Celebrity Metalheads

Actor Colin Hanks Talks About His Love Of PRIMUS, FAR & DEFTONES

"I was a big Primus fan growing up. I was obsessed with them… I was really drawn to them because they were so different."

Greg Kennelty

Published

March 7, 2018

"I was a big Primus fan growing up. I was obsessed with them… I was really drawn to them because they were so different."

Actor and director Colin Hanks, son of Tom Hanks, recently guests on Dean Delray's Let There Be Talk podcast and the conversation turned to music. Hanks, who you might know from Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, Drunk History, and maybe Tenacious D In The Pick of Destiny if you were paying attention, says he grew up on a steady diet of Deftones, Far, and Primus. Hanks ends his statement by saying that while he dug quite a lot of different bands, he really got into Primus pretty heavily.

"I was a big music kid growing up… For me there was a period there that was just really like Sacramento bands that never really went anywhere else… There was a band called Funky Blue Velvet that I really liked, there was another band called Little Guilt Shrine…

But Far was big when I was growing up, Deftones were obviously big. Cake was obviously another big one. So there's really, mostly, just like a bunch of bands that never really made it out of Sacramento.
Far, Deftones and then there was this other band Simon Says—those were sort of the three that made it out of that scene. Cake was kind of special—Cake was kind of like an anomaly…"
"I was a big Primus fan growing up. I was obsessed with them… I was really drawn to them because they were so different. And that was really sort of like the big thing for me growing up…"

Hanks also discusses the time and place he grew up in, that being the eighties and nineties in Sacramento, CA, and how that shaped his musical tastes. Hanks also goes into detail about his love of Primus, and how they were a gateway for him to bands like XTC and The Meters.

"It led me to places, it led me to places like Tower Records and that's where I was able to get into Primus and Mr. Bungle and just like all very different kind of things.

And I was very fortunate in that I sort of came up during the era of grunge in music and got to see this music change. Like when I was younger it was all hair metal bands and all that sort of stuff and I'd watch that shit on MTV—I loved Def Leppard "Hysteria"; listened to that in fourth grade on the school bus and all that sort of stuff.
But then to see music change was like ‘oh, this is my kind of stuff.' And Primus was a big example of like, this is kind of cool for a majority of people—but they're not really all that into it—but I'm going to go all in on this and become obsessed, and learn everything I can about it and learn what their influences are and who inspired them to do what they're doing and pay more attention to the bass player and things like that.
As a result of that I was able to really sort of find my identity and who I was. That sort of component, like, there are components of punk that I really love and really resonate with—questioning authority and things like that. But I was also kind of like, ‘yeah, there's no reason to make a scene if there's no need for it.'
I didn't need to rebel just to rebel. I'm not into that. I would spend much more time trying to find what's unique, what's different and what's really interesting. Like what's the thing that needs to exist, purely to exist. And that was Primus for me. That [led to] discovering The Meters, XTC, all different kinds of stuff."

You can check out the full podcast below.

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