A betting man wouldn't have wagered much on the success of an anomaly like Primus. Their dark lyrics have always conjured up images of sideshow freaks and maladjusted misfits, and their angular songs and jerky jams are the furthest thing from pop. But the mutant stew of Larry LaLonde's arty, metallic guitar and Les Claypool's lurching funk-flavored basslines, coupled with Claypool's oddball, acerbic critique of Americana, appeal to punks and prog-rockers alike. They've opened for the likes of U2 and Rush, headlined Lollapalooza, seen two albums go gold ("Sailing the Seas of Cheese" and "Pork Soda") and now find themselves criss-crossing the country with this summer's hipped-up H.O.R.D.E. Festival.

\\In the two years since Primus' last album, Claypool has kept busy with a solo project billed as Les Claypool and the Holy Mackerel as well as the graphics company Prawn Song Designs, which in a typical burst of Claypool weirdness sprung spontaneously out of his Prawn Song record label. Last year, drummer Tim "Herb" Alexander left the group, but longtime band buddy Bryan "Brain" Mantia (Limbomaniacs) more than ably fills the stool, and the group's "Brown Album" is pure Primus. A few days into the H.O.R.D.E. tour, after jetting back from New York, where he weirded out with the Zappa boys on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien," Claypool took a few moments to talk about fatherhood, analog recording and his obsession with meat.

\\So why did Tim Alexander leave the band?

\\It was one of those things that had been coming for a long time. I always refer to it as a marriage that slowly dissolved ... It just got to the point that he wasn't excited about doing it anymore and it was making us lose our enthusiasm, so we got together and decided to make a change.

\\Is it very different playing with Brain?

\\He's one of these guys who's very energetic and out of his mind. It's like hanging out with Keith Moon or something. He's brought a lot of energy to the band. On a social level, it's great. We probably would have finished this record two months earlier had we not been taking off to go snowboarding together all the time.

\\What inspired you to record "Brown Album" in analog?

\\Brain said we gotta go analog -- forget all the digital stuff. He was really burnt on that whole sound. So I did a tape with an old eight-track machine that we had recorded our first record on, and we did the same thing with our digital equipment and played [the results of both] for everybody. Everybody picked the old beat-up eight-track machine over the digital stuff. So we sold off all our digital equipment and bought a bunch of old analog gear.

\\Where does the inspiration for the weird characters in your songs come from?

\\I grew up in a very blue collar semi-rural suburban environment [Richmond, Calif.] that has now become very suburban with lots of little townhouses where all the little cow fields were. Basically, stuff that's going to become low-income housing in another 10 to 15 years. So, there are a lot of rural-type folk in my stories.

\\Some of these characters sound like they could have been you when you were a kid.

\\"Shake Hands with Beef" was probably the most like me when I was a kid. The verses for the most part are about me as a kid riding around through our little town where I spent my younger days on my Schwinn Stingray with the sparkly banana seat. Cruising around on the weekends, just scrounging around, getting enough money to buy candy bars and stealing plums off neighborhood trees and stealing Tijuana small cigars out of the liquor store and smoking them ...That's my Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn. That was my era, the early to mid-'70s, running around being a kid.

\\With a label called Prawn Song and band called Holy Mackerel, you're obviously obsessed with fish. What's up with your obsession with meat? You have an album called "Pork Soda," a band named Sausage and now a song titled "Shake Hands with Beef."

\\Sausage, I don't even know how the hell that came about. It was just something that seemed humorous at the time. And "Pork Soda" to me was the exact opposite of what everybody wanted. Everybody's looking for the low-calorie fat-free non-meat beverage and here we did the polar opposite, which to me was what Primus was at the time. We're a hard pill to swallow and "Pork Soda" is something I would assume would be an acquired taste.

\\You said you're a hard pill to swallow, but don't people now expect you to be quirky?

\\It's sort of a love/hate thing. People are either really way into us or they're way out of us. It's hard for me to say. Especially the way the mainstream is right now. My manager handed me an alternative radio chart a couple of months back in hopes that we would pick a song that was a little more radio friendly to send out to commercial radio. And I looked at it and it was the most syrupy, poppy, candy-coated crap I had ever seen in my entire life. So even the term alternative doesn't mean alternative anymore. It's basically just another tag word for pop radio or pop programming or whatever.

\\Where do you fit in?

\\A band like Primus survives on our loyal, cultish fan base and on our touring, because we've never really gotten a whole heck of a lot of media coverage. And we're not going to get that much commercial play ,whether it's MTV or radio, just because the environment is not geared toward us. It's not even close.

\\I heard that you recently became a father. Does that make it hard to be out on the road so much?

\\My wife and I had a son last year and we're having another child at the end of this summer. It's difficult being away from him. It definitely tugs the heart strings, but I gotta bring home the bacon, you know. Give a little security to his future.

\\Any plans to teach them how to play instruments?

\\I'm going to teach them how to run the lawnm