Les Claypool Tells the Wild Story Behind the South Park Theme Song
Rick Beato always has great guests on his YouTube channel, but his latest interview with Les Claypool is one of his best. The wide-ranging talk includes his musical beginnings, the history of his basses, and the current state of Primus.
One of the fascinating and hilarious stories he tells is the origin of the South Park theme song, which debuted with the show all the way back in 1997. The quirky song helped to set the tone for the offbeat and often vulgar animated show. Creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker would listen to music as they worked on the show’s pilot, but they’d often bicker about what to put on.
“Those guys were big Primus fans from what I understood,” Claypool explains. “As they were making the South Park pilot, they would listen to different music. The only one they could all agree on was Primus.”
They contacted Claypool to see if he would make a song for them with his solo project at the time, but he pushed to have Primus do it. “I said, ‘Well, no, we just got a new drummer in Primus. We’ll do it.’ But we never thought it’d get on television or anything,” he recalls.
So the Bay Area trio wrote some music for the show. As always, network executives had something to say about it, but maybe this time they were right.
“The funny thing is what you hear at the end of the South Park episode is what we actually gave them. It’s much slower… One of the greatest guitar parts [guitarist Larry LaLonde] has ever written,” the bassist states. “They got it and said, ‘Comedy Central thinks it’s too slow. Can you do another version that’s faster?’ We were on tour, so we just said, ‘These guys are not even going to get on television. Just speed it up.’ So they sped it up and it became [the song]. They came to one of my shows, I re-recorded the vocals into a little tape recorder, and they took it back, put it together, and then they took over the world.”
Claypool wrote the song using his Whamola, a percussive bass instrument with just one string. Watch him perform the South Park theme with Stone and Parker during the show’s 25th Anniversary Concert:
Beato’s interview is a gold mine for interesting facts. Give it a full watch:
In his time with No Treble, Kevin has met hundreds of amazing bassists and interviewed icons like Jack Casady, Victor Wooten, Les Claypool, Marcus Miller, and more. He's a gigging bassist performing jazz in Northern Virginia and bluegrass with The Plate Scrapers up and down the East Coast. Kevin appreciates all genres of music, from R&B to metal and everything in between. Connect with Kevin on Facebook and check his performance schedule on his website.
