Primus has announced a U.S. summer tour that will find the Alt/Prog Rock greats returning to Riverbend’s PNC Pavilion in June.
Tickets for the June 9 concert — which will also feature openers The Sword and Wolfmother — go on sale this Friday, Feb. 21 at 10 a.m. via ticketmaster.com.
Primus has dubbed the 40-date tour “A Tribute to Kings” because they will be paying tribute to their Prog Rock forefathers (and onetime tourmates) Rush on the trek. The band is performing Rush’s 1977 album A Farewell to Kings in its entirety, something singer/bassist Les Claypool says they’ve been scheming up over the past year plus; they originally intended to do the tribute tour in 2019 but were asked to support Slayer on their final tour, so they put the plans on the backburner.
“A little over one year ago, (guitarist) Ler Lalonde and I started kicking the idea around of Primus performing a series of shows featuring an iconic Rush album from our youth,” Claypool says in a press release. “Being that A Farewell to Kings was the first Rush record I ever heard, and that it contains my all-time favorite Rush tune, ‘Cygnus X1,’ the choice narrowed quickly.”
Claypool says that getting to know the Rush musicians in the early ’90s was a career highlight.
“Geddy, Alex and Neil had been superheroes to Larry, Herb (drummer Tim Alexander) and I in our teens, so when we all became pals while touring together in the early ’90s, we were pretty delighted; partially because of the musical geek-out factor but mostly because the three guys whom we had admired so much from afar, turned out to be truly great, down-to-earth humans, and like us, a tad eccentric,” he says.
Last time Primus played PNC Pavilion, in 2018, Mayor John Cranley proclaimed it “Les Claypool Day” and the bass genius visited the former site of Cincinnati music institution King Records in Evanston.
This article appears in Feb 5-18, 2020.