Jilly's On Smack

Album: Green Naugahyde (2011)
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Songfacts®:

  • Les Claypool shared the writing of Green Naugahyde between him, guitarist Larry 'Ler' LaLonde and drummer Jay Lane. The primus frontman insisted that everybody brought in some material, something that never happened in the band previously. This more democratic process gave Claypool different perspectives. He told MusicRadar: "Take Ler's music for Jilly's On Smack: I would never write a song where I played a bunch of whole notes. 'Hey, everybody! Follow me…' [laughs] How's that gonna work? But Ler had this guitar part and arrangement, and I came in and supported it. It's very gratifying for everybody to work like that."
  • The song is about a friend of the band whom they lost to heroin addiction. Claypool told Artist Direct: "We have a friend who's sort of disappeared from us because of the old magic poppy. And I wrote that song almost from the perspective of the family: 'Where's Jilly? She was always this wonderful successful person then all the sudden she's just not going to be here this holiday.' We've had a lot of friends who we've watched go through various times of turbulence over random chemical dependencies, a few of them on heroin. You know my family on one side has really struggled with substance abuse, and if you look at my songs and Primus over the years, there's a lot dealing with that: 'My Name Is Mud' - a couple of tweekers hanging out, one flips out and smashes the other's head in with a baseball bat; 'Jerry Was a Racecar Driver' - Jerry gets drunk, wraps his car around a telephone poll; 'Those Damned Blue-Collar Tweekers' - I saw a lot of that mess when I was in the trade of carpentry."

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