My Top 1000 Songs #849: Wynona's Big Brown Beaver

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Never been much of a Primus fan myself. Never owned any of their records. Their brand of 90s alt.rock, infused with prog chops and some metal, was always a bit too abrasive. Oh, sure, some of their singles were fun, when they popped up on the alternative rock station or MTV, and I couldn't help but admire their virtuosity, most obviously frontman Les Claypool's jaw-dropping bass playing. But the silliness of Claypool's semi-spoken narrative didn't enthrall me. So I kinda bucketed them as a modern-day Zappa, musically interesting but just not my thing.

But about a decade back I went through some late-night couch-surfing through 90s music videos on YouTube, a nostalgic flirtation with some of the dimly-remembered tracks from my early adulthood. It rekindled my love of, say, Mercury Rev's "Bronx Cheer" and Sinead O'Connor's "The Emperor's New Clothes." Naturally, the algorithm then started feeding me a steady flow of 90s alt.rock videos, including Primus' "Wynona's Big Brown Beaver," off 1995's Tales From The Punchbowl. And, per the above description, it was both absurdly silly yet musically compelling. Claypool's bass, as always, positively cooks, though all three shine without hitting that point of aggravation. 

But mostly I just loved the video, the trio remade as plastic-encased cowboys, so creepy and insane that you can't take your eyes off of them (the animated spoken-word interludes grew thin more quickly, but the rest of it haunts my nightmares). Probably watched the damn thing 200 times in the years since. Still don't own any Primus albums, have never actually played this song anywhere other than on YouTube... but sometimes that's enough to catapult a track into the ranks of a personal fave.

Live on Letterman, 1995:

Live 2011: