Like a lot of us who tottered into consciousness in the second half of the 20th century, Les Claypool grew up with cartoons from the family television beaming into his retinas. In a 1991 Rolling Stone profile, journalist Michael Azerrad interviewed not only the three members of Claypool’s band Primus, but also both of his parents, who were partying with them. From a conversation with the bassist’s mother, he unearthed an image that more or less slid the absurdist funk-metal outfit’s whole deal into place. “He liked to watch TV a lot,” Claypool’s mom said. “I think that’s where he got a lot of his ideas. He’d sit there on his little tiny plastic motorcycle that he had and watch cartoons.” A little kid gripping the handlebars of a fake bike, a barrage of novel stimulus more vivid and elastic than real life—there it is, that’s Primus’ embryo.

Later on, at age 15, Claypool learned to play bass by noodling amplessly in front of the TV. He opted for bass rather than guitar because he loved Rush, and because nobody else among his high school friends wanted to play it, and because it “only had four strings, so I thought it would be easier to learn.” Fingers busy, he was a satellite dish for stray transmissions. The basslines and the storylines started to merge in his mind, and in 1984 he formed what would eventually become Primus (originally called Primate, later changed over a legal dispute). By the end of the ’80s, the band had its first stable lineup—Claypool plus Tim “Herb” Alexander on drums and Larry “Ler” LaLonde on guitar—and its first record, Suck on This, a collection of live tracks financed by a loan from Claypool’s dad.

Primus crawled from the same California soup that gave birth to a host of funk-metal acts in the 1980s, following Fishbone, Faith No More, and, most infamously, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. All married slap bass to thrash guitar, but if most of their cohort alternated rapping and belting on the vocal front, Primus trotted out Claypool as more of a hyperliterate carnival barker. He didn’t have the sheer vocal power of someone like Mike Patton or Angelo Moore, and he compensated for his scant chops by twisting himself into various balloon animals. (“Hello, all you boys and girls/I’d like to take you to the inside world/It’s quite an irregular place to be/But never fear, you’re safe with me,” he pronounces in a crimped whine in the opening to “Frizzle Fry,” one of several songs from Suck on This that play as nursery rhymes for blitzed adults.) Claypool wasn’t so much a lead singer as he was a master of ceremonies presiding over a rotating sideshow of oddballs, also played by him. “In the beginning, I didn’t have confidence in my singing ability, but plenty of confidence as the character I created,” he said in a 2017 interview. “Everyone would say, ‘Here’s the singer for Primus.’ And I would say, ‘No, I’m the narrator.’”

That volatile combination of pummeling instrumentals and strange, weaselly storytelling proved winning. Primus’ Bay Area cult following snowballed into a deal with Virgin offshoot Caroline Records for their studio debut, 1990’s Frizzle Fry, which established Primus as irresistible genre iconoclasts. All three musicians played virtuosically, and all three wielded their astounding dexterity to drag against the grain of pop appeal. This was music with both an archetypically ’90s slacker ethos (see “Spegetti Western,” a spacey jam about lazing in front of the TV in the wee hours of the morning while a Leone jaunt unspools) and an absolutely dizzying rate of notes per measure. Primus sank hard labor into their odes to chilling out.

They were an acquired taste from the start. For one, all the parts of the power trio were in the wrong place. Claypool’s bass didn’t serve as a bridge between rhythm and melody like the bass guitar typically does. It rocketed from one extreme to the other, slapped and tapped and strummed at speed, always and forever the center of attention and never relegated to support. LaLonde, for his part, didn’t lead with his treble licks so much as he floated miasmatically over Claypool’s volcanic ranges. Alexander could bludgeon and needle in turn, dropping into robust polyrhythms, slippery time signatures, and delicate hi-hats accenting the controlled chaos around him. No one player seemed to be actually driving this clown car.

Though it drew heavily on funk and soul, Primus’ overgrown sound, which always sounded far too busy to be generated by just three guys, rarely coalesced into what might reasonably be called a “groove.” It was all too agitated, too jagged, forever splintering off from itself, each rangy element connected by threadbare ligaments. Even the band’s Interscope debut, 1991’s Sailing the Seas of Cheese, only splashed a thin layer of lacquer onto an ugly, unruly beast. LaLonde’s squalls crashed headlong into Tom Waits’ distorted guest snarls on “Tommy the Cat,” one of only a couple Primus songs to glance off sex (and even then only through the perspective of an anthropomorphic tomcat), while Claypool’s wriggling, segmented bassline nosedived off cliffs for “Jerry Was a Racecar Driver,” an MTV-favored single about a racer dying young after driving drunk. Amid these cartoonish offerings emerged sensitive social commentary, too: the disarmingly earnest “American Life,” which sketched migrants and laborers growing disillusioned with the false promises of the United States, and the working-class call to arms “Those Damned Blue-Collar Tweekers.” All were toothy, seething numbers, and all were terrifically fun. Interscope signed Primus just as widespread hunger for weird, adrenalized, and mutable music kicked into high gear, and Sailing went gold.

By the time they issued their third studio LP, Primus had amassed enough of a fanbase to debut at No. 7 on the Billboard albums chart, where they spent a healthy 34 weeks. Pork Soda, too, went gold in a jiffy, and platinum before the end of the decade, making it one of the weirdest and most upsetting albums to ever sell more than a million copies. Like the first two LPs, it was produced by the band members themselves, who opted this time to haul their gear into their rehearsal space and record there to save money on studio fees. With a more leisurely timeline and tighter control over their environment, Primus zeroed in on the sound they really wanted, which turned out to be much darker and boggier than what had come out of them in studios. If Sailing could slot easily beside a record like Faith No More’s The Real Thing—taut and metallic, expressive and immediate, unmistakably of its time and place—Pork Soda laid its ground by reducing elements until the negative space formed an architecture of its own. The most prominent melodies tend to juggle only two or three notes at a time, often over uncomfortably close intervals. You’d be hard-pressed to find another top 10 album with quite so many rests among its notes.

That atmosphere spewed, in part, out of a simple change in tools. Claypool swapped his four-string bass for a six-string, a bigger, heftier slab of wood that could support even lower notes. The central riff to lead single “My Name Is Mud,” borne of a warmup ahead of a gig at the Greek Theater, dips close to the queasy lower edge of audible frequencies. The machinic churn of the eight-minute instrumental “Hamburger Train” charges forward on the power of the bass’ rubbery scrape, while the gelatinous “Nature Boy” (no relation to Nat King Cole’s) wobbles and melts down throughout its sparse verses. Claypool’s voice, formerly a sharp and declarative figure in the mix, slinks down into silty waters, often unintelligible and almost always emotionally ambiguous. Is he gloating or yelping in pain on the sour, askew “Welcome to This World”? Is “The Ol’ Diamondback Sturgeon,” the third entry in the band’s “Fisherman’s Chronicles” after Frizzle Fry’s “John the Fisherman” and Sailing’s “Fish On,” an anthem or a dirge? Even “Mr. Krinkle,” a song ostensibly about shooting the shit with a buddy, puddles into menace under the heat of Claypool’s bowed electric upright. The whole record sounds like it was recorded in the torture chamber at the end of Brazil: a vast concrete silo of indeterminate (but unquestionably nefarious) purpose.

Under that grisly dome, Claypool sounded as if he were grimacing through his words. The subject matter certainly didn’t lighten the mood. If Jerry’s sudden demise flashed by as a tragic coda to an otherwise fun character sketch, “Bob” aims its lens squarely on death. “I had a friend who took a belt/Took a belt and hung himself/Hung himself in the doorway of the apartment where he lived,” Claypool repeats, his increasingly frantic voice strung ragged across a handful of notes, while his giant bass shakes the ground and LaLonde’s guitar zigzags wasp-like in the middle distance. “Mud,” meanwhile, has Claypool settling into the shoes of a murderer puzzling over the corpse of a man he’s just killed. He mutes his bass to a percussive rattle against Alexander’s bony snare, until soon enough it’s hard to discern who’s thwacking at what.

It’s tough, too, to pick out exactly where songs begin and end in the midst of this mesmerizing sludge. Sailing’s songs tended to be cellophane-wrapped like candy; Pork Soda’s ooze together. “Bob” trundles right along into “DMV,” a song complaining about long wait times at the Department of Motor Vehicles. (Primus delivers both with equal muscle, which might point to something like a philosophical slant: When you’re really in it, life’s tragedies and its indignities can be hard to pick apart.) “Welcome to This World” takes a hard left into a nauseous guitar solo about halfway through its runtime, a shift so dramatic it sounds like the start of a new track, before it roars right back into its claustrophobic main riff. “Nature Boy” fakes out its ending, dropping into a few seconds of pure silence before an adrenalized reprise wrings out the song for good. Here’s music that doesn’t just deal with pain but structurally simulates it—music about falling apart that falls apart itself. The ground never stops roiling. Everywhere and anywhere could be quicksand.

A few months after Pork Soda’s release, Primus played the closing slot on Lollapalooza’s 1993 tour—not because they were headliners, per se, but because they wanted to mess around with lighting and projections after dark, even if it meant some of the festival’s primetime audience would already be shuffling back to their cars. Thanks to one of the blessed video bootleggers of the era, there’s footage online of the band’s entire Philadelphia set, captured with a camcorder from the rowdy pit. What an artifact it is: There’s Claypool in his element, almost preacherlike in his zany authority, presiding over all manner of wonders and horrors. Primus starts with their overall statement of purpose, “To Defy the Laws of Tradition,” track one off album one. They jostle through a few Sailing songs and then they get to the new stuff. At first, there is no break in tone. “Sailing the Seas of Cheese” settles directly into “Pork Soda” which arcs naturally into “Mr. Krinkle,” and everyone’s having fun. Then Claypool pauses, and, in the charged silence, he cheerfully pronounces, “My friend...he took a belt? And he hung himself!” Then he bounces ahead into the song proper. And it’s here, only here, only during “Bob” that we see a fan climb aboard someone’s shoulders in the pit, and, for a few measures, go gleefully, rambunctiously topless.

Primus could easily have been a blip, one of many abortive major label risks in a decade when the industry was swimming in cash. Instead, we haven’t yet left their shadow. After Pork Soda, their commercial peak, Primus rounded out the decade with a trio of increasingly slick LPs and a misfit radio single in “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver.” Their lineup continued to shift; they took the aughts off from recording to focus on solo and side projects; they just put out a new video, directed by Claypool’s son Cage, for the return-to-form character study “The Ol’ Grizz.” Their ’90s output handily presaged the logic of media like the shows that aired on Adult Swim, adapting the bounciness and surrealism of childhood stories to biting adult sensibilities. (Claypool would go on to supply the theme song to Adult Swim’s stop-motion sketch show Robot Chicken in 2005.) Pork Soda, in particular, foreshadowed the weight of nu-metal acts like Korn, who also deployed sagging bass in service of profoundly unsettling narratives. Beyond their immediate descendants, you might well say that every generation gets their own Primus. We millennials split the difference between occult circus performers Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and the playful, warbling Battles. These days, Gen Z gets the polka-dotted French Canadian time travelers Angine de Poitrine, a band so fully in character it could have sprung fully formed from an Adventure Time cel. Every few years, the kids hunger for hefty bass flung across a grab bag of intermingled genres. Whatever ends up coming for Alpha, with their TV fragmented into a billion tiny screens, it’s bound to be bizarre.