In the direct aftermath of Nirvana’s success with their 1991 album Nevermind, a myriad of odd, alternative and underground bands managed to sign deals with major labels, regardless of how unsuitable they were to mainstream ears.
Surely none of them were as odd as Primus, though. An experimental, cartoon-like funk rock band, they made enough headway into pop culture that the video for one of their songs (in which they were dressed as plastic cowboys, obviously) saw them get massive MTV airplay. It also earned them a Grammy nomination and lead to the band being confronted by a confused Hollywood A-lister to enquire whether the song was written about her. Thirty years after its release, it’s time to ask the question; how the hell did Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver become a hit?!
Primus had been the second signing to Jimmy Iovine’s Interscope Records imprint in 1991. Their major label debut, Sailing the Seas of Cheese, had been a surprise success, going platinum and seeing the band obtain the patronage of two pairs of highly influential rock figureheads of the time: Bill and Ted and Beavis and Butthead. …Cheese’s 1993 follow up Pork Soda, meanwhile, peaked at number seven on the Billboard chart and went on to sell a million copies in the US.
“Before every new record I swear, ‘This is the one nobody’s ever gonna get,'” guitarist Larry LaLonde told RAM magazine in 1997. “‘No one will possibly understand this one. No one will ever buy this one.’ But I’ve been proven wrong every time.”
For a group of weirdos playing progressive, artsy, bass-slapping alternative rock, their success was unfathomable to almost everyone. But Primus still hadn’t peaked.
When it came to recording their next album, frontman Les Claypool found inspiration for what would become their biggest song during a fishing trip.
“I was fly fishing with a friend of mine up in Lassen County [California], the sun was going down and we were heading back to the car,” he told Songfacts in 2014. “I come around this corner, and I spied this thing, it spied me. It was this big, furry mass coming my way. It flipped and popped its tail and scared the shit out of me, and I scared the shit out of it. It was this giant beaver. I mean, it was huge. So, it kind of got in my head. This big brown beaver. Okay. Well, how can I make a song out of that?”
Thus, Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver, a funky, country-fried ho-down about a random woman named Wynona and her relationship with her furry friend, was born. The song was released as the lead single from Primus’ 1995 Tales from the Punchbowl album, also packing one of the most ingenious videos of the decade: the band playing live, dressed in plastic cowboy suits intended to look like cheap action figures, under the moniker of Buck Naked and the Bare Bottom Boys.
It received significant radio and MTV airplay, peaked at number 23 on the US Mainstream Rock chart and raised Primus’ profile to even greater heights than before.
“That song was never supposed to be what it became,” Claypool told RAM. “It was gonna be this goofy little song on the record with some banjo and some upright bass, and it just kind of evolved into the lead track.”
So successful was it that Primus found themselves nominated for a Grammy in the Best Hard Rock Performance category in 1996, alongside huge artists like Van Halen and Red Hot Chili Peppers, although eventually losing to Pearl Jam’s Spin the Black Circle.
At this point, Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver was a proper pop-culture crossover song, leading to questions about exactly who the song was about. Unsurprisingly, given her success in movies like Beetlejuice, Heathers, Little Women and Edward Scissorhands – and by virtue of being the only famous Winona of the time – actress Winona Ryder was assumed to be the subject of the song. Including by the actress herself.
“I met Winona Ryder,” Claypool said to RAM, explaining that the future Stranger Things star approached him backstage at Washington’s HFStival. “She had heard from a friend of ours that I’d possibly written a song about her. She’s actually really cool. She wasn’t pissed, really; I think she was just more confused. She wanted to know why we might write a song about her and I told her, ‘It has nothing to do with you.’ It was really cool. I got to meet a movie star.”
In many ways, it would never get any bigger for Primus than an actual A-lister wondering if their song was about her.
Claypool later described the song as “the bane of my existence” due to it causing people to think Primus were a joke band. But he appears to have thawed on that these days, with the track regularly appearing on Primus’ setlists. Regardless, Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver remains one of the most brilliantly unusual crossover hits of any era.
