In late October of 2024, Primus and their fans were shocked when longtime drummer Tim “Herb” Alexander abruptly announced that he was leaving the trio. Primus—which also features ubiquitous bassist/singer Les Claypool and guitarist Larry “Ler” LaLonde—had been here before. This was the third time Alexander quit the band. He was the drummer on their early records—their 1989 debut EP Suck On This, 1990’s Frizzle Fry, 1991’s Sailing The Seas Of Cheese, 1993’s Pork Soda, and 1995’s Tales From The Punchbowl. He left in 1996 and was replaced by Bryan “Brain” Mantia, who had played in an early incarnation of Primus. Alexander rejoined in 2003, leaving again in 2010. Jay Lane, another early Primus member, took his place. Lane left, and Alexander rejoined in 2013, staying for eleven years.
This time, the band went outside their circle to replace Alexander. As Claypool recalls, laughing, “Well, [Alexander quitting] kind of came from out of the blue, so we weren’t prepared for any of this!” Still sounding a bit surprised, he says, “The first thing I did was call [Tool drummer] Danny Carey, because he’s a good friend and he can play those drums! He recommended a few people, but then Ler and I thought, ‘We don’t have anybody in the wings like we had before, let’s see who’s out there,’ and we started going down the wormhole of YouTube. That led to the ‘Interstellar Drum Derby.’”
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The multi-part “Interstellar Drum Derby” clocks in at over three hours and features cameos from Fred Armisen, Danny Carey, and Maynard James Keenan, and Stewart Copeland of the Police.
Spoiler alert: the winner was a relative unknown named John Hoffman from Shreveport, Louisiana. Actually, it’s not much of a spoiler: he’s on the cover of Modern Drummer magazine, having made his very high-profile debut with the band at Tool’s Live in the Sand festival, which took place in the Dominican Republic on March 8. Hoffman is currently on his first tour with the band, as part of the Sessanta 2.0 trek, which sees Primus and two of Maynard James Keenan’s bands (A Perfect Circle and Puscifer) sharing the stage and switching off songs all night long.
In Tim Alexander’s statement explaining why he quit, he mentioned that he’d lost his passion for playing and that touring had left him “feeling empty.” He said that he told the band, “They deserve someone who wants to be there.” John Hoffman is someone who very much wants to be there.
“This is something my friends and I talked about when we were kids: ‘What if I could be the drummer of Primus?’” Hoffman says excitedly from a stop on the tour. “It never seemed like an actual possibility! I remember going to Tower Records to buy [1999’s] Antipop the day it came out. A lot of that stuff doesn’t get played as much,” he notes, referring to that album and 1997’s The Brown Album. “I’m hoping to get them to bring back some of that stuff to the live shows.”
His choice to play a rather deep cut from The Brown Album, “Duchess and the Proverbial Mind Spread,” impressed Claypool and LaLonde during his audition. And that song made the setlist at the Live In The Sand Festival. The band shared the performance of that song on YouTube.
The video is titled “Hoffer’s First Gig.” It’s sort of an unofficial rite of passage in Les Claypool’s world that everyone around him has nicknames: “Ler,” “Herb,” former Primus drummer Jay Lane is “Jayski,” and his frequent collaborator Sean Ono Lennon is “Shiner.”
“All my friends tend to have nicknames,” he explains. “When I get comfortable with somebody, they end up with a nickname. I feel odd calling someone by their proper name if I really know them well.”
Hoffman wasn’t the obvious choice for the gig, according to Claypool speaking by phone from the tour. “We had over 6,100 submissions. Our friend Tim Soya, who has known us forever, watched every single video. Ler watched almost every single video. They went through and picked the best of them, and I watched those. We had four folders: the one-star folder meant you were really good, two stars meant you were exceptional, three stars meant ‘Oh my god, this person’s amazing,’ and four stars meant that this person had to get an audition. I think Hoffer was in the two-star folder.”
He continues. “But then I posted, ‘Hey, we’re getting a lot of people playing Primus songs, it’s hard to see what personality folks have. Please resubmit with some of your own stuff.’ (this is the post where he made the announcement: https://www.instagram.com/p/DDaRkGlTgVZ/ ) Hoffer resubmitted, and it killed us, so he got an audition.” That video not only featured Hoffman playing along with Primus songs, but also famous TV themes, including Seinfeld, Barney Miller, and The Jetsons. “It was very clever,” Claypool says.
“We didn’t think that he’d make it to the finals because the day he played, Ler was dealing with all of this fire shit, because his house had just burned down [in the Los Angeles fires]. He just wasn’t in a great mood. He didn’t feel that audition like I did. Even up to the end, we thought that Gergo [Borlai, another auditioning drummer] was going to get it.”
Claypool, who is also a drummer, had some issues with Hoffman’s playing at the first audition. As Hoffman recalls, “Les said, ‘You had a good audition and we were all very impressed, but you need to go home and work on your double bass [drumming] and get that tight.’ I said, ‘Yes, sir, I’m on it!’ So the next time I got with Les, and we jammed, he said, ‘Man, you’ve been working on your double bass.’ I said, ‘Yep, I sure have: I came to win!’”
“He did his homework!” Claypool agrees. “And part of the final audition was that we spent the day in the recording studio working on this brand new song that I had written, ‘Little Lord Fentanyl.’ We just released it [on May 2]: that’s directly from the audition.” Maynard James Keenan is featured on the song, and they’re performing it together at the Sessanta shows. (Claypool notes that the Primus/Tool bond dates back to 1993 when both bands were on the Lollapalooza tour. Tool was a new band at the time, or as Claypool puts it, “They were the low scrotum on the totem!”)
“Little Lord Fentanyl” is a pretty heavy song, musically and lyrically. Claypool notes, “I really pushed the notion that this person is a victim of the abuse of pharmaceuticals, not street drugs. But that’s been happening with a lot of people, and I’ve had friends who had this happen. Not just with fentanyl, but opiates. They have an injury, they have a surgery, and the next thing you know, they’re addicted to this shit and it takes them forever to get off of it.”
Hoffman’s ascent is a much happier topic to discuss than the drug epidemic. As the rookie says, “I went from sending in an audition video to becoming the drummer for one of the greatest bands of all time.” Claypool enjoys watching Hoffman experience rock stardom, and says it’s given the band a new blast of energy.
“He’s meeting famous people, he’s on the tour bus, he’s staying in these nice hotel rooms, we’re drinking fancy wine, he has a real drum tech… It’s very endearing, and it’s rejuvenating for us as a band. We’re jaded old bastards; all of the sudden, there’s this fresh perspective! And it’s really a wonderful thing. It’s been a shot in the arm for this band, for sure.”
“I draw the parallel to the first time I took my kids to Disneyland,” Claypool explains. “I went to Disneyland one time when I was like 8 or 9 years old, and it was the greatest experience of my life. When I was older, Ler and I would go all the time. Sometimes in various altered states! But when I got to take my kids for the first time, it was like reliving that excitement through their eyes. It was a wonderful thing. That’s the way it is with Hoffer.”
The band’s new dynamic changed Claypool’s summer plans: he notes that Alexander had initially committed to the Sessanta tour, which stretches through early June. “I was going to do a Frog Brigade [his solo band] summer tour or a Claypool Lennon Delirium [his band with Sean Lennon] tour. We’ve got a Delirium album that we’ve been working on for three years that we’re trying to finish up. Then all of this happened, and now the focus is back in Primus-land. Especially now that we have this guy who is all fired up. Plus, I couldn’t leave Ler high and dry like that, either. It’s just a different dynamic now than it was eight months ago.” A month after Sessanta ends, Primus is headlining their own tour.
A new Primus album is “probably very likely,” he says. “There’s an enthusiasm now that’s infectious, and when you have that, you have to take advantage of it. But I also have the Delirium album: it’s a big concept record, and it’s a pretty ‘out-there’ concept. I’m kind of hoping to do a new Primus record in the next year and get the Delirium record out and maybe do a tour next summer with both bands.”
The Sessanta Tour, with A Perfect Circle and Puscifer, ends June 7. Primus kicks off their headlining tour on July 5; that tour ends August 8.
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