MÖSH YOUR ENTHUSIASM (8)
By:
January 25, 2024
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of metal records from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Heather Quinlan. Also check out our MÖSH YOUR ENTHUSIASM playlist at Spotify.
PRIMUS | “JERRY WAS A RACE CAR DRIVER” | 1991
An indistinct voice calls out “Fire it up, man,” a souped-up engine turns over, and Les Claypool launches into the bassline of “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver.” A virtuosic display of tapping technique, hammer-ons, slapping, and strumming, that bassline manages to be several contradictory things at once: towering and lithe; clangorous and weirdly delicate; unimpeachably funky, but with an avant-jazz frisson; portentous, yet also relentlessly jokey.
On top of it are layered Larry LaLonde’s earworm guitar, Tim Anderson’s shrewdly athletic drumming, and two intertwined mock-epic stories. One’s about Jerry, a 22 year-old muscle car freak who gets fucked up and wraps his Oldsmobile 442 around a telephone pole. The other’s about Captain Pierce, a fireman forced to retire at 65 even though he’s as strong as any man alive. Picture Pierce responding to the scene of Jerry’s flaming wreck. The two narrative threads share a theme of greatness within constraint, memorializing local heroes who rate a stately funeral mass even if nobody outside El Sobrante (the Contra Costa County town where Claypool grew up) or Richmond (the neighboring city where his stepfather’s father served as a fireman) ever heard of them.
Halfway into the song, Claypool shouts “Go!” and takes a bass solo that’s titanic in feel but concise in execution, like a symphony orchestra tearing through Holst’s “Mars” at bluegrass speed while the mosh pit goes apeshit. LaLonde follows with a skull-flossing guitar solo that’s perhaps anticlimactic if you were expecting the usual wide-stance sturm und drang but a revelation if you’ve long wondered what the hellish piping of the moon-things in H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath might sound like.
Which brings me, at last, to this: “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” is also very, very metal. Funkiness, jazziness, and especially jokiness are not qualities to which metal typically aspires, but consider the doomy decline-and-fall theme, the dire hugeness of scale, the heaviest bass playing on the planet, the crunching merger of aggression and introspection, the literally metallic sound of bandsaw guitar against tread-clanking battletank bass.
Watching the video, you might be distracted by the studied eccentricity of Claypool’s stage presence and getup, a kepi and what appears to be a white union suit, which causes him to resemble a Civil War deserter flushed from his bedroll by a midnight artillery barrage. But don’t let the ironic headfakes make you miss the unironic essence — for metal is, down deep, touchingly earnest. Now everybody has heard of Jerry and Captain Pierce. “El Sob number one!”
MÖSH YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Heather Quinlan | Crockett Doob on Metallica’s ENTER SANDMAN | Dean Haspiel on Mötley Crüe’s HOME SWEET HOME | Jack Silbert on Poison’s TALK DIRTY TO ME | Adam McGovern on Dio’s INVISIBLE | Mariane Cara on Faith No More’s EPIC | Heather Quinlan on Blue Öyster Cult’s SHOOTING SHARK | Steve Schneider on UFO’s DIESEL IN THE DUST | Carlo Rotella on Primus’ JERRY WAS A RACE CAR DRIVER | Erik Davis on St. Vitus’ BORN TOO LATE | Greg Rowland on Motörhead’s ACE OF SPADES (remix) | Kathy Biehl on Twisted Sister’s WE’RE NOT GONNA TAKE IT | Nikhil Singh on G.I.S.M.’s GAS BURNER PANIC | Erin M. Routson on Metallica’s ESCAPE | Holly Interlandi on Helmet’s MILQUETOAST | Marc Weidenbaum on Celtic Frost’s I WON’T DANCE (THE ELDERS’ ORIENT) | Amy Keyishian on Living Colour’s CULT OF PERSONALITY | Josh Glenn on Scorpions’ STILL LOVING YOU | Alycia Chillemi on Danzig’s SOUL ON FIRE | James Parker on Godflesh’s CHRISTBAIT RISING | Miranda Mellis on The Afflicted’s HERE COME THE COPS | Rene Rosa on Type O Negative’s BLACK NO. 1 | Tony Leone on Slayer’s SOUTH OF HEAVEN | Christopher Cannon on Neurosis’s LOST | Brian Berger on Black Sabbath’s HEADLESS CROSS | MÖSH CONTEST-WINNING ENTRY: Tony Pacitti on Metallica’s THE CALL OF KTULU. PLUS: CONTEST RUNNER-UP: James Scott Maloy on Accept’s MIDNIGHT MOVER.
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