Rumble of the Diesel

Les Claypool was born in Richmond, California in 1963 and grew up in El Sobrante, east of Berkeley. He auditioned for Metallica in 1986 to replace bassist Cliff Burton, who had died in a tour bus accident in Sweden in September of that year. They passed on him, which turned out to be the correct decision for everyone involved. He formed Primus instead and spent the next three decades becoming one of the most technically distinctive bassists in rock, building a catalog of freak-funk records on his own Prawn Song Records label. The influences he cites are Geddy Lee of Rush and The Residents. That is the most accurate possible self-description.

Of Whales and Woe, released May 30, 2006 on Prawn Song, was the second solo album issued under his own name. On Rumble of the Diesel, Claypool played bass, vocals, guitar and percussion with Mike Dillon on marimba and percussion. The album also features Skerik on saxophone and Gabby La La on sitar and theremin across its twelve tracks. The album peaked at number 115 on the Billboard 200 and number 5 on the Billboard Independent Albums chart. Rumble of the Diesel runs four minutes and three seconds and does what all the best Claypool tracks do, plants a bass groove of such insistence that everything else orbits around it rather than competing with it. The diesel of the title is literal. The rumble is the point.

Claypool has always operated outside the commercial mainstream without ever losing the audience that found him. Primus toured with Rush and headlined Lollapalooza in 1993, but the music never moved toward the center. The center moved past it. Rumble of the Diesel is the work of someone with nothing left to prove, recording on his own label with his own band, playing his own instrument better than almost anyone alive. It runs four minutes and three seconds and contains one idea executed to absolute completion. That is enough.