Frizzle Fry

Frizzle Fry
Studio album by Primus
Released	February 7, 1990
Recorded	1989 at Different Fur, San Francisco, California
Length	51:23 (55:31 for reissue)
Label	Caroline (1990), Prawn Song (2002)
Producer	Primus, Matt "Exxon" Winegar
Primus chronology
Suck on This (1989) Frizzle Fry (1990) Sailing the Seas of Cheese (1991)
Singles from Frizzle Fry
"John the Fisherman" Released: 1990 "Too Many Puppies" Released: 1990 "Mr. Knowitall" Released: 1990

Frizzle Fry is the debut studio album recorded by the band Primus.

Released in 1990 on Caroline Records, it features the band's first single and minor radio hit "John the Fisherman". It was remastered in 2002, after the original had been out of print for years, and was released on Prawn Song Records. The remaster includes an extra track, named "Hello Skinny/Constantinople", a cover of the tracks "Hello Skinny" and "Constantinople" by The Residents.

"You Can't Kill Michael Malloy" is an excerpt from the Spent Poets song of the same name. The album's producer, Matt Winegar (who also recorded and produced Suck on This), was a member of the group, and a clip is featured just before "The Toys Go Winding Down". During Primus' 2004 Hallucino-Genetics Tour, where Frizzle Fry was performed as the second set, "You Can't Kill Michael Malloy" was used in its entirety as a short set break, as opposed to merely the excerpt. The beginning of "To Defy the Laws of Tradition" is an excerpt from the song "YYZ" by the band Rush on their "Moving Pictures" album, and was also featured in the live version of "John the Fisherman" which appears on "Suck on This".

"Too Many Puppies" has been adopted by some sports venues as bumper music. The track "John the Fisherman" was used in the video game Guitar Hero II.^[1]

Track listing

All lyrics written by Claypool (Sturgeon BMI), all music composed by Primus with the following exceptions:

• "You Can't Kill Michael Malloy" composed and performed by Matt Winegar.
• "Hello Skinny/Constantinople" written by The Residents.
• Guitar melodies on "To Defy the Laws of Tradition", "Pudding Time", "Groundhog's Day", "Frizzle Fry", "John the Fisherman" and "Harold of the Rocks" composed by Todd Huth.

  No.	Title	Length
  1.	"To Defy the Laws of Tradition"	6:41
  2.	"Groundhog's Day[2]"	4:58
  3.	"Too Many Puppies"	3:57
  4.	"Mr. Knowitall"	3:51
  5.	"Frizzle Fry"	6:05
  6.	"John the Fisherman"	3:37
  7.	"You Can't Kill Michael Malloy"	0:26
  8.	"The Toys Go Winding Down"	4:35
  9.	"Pudding Time"	4:09
  10.	"Sathington Willoughby[2]"	0:24
  11.	"Spegetti Western"	5:43
  12.	"Harold of the Rocks"	6:17
  13.	"To Defy"	0:39
  14.	"Hello Skinny/Constantinople" (The Residents Cover, 2002 reissue only)	4:49

Personnel

Critical reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	[3]
Robert Christgau	[4]

Reviewing the album for Allmusic, Ned Raggett notes that "it's pretty easy to see in retrospect how much of a melange went into the group's work. Nods but thankfully few outright steals to everything from Frank Zappa's arch humor and Funkadelic's sprawl to the Police's early, spare effectiveness crop up and, indeed, so does plenty of Metallica." He contends that "something about Frizzle Fry is ultimately and perfectly of its time and place."^[3] Robert Christgau simply describes the album as "Don Knotts Jr. joins the Minutemen."^[4]

Live performance

The album was performed live in its entirety on their Hallucino-Genetics Tour in 2004 and few more times in 2010.^[5]

Charts

"Frizzle fry" was Re-Released in 1992.

References