Primus | Why Claypool picked John Hoffman

More than 6,100 drummers applied for one job. Thomas Pridgen applied. Nikki Glaspie applied.

The gig went to a man from Shreveport who plays around 250 shows a year and whom almost nobody outside Louisiana had heard of.

Les Claypool has now explained why, and the answer is worth a read if you have ever sat in an audition room wondering what they are actually looking at.

First, the recap

Tim “Herb” Alexander left Primus in October 2024 — his third departure in thirty years, this time citing health and wanting to be closer to family.

Rather than quietly ring round, Primus threw the job open to anyone, inviting submissions “from all points in the universe”. They called it the Interstellar Drum Derby and filmed the whole thing as a YouTube series.

Over 6,100 people sent something in — some reports put it nearer 6,200. That was cut to a shortlist, flown in for a five-day play-off, with Maynard James Keenan among those watching.

John “Hoffer” Hoffman won it. He was announced in February 2025, found out via a cake, and is Primus’s ninth drummer overall and only the fourth to record with them.

His first show was Tool’s Live in the Sand in Punta Cana that March, where Danny Carey sat in for the first four songs, let Hoffman take three on his own, then came back for “My Name Is Mud”. As debuts go, that is an unusual amount of company.

By May he had recorded “Little Lord Fentanyl” with Keenan guesting — the band’s first new music in three years.

What Claypool has just said

Speaking to Neil Jones of TotalRock this month, Claypool put the decision plainly: chemistry was the main thing they were looking for.

On why audiences watching the series ended up rooting for Hoffman, he was blunter still. “Because he was so genuine,” Claypool said. “He was nervous as hell, and you could tell he was nervous as hell!”

He added that Hoffman had “been working at his skill for a long time and he’s just a genuine dude, and people could relate to that”, and described him as “just an incredibly nice, positive human being”.

He had apparently made his mind up early, reportedly saying after day one of the in-person derby that unless Hoffer really choked the next day, he had the gig.

The bit aspiring pros should sit with

Read that list of finalists again. Pridgen. Glaspie. Players whose technical ceiling is somewhere in the clouds.

And the deciding factors, in the bandleader’s own words: genuine, hard-working, nice, and visibly terrified.

That last one should reassure you. Hoffman did not win by hiding his nerves. He won partly because he could not hide them, and because what sat underneath them was twenty years of unglamorous graft.

There is a hard-headed version of this too. Primus tour for months at a time in a confined space, and the technical bar was cleared by dozens of applicants — so it stopped being a useful way of telling them apart. Once everyone can play the parts, the question becomes who you want in the van. That is, quietly, how most gigs are decided.

The other thing worth noting: Hoffman was not discovered. He was doing 250 gigs a year, in every style going, on a deliberately small kit he was loading himself. One of his earlier bands even opened for Primus back in 2011. He had already built the thing that got him through the door.

Since joining, his setup has gone the other way — he has described it growing week by week into a beast, because Primus songs demand it. The gig changes the kit, not the other way round.

Final thoughts

The number is the hook, but it is not really the story. Six thousand people is just what happens when a famous band posts a form.

The story is a bandleader saying out loud that once the chops are a given, he hired for character — and then a year of touring and a record proving him right.

If you are chasing this kind of work, our guide to getting a drum endorsement tells the same unglamorous truth from the gear side: relationships and reliability do most of the work. And Drummergeddon has the scorecard on who else has changed seats lately.