Frizzle Fry

Frizzle Fry is blatantly about tripping on LSD. For one, the name. Frying is a term for someone that has dropped acid and is currently tripping. Usually when you're tripping, enclosed places around you will look like the walls are bending in and out, like it's breathing. Women don't matter. You aren't driven sexually while tripping; whereas you would see with other drugs like Ex, Cocaine or booze. Thus the "I have no use for beauty dolls, especially on this night" lyric.

When you're on acid, things take on faces. In a campfire, you'll see faces all over the place in the hot coals and inanimate objects will take on animate values. Faces, personalities, breathing, living. Depending on your trip and how intense it is, this can be a good or bad thing. When you're on acid, all of these values in life seem to lose their meaning. You don't see why people feel spite, sin, charity, miracles. They all just lose their meaning. Much like numbers. You can picture a number six in your head but it'll just be a shape. No meaning to it and it becomes hard to count... Really hard. But that's mostly an aspect of shrooms. The white porcelain reference is probably a toilet that he is seeing but it's taking on an animate personality, like with the stone. The toilet just happens to have a round mouth and looks like it's screaming.

Another thing about LSD is that there is a possibility of doing more than your mind can handle or the acid pulling out underlying psychological conditions like Schizophrenia. The poor kid painting probably lost his freakin' mind, finally and they're about to haul him away to a mental institution.

... Acid is a helluva drug.

I agree with some of the LSD stuff, but I think there is some more to it than that. I also agree with the Fish Fry idea, of a generational thing, the spawn of the frizzles, yeah.

But has anybody thought of the phonetic break-down of the way he sings it? I hear "For I Am For Is All For I" - Sort of like a "I think therefore I am", along with an amoralistic declaration, going along with "I don't believe in miracles, charity, sin, hollygrams" etc. And I think "Holly" -grams is significant, it's playing on the notion that the hologram ie artificial substanceless construction or illusion, is from Hollywood - the ultimate symbol of corporate America's cultural didactic, "brain-washing" if you will. And to look too, at the religious concepts in the song - well, as IF religion invented the very concepts themselves of Charity and Sin and Miracles ha ha - but yeah, to say "I don't believe in Charity" doesn't mean you don't believe in helping others less fortunate - because it could also mean you don't believe in the accepted conventions of what charity and sin ARE. To whit, it could be a ... distillation - of rejecting the whole World Bank model where western surpluses are dumped on Africa as "AID" money ultimately undermining third-world agriculture because of the way our agricultural subsidies unfairly out-compete with local SUSTAINABLE agriculture. And speaking of "AID", so too the notion of Western MEDICINE being a sainted vocation, whereby the "Dark Continent" and rural USSR were so in need of Western Polio Vaccines that those famous Drs just had to use un-tested and blatantly un-safe Chimpanzee liver suspensions directly injected into VAST populations over wide geographic areas, and all of this funded by foundations started by well known American Billionaire types.... Etc etc. Obviously, breaking down the hypocrisy of the social conventions of SIN needn't be interpolated here. Which is to say, it's not a rejection of values themselves, it can be taken as a rejection of how in our ignorance we manifest those values.

As for the golden macrame hair, a face cut from stone, this could be a characterization of the trendy '90s rebel, as personified by our oh-so beloved Curt Cobain. All of the ratty dirty grunge fuckers, the wannabe hippie types who proliferated in those times. If, like me, you grew up RAISED BY fucking acid dropping irresponsible self-righteous asshole hippies who preached about police brutality over bottles of cheap red wine until late into the night thereby getting so wound up about it that they'd beat their wives and kids after all the groovy people went home.... IF you'd seen the dirty pastey underbelly of the ME generation it would appear rather distasteful the way HIP-ness was resurrected in the '90s for one more cash-in on it's street cred with youth culture....

It's interesting here too, to break it down phonetically - Primus sure like their play on words and double entendre don't they? - it SOUNDS like "The white porcelain is screaming AYEE" is actually

"THE WHITE BOY'S LEARNING SEEING EYE"

And I quote: "Thank GAWD the boy's not alone." -Yup, I rest my case. Ha ha. Well, that's what it sounds like to ME.

Hello all you boys and girls, I'd like to take you to the inside world" follows in this vein too. Or rather, LEADS us in this direction I should say. This introduction basically speaks to the fact that successful music's main audience is YOUTH. Teenagers, who are in that period in their development - (hopefully I'm only in the company of other aged children of the Primus era ha ha, don't wanna start flame wars with young dudes who are more "technologically proficient" ... was always confident in my strength and ability that I'd carry heaps of money or my prescriptions or my lil' trophy "wife" on my elbow etc, through the roughest parts of town - never worried I'd be ripped off ... the trophy wife was certainly a blind-side ha ha - What I'm getting at, is the first time I EVER worried that another kid was gonna take my lunch money was when I started to do banking on-line. What I'm sayin is, don't fuck with those sickly little scurvy ridden weaklings with their square-eyed lap-top tans and over-developed texting thumbs, they'll fuck you up worse than any alley mugging beat-down ever could!) Ahem - yes, the YOUTH are the main audience for music, and Reverend Claypool ... Professor Claypool? Travelling Country Dr. Claypool (Hominid Veterinarian)? Ahem - Les is laying down that this is gonna be some PEDANTICISM right here - he's our GUIDE if you will. But I don't think he's speaking to any kind of Ayahuasca Shamanism or nothing like that. He's just saying "Listen up you little fuckers. Let me set some shit straight." It's kinda like "Welcome to this World" - I always sing a few verses when I meet a new-born baby, and of course the Smother always gives you that pedophilial-accusatory glare when one gets to the bit about "All you've got to lose is your virginity" ha ha. Really though, I mean - Welcome to this world of FOOLS" I'm generally referring to the parents right there, so I'm sure the kids understand my meaning.... But yeah, I think this whole passage is about the Youth culture, the predominantly "white" suburbanite upper-middle-class audience.... Hey, remember this was BEFORE it was so easy to rip-off music, so you had to be relatively wealthy if you were able to BUY every CD that came along. At least, compared to the way I lived as a teenager. Fuck me, "earn money" you say? Yeah, I did. I worked HARD as a teen. Like, two full-time summer jobs at sixteen, one in hard landscaping shovelling gravel moving it back and forth with a wheel-barrow moving two-three dump-trucks full each day all by myself, hauling them over rough ground and soft loam and well, gravel - a good block away from where it was dumped, and that for 12 hrs a shift - digging ditches, THEN at night I took a job unloading trailers full of 100lb boxes of fish on ice, in 40 degree Celcius, then carrying them through a warehouse into a blast freezer at the back of the building and stacking them up to the ceiling on tippy toes. But hey, I was heavy into "fitness" so I pissed off a lot of co-workers, which is to say fuck-ups from the employment office, by saying shit like "Hey, I'm getting paid to do my work-out this is awesome. What with the 1500 push-ups I did this morning when I got out of bed, and the ditches I dug yesterday, I'll have some REAL muscles by the end of the year...." Ha ha. Then I wound up on the line, gutting and filetting those fish, usually 18hr shifts but once I'd learned to hide my hours of work until right before payroll was calculated, I managed to get a bunch of 24 & 36hr shifts, believe it or not sometimes I wonder if it was all a dream myself - but yeah I really cleaned up on that minimum wage over-time. Ha ha. And to think, back then the gov't gave incentive so drop-outs got work, so the gov't was paying more than half of that minimum wage, so they got my labour for peanuts. Pays off long term though, the owner's wife - widow now - works at the clinic I've been going to for my completely fucked up back for the past 13 years. So when I run out of the 250-300mg per day of Dilaudid I take to keep from busting a 12-gauge slug into my sacro-ileac and becoming one of those wheel-chair rugby jocks ... oh who am I kidding, I MUST be cured of all that mach insecurity by NOW ... anyway yeah, whenever I need ANYTHING from that clinic, that old gal has "got my back". She's probably got a hell of a guilt complex about it, otherwise I dunno why ... of course, she DID sexually harrass me back then too, so who's to say WHAT she's feeling guilt about. Or, whether it's guilt at all. Ha ha. But hey, I don't hold a thing against her. Maybe if I did. Hold a "thing" against her. Ha ha. Of course, when you're MY age, those older women are like, fucking senior citizens by now.

Where was I? Aha. Yes. First of all, I was saying "TREASURE YOUR SOBRIETY FOR THE GIFT OF PERFECT HEALTH THAT IT TRULY IS".

But yeah, I was saying, I DID earn more money than other teens of that era, so I WOULD HAVE been able to afford to buy CDs. That is, if my SMOTHER didn't spend every fucking dime I earned. It wasn't just rent, I was paying utilities in excess of what was zapping and trickling through the house. She asked for some blank cheques at one point, saying she'd put cash into my account if she needed to use them. Needless to say, when my account was shut down all of a sudden, she was willing to cash my cheques for me, and I never saw more of it than a five dollar bill at a time. When I moved out and rented my own appartment, bought a motorcycle and paid insurance etc, I suddenly found I had all of this expendable income. Funny thing, I was still working the same job as before. Ha ha ha.

Anyway, YEAH - generally speaking the STEREOTYPE of the typical "white" male North-American teenager is that he's born with a silver spoon up his ass. I certainly grew bored of that prejudice when I worked down in Chinatown for five years in an apprenticeship of sorts to a couple of old dudes from Hong-Kong. Fuck ME. I mean, shit - go ahead and judge me because YOU'VE got an engineering degree. That your parents bought for you. Fucking pricks. Treated me like shit, until one day I just had enough of being blamed for every flooded floor and over-flowing aquarium just because I was the one holding a mop - for instance if some old fart left a tap on overnight - So I took the guy by the collar and I said "How many teeth are left in your mouth? 'Cause when we get out to the parking lot in two minutes I'll have to know when to stop knocking 'em out." It was only THEN that he began to show me a bit of respect. Only because I demanded it, spoke up for myself. A valuable lesson in one sense, but really - in MY book you don't have to EARN my respect. It's freely given. You can, however, LOSE my respect. Call it a generational thing, or a cultural thing. Or go ahead and call it him being racist. Ha ha. Some time later, when we no longer worked together, he was giving me the whole "do something with yourself you lazy North American white-boy" and I laid it out for him and told him that it was actually HE who had the silver spoon up his ass. Or something else stuck up there, whatever it was.

ANYWAY yeah, the STEREOTYPE of the predominantly "white" male suburbanite upper-middle-class teenager, music consumer demographic of my generation - this was what Claypool was addressing his message to, and THAT is my interpretation of the "Golden hair of Macrame against the face that's cut from stone"

Macrame is a reference to the '70s generation. Mmmm! My first "wife" and I were very much the scroungers and recyclers, and one day in a Southern Alberta "Bibles For Missions" second hand store ... one gets the sense that said bibles were being carried into Nicaragua on the backs of the Contras if you get my meaning ... I found this BOOK on MACRAME, and the cover had this typically healthy fresh-faced looking model from the '70s ... they had clean air back then, all of the Northern Leopard Frogs weren't wiped out by pesticides, and every morning there were birds outside my window here rather unlike today where the food I put out for them goes stale - and I put out GOOD bird food, I mean like the expensive pet-store treat bird food, not the cheap stale bulk shit ... used to take in "rescue" parrots and stuff, the "wife" and I ... AND for that matter, back then at this time of year it was the coldest point in the season like thirty below, whereas today I wasn't just out in a T-shirt and shorts I was standing barefoot on the pavement and it was warm underfoot. Mark my words, Southern Alberta is going to suffer a desertification much like it's said that North Africa and the Middle East did since the time of the Carthaginians or whatever. This place is gonna be a fucking ghost-town in fifty years, it might be next to impossible to even eke out an existence in places like this. I worry whether our local CACTUS species might hold out. Years ago, living in Northern Alberta, I used to joke about investing in a local Banana plantation. But now I'm thinking more along the lines of Date Palms.... Yeah, cough cough - I was SAYING - it was a very fresh-faced healthy looking oh so fuckable girl of YOUR MOTHER'S generation on the cover of this book. They used to get their vitamins from their FOOD back then.... AND SHE WAS WEARING A DRESS MADE OUT OF MACRAME.

I guess that was a little long winded. Sorry about the rant. Anyway yeah, I wish to hell I'd kept the book. The ex has got it. What a total fetish-wear for hippies though, holy shit. Take down one of them plant hangers, or if you're really hip maybe you've got one of them OWL'S yeah? Take some macrame and rub it between some GRRL's teats. See how she likes that. Ugh I just try to imagine it rubbing under the arm-pits and shit, it's painful to think about.

I guess what I'm trying to say about the macrame, is that this is a reference to the '70s and the influence of that generation. It's basically saying -hey, if you're wearing those trendy fucking grunge-kid white-boy dreadlocks? It's because your Smother is still dressing you. Know what I mean? If, coming up through the '80s into the Primus era, your Smother wasn't a total and utter "Stepford Wife", let's say even if she WAS campaigning for Reagan-Bush at the time, you still went out on a limb and asked her whether she had a box with a pair of patch-sewn bell-bottom jeans and an official souvenier Woodstock T-shirt. Hopefully, if you were a chick I mean. But hey, maybe if you really DID worship and emulate Curt Cobain maybe we're talking about a lot of GUYS too. Ha ha. Whoops, Type-O. I meant to say GAYS. Ha ha just kidding. Actually, unless they were still in the closet or slavishly devoted to grunge fashion, there are very few gay fellas who would have taken their grunge look past the vogue centerfold standard. Which is to say, maybe grooming with clippers for the 3-day beard stubble ... no wait that was Miami VIce, grunge was more like two weeks wasn't it ... but yeah - right up to the point that all of those suburbanite kids figured out that if they wanted to look authentically grungey they'd have to bypass The Gap and Banana Republic (which used to be a pretty cool army surplus store if you can believe it ) and go to the SECOND HAND stores ... all of a sudden the very thing that I'd been picked on for all of my life was finally cool but I couldn't keep it up because all of the second-hand jeans in my size were being picked over by anorexic fifteen year old girls.... Still, just prior to going slumming across the tracks like that, they'd cleaned out mom's closet, asked their Aunt for hand-me-downs, dug through the attic etc.

My own teenaged daughter ... okay, she's my EX-daughter. But she's still MY kid. - SHE'S gone and done the white-girl dreadlock thing lately, and she's actually braided little bits of what feels like macrame into her hair. It's truly sad, because she looks like a more beautiful Edie Sedgewick, and I've always told her she should wear her hair short. I just think it's more pretty that way. Short hair on females. Or even bald. Or rather, shaved bald. As Larry David said, "Shavers aren't considered a part of the Bald community". But yeah, now MY gawd-damned kid has got fucking macrame in her hair. Jeebus.

But at least she doesn't have a "face that's cut from stone". Somehow, perhaps free of the pre-millenium tension of the armageddon cult etc, no longer glancing skyward scanning for cruise missiles everytime she hears a jet engine, she's able to take life a little bit less serious than we did back then.

Ah, whatever - to get to my POINT, these lines in the intro to ME at least, are about the "coming of age" , or of coming into one's awareness of self. And how it can be a wilderness. "Thank Gawd the boy's not alone."

Are we all sure that it's "BARRINGTON"? And "Breathe" not "BREED again"? I might just have to go out and buy yet ANOTHER COPY of this CD and check the liner notes. It seems to me those early CD printings were more fragile than later re-pressings. Do you agree? I went through several copies of each Primus album, and Tool as well. And it's not like I was a COMPLETE clutz. Not back then, anyway. If you wanna call it being a clutz - I lost all of my CDs when they spilled out of my back-pack one day. Walking with a cane onto the public tranport one day - and nobody willing to offer me a seat not to mention the driver not waiting until I'd stepped aboard properly, I went down flat on my face and all of my CDs were in my pack, stacked into one of those plastic jello mould cases they sell blank CDs on. But no, they weren't copies. It was just a convenient way to carry a whole shit-load of music around. Only a brief time later, out came the cheap MP3 players. Ugh.

Sheesh, fuckin LISTEN to me here. I oughta be giving my interpretation of a song like "It's a hard luck life" or something. Ha ha ha.

Really though, IMHO this song is a little more deep than just saying "This one time, I was on ACID...." which has gotta be the most annoying fucking sound that can be generated by the children of the '90s. Especially given the fact that so much of the Acid back then wasn't even LSD in the first place. A lot of those trips were on fucking RAT POISON. You know? Let's just be real about it, 'cause it sounds so much more bad-ass when you say "This one time, 9when I was at band camp) - I took three hits of RAT POISON...."

Obviously a song about some mind altering substane, possibly lysergic acid, the Barrington thing took me awhile to get though. I was picking my underwear off the floor and noticed they were made by Barrington. Heh, not sure if this is what Les meant by Barrington breathing, pretty funny if he did though.

Frizzle Fry is not what any of you think. Barrington is the dorm Les lived in when he went to Berkley. Famous for its crazy parties and hard drugs, Barrington Hall is the subject of many Claypool songs (pretty much the entire FRIZZLE FRY album and the song BARRINGTON HALL is a Frog Bridage tune and tells you about it. This song is about all the people in that dorm doing acid, meth, weed, & coke. It drove half of them nuts. This is what he's talking about when he says, "Andy's painting green again(translation -- Andy's going nuts from drugs). And "FRIZZLE FRY" is your head after all of this damage; fried and frizzled and toasted. And to explain all of the "i dont believe in...", that's how you feel after hard long binges -- YOU DONT GIVE A F** ABOUT ANYTHING. Probably the darkest and more creative of all their songs, this one is a bad motherfucer. Claypool uses all techniques of style in this song -- slap, pops, strum, pluck. He's a cool bastard.

Claypool went to Berkley, damn he's real fucking smart. Bravisimo!

Huh? I'm thinking of UC-Berkeley, in Berkeley, California. I called him smart, because that's a really good college. I'm confused as to what you think I meant, but whatever.

Fuck primus is cool frizzle fry is gotta be the best album

I think Heckler hit it right on the nose except for the part about when Claypool is explaining all of the things he doesnt believe in. Psychedellic cause you to see through all of the bullshit in this world like advertisement and magazines and shit, and with the amount of acid that claypool has taken he obviously has the new eyes to see through all the bullshit in this world

this song kikcs ass

i heard somewhere that the song was about meth. It might have been in a interview with Les himself. if anyone knows, mention it here.