For love of music, band members decide to reunite

The bassist says he's got other things going on, but he's used to juggling.
By MARK BROWN
SCRIPPS HOWARD
It's a reunion for the best of reasons. Instead of money or some fake "farewell" tour, the three members of Primus rejoined forces because it's fun to play music together.
The original lineup splintered in 1996, and Primus went on indefinite hiatus four years later.
Bassist Les Claypool and drummer Tim Alexander started working together again when Alexander jumped onto one of Claypool's Frog Brigade tours a couple of summers ago. When they worked together to do the video compilation "Animals Should Not Try To Act Like People," the tug got even stronger.
"It was pretty evident that we had an interesting chemistry that we'd sort of forgotten about. We were in different head spaces than we were in the old days, and it was a very pleasant thing," Claypool says. "It made a potential Primus reunion move that much forward. Then when we started working on the DVD, seeing all this retrospective material and nostalgic stuff, the three of us started becoming more and more excited about the potential of doing things again."
Guitarist Larry LaLonde quickly jumped on board, too.
In the process of it all, Claypool has rediscovered Primus' music himself.
'Little slices of time'
"These songs are little slices of time for us. Going back and looking at these things, it's amazing because you start relating to 'Wow, this riff came from this head space or when I was sitting backstage here or there,'" he says. "Not that I'm a completely different person, but I think as you move through life you don't realize how much you evolve until you look back."
First, Claypool put a stop to all his side projects.
"I definitely set aside some time for it. There's always something going on. There's always something on the horizon. I have tapes on the machine in the studio right now that have nothing to do with this," he says. "But that's just the way I've always been since the early '90s with Primus. I've always had something going, so I'm used to it. It comes from my father. As a kid, there was always some deck being built, some car half-completed in the garage, the bathroom in a state of remodeling. There was always something going."
Claypool's ongoing side projects included a stint with Phish's Trey Anastasio and The Police's Stewart Copeland in Oysterhead.
"Oysterhead is probably one of the most influential things for myself that I've done in about 10 years," he says. "Here you have three alpha dogs making music together, all three of us trying to be gracious and not step on each other's toes but also trying to push our ideas forward."
Working with Copeland was especially ear-opening, he says.
"He grew up in Lebanon. He grew up listening to Arabic music and he's a bit dyslexic. The way he thinks of music is very unique," Claypool says. "It bursts and it comes from directions that you just don't expect."
In the collection
The new Primus DVD collection includes some new music, such as "The Last Superpower," an anti-war song that mentions "blood in the gas tank."
"The chorus for The Last Superpower I wrote quite a long time ago, long before 9/11 or anything," he says. "It was more of a bit of commentary on America's place in the world and the impact we have on the world's resources. It was long before any of these controversies. When I did flesh it out with some verses, I made it a bit vague so as not to point at any one thing or another."
The same thing happened years ago with the song "Too Many Puppies."
"It's all about sending young men, puppies, troops, to the Middle East to fight for oil," he says. "It was written in 1984, but it's very pertinent to what's been going on. I remember, when it came out, we were in the first Gulf War. People went 'Oh my God, how did you have that foresight?' I just wrote it years ago; the handwriting has been on the wall for a while. There's been hostility between the East and West for centuries."