop bassist and singer Les Claypool’s bass rack, and what appeared to be a toy emu head on the end of a pole stood nearby. Claypool stopped mid-song for a brief bit of audience patter. “What the hell’s going on, Phoenix?” he asked. “Here you are. Here we are. Here we go.” Perhaps this was a bit of drollery, a serious craftsman’s dry humor, or, coming near the end of the tour, there was a bit of tour fatigue as well.

There then began a trio of tunes on fish-related themes. “The Last Salmon Man,” one of the few songs of the night from more recent albums, stands out among the Primus oeuvre and the night’s setlist for addressing social issues. As the lighting patterns changed, leaving Claypool in the dark for moments, the luminescent green fret markers on the top of his bass neck glowed. With music videos, first of actual shoals of silver fish, then of strange eyeballs with fishtails, playing on the back screen, the mini fish set continued with “John the Fisherman,” prompting one of the first mosh circles of the night. The miniature fish set concluded with the psychedelic reversed sounds in Eastern, modal tonalities of “The Ol’ Diamondback Sturgeon.”
After “Mrs. Blaileen,” which allowed guitarist Larry LaLonde to showcase his shredding abilities, and the weird outlaw tale “Over the Electric Grapevine,” animated images of seas of cheese hinted at what might come next. “I’m going to play a song dedicated to Mr. Larry’ Lar’ LaLonde,” Claypool said before launching into the neck-tapping bass intro for the band’s early hit and ongoing fan favorite, “Jerry Was a Racecar Driver.” The crowd sang along for the first verse, and mosh pits resumed, more aggressively this time. After the song’s break, instead of resuming after the crowd’s shouting, “Dog will hunt,” Claypool engaged in a bit more stage patter about a woman in the front wearing a tiara with the words “Birthday Girl.” He mentioned other people who shared her birthday, including Jerry Garcia and Jason Momoa, and suggested she give Momoa a call. “You can have cheesecake together,” he said. “Everybody likes cheesecake.” The song resumed, the Jerry of the lyrics met his early demise, and “Heckler” followed, again demonstrating LaLonde’s guitar virtuosity and serving to remind the astute listeners that the band’s individual and collective technical abilities can sometimes be overlooked because of goofy lyrics and Claypool’s idiosyncratic rock-yodel singing style.

The show’s highlight came during “Southbound Pachyderm,” which began in the dark with photo-negative images of elephants on trampolines projected on the back screen. After Claypool took a lengthy and impressive bass solo, he called for “Mr. MonoNeon,” singer and bassist MonoNeon, whose quartet had opened the evening. MonoNeon came out in a knit magenta balaclava with yellow fringe, sunglasses, loose-fitting brightly colored jacket and pants, and snowboots with pieces of paper bearing his name. He and Claypool proceeded to trade bass solos. Though both are bass extraordinaires and extensively employ similar slapping, tapping, and popping moves, their expression of those techniques differs greatly, and the crowd, whether they knew it or not, was privileged to hear such high-level bass players improvising together.
“I think we should just stop there,” Claypool joked after the end of the song and MonoNeon’s departure from the stage. “That’s a good place to stop. What the hell are we going to do now?”

What they did was play “Little Lord Fentanyl,” released only a few months ago and new drummer Jon Hoffman’s first composition with the band, a tune both scary and funny in its description of the ravages of that drug. The last two songs of the set returned listeners to “The Brown Album” of 1997 with “Restin’ Bones,” accompanied by videos of animated skeletons, taking pills, shooting revolvers, and bending at the waist, and closed out with “Bob’s Party Time Lounge,” which seems to tell the story of a particularly sordid drinking establishment.
The lights went down, and the trio exited the stage while the center screen showed a video of a woman describing a Primus performance as the worst concert ever. “It was weird,” the woman said, “and it was disjointed, and they weren’t listening to each other, and they weren’t playing music together.” Her interviewer responded, “I’ve seen Primus, and I do kind of like it.” The jeer-turned-motto PRIMUS SUCKS then appeared on the screen, and to the crowd’s chanting that Primus sucks, the band took the stage again for a short encore.

First came “Golden Boy,” with its groovy, infectious neck-traversing guitar riff that demands you bang, or at least bob, your head. Before the applause died down, Hoffman began on the ride cymbal, and soon Claypool joined with the starting motif for “Too Many Puppies.” Mosh circles begin again, larger and more aggressive than earlier, under hot orange lighting that shows the spray of drinks flung in the air. The screen behind the band shows a video of crimson-tinted WWI-era soldiers jerkily marching. Of material from Primus’s early period, “Puppies” is unusual for engaging, though somewhat indirectly, with political issues related to, in the words of the song, the “war machine” that exists to “maintain the oil fields.”

When the song ended, the lights went dark, and the band exited a second time. The crowd again chanted, “Primus sucks,” hoping for a second encore, but the lights came up. One man muttered that “Lacquer Head” and “My Name is Mud,” which he says “would have been bangers in this room,” weren’t in the setlist. The crowd turned to the back of the auditorium and clogged the walkways in trying to leave as Gene Wilder began singing “Pure Imagination” over the house sound system: “Come with me/And you’ll be/in a world of pure imagination.”

Here are a few more photos from MonoNeon at Primus at Arizona Financial Theatre: