Wynona's Big Brown Beaver

Nice beaver. Thank you. I just had it stuffed. This exchange is from the 1988 movie The Naked Gun, where Leslie Nielsen is admiring Priscilla Presley's taxidermied beaver. Primus used a similar gag seven years later in this story about a woman and the adventures of her pet beaver. In a Songfacts interview with the band's frontman Les Claypool, he explained that the story was inspired by a fishing trip. "I was fly fishing with a friend of mine up in Lassen County (California), and the sun was going down and we were heading back to the car," he said. "He was off in one direction, and I went off in another direction. I come around this corner and I step into the creek. And just as 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 s--t out of me, and I scared the s--t 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, big brown beaver. Okay. Well, how can I make a song out of that? And then it became, 'Wynona's got herself a big brown beaver.' And from there it just built into this little mythological character that obviously had a little double entendre to it."

Primus never had a Hot 100 hit, but this is one of their most popular songs, making #12 on the Alternative chart and #23 on the Mainstream Rock chart. The band had much more modest ambitions for the song when they conceived it, at first considering it one of the filler pieces the band sometimes puts between their proper songs for comic relief. "It just happened that I had this bass part with all these triplets in it and it kind of fit real well with those lyrics," Les Claypool told Songfacts. "So when we did Punchbowl, we put the two together and that became the 'Wynona's Big Brown Beaver' that everybody came to know."

The video was quite a production. Shot at a time when record companies were willing to shell out big bucks for videos (which MTV still played), this one featured the band in foam rubber suits dressed like cartoon cowboys. The film was shot 25% slower than normal (18 frames-per-second instead of 24) to create a sped-up, jerky look to match the cartoon theme when it was played back. This meant that the band had to mime to the song at a slower speed, so the song was played 25% slower so they could match their movements. The band had some trouble convincing MTV to play it - Claypool says he met with a woman at the network who asked him some questions about the song. MTV ended up nightparting it.