Jay Blakesberg
Audio By Carbonatix
Ask Les Claypool what makes North Texas special, and you’ll get the most disarming answer in rock ‘n’ roll: a shrug.
“I don’t know that it is different,” he says by phone, sitting in a parked bus outside a Chicago venue he’s played more times than he can count. “Once I get in tour mode, it all becomes one big blur, to be honest with you.” He went further, cheerfully filing himself under unreliable narrator. “You should do this interview with [guitarist Larry LaLonde], because I am literally the worst.”
He hadn’t even gone inside the venue yet. He didn’t remember what it looked like in there.
Most artists would smooth that over with a polite line about how the crowds out here just hit different. Claypool won’t bother. And somehow that honesty is exactly why you trust the guy — he’s not here to flatter your ZIP code. He’s here to do something far more interesting.
One night, three worlds
In a single evening, Claypool drags three wildly different corners of his catalog onto the same stage for the Claypool Gold Tour: the tightly wound mania of Primus, the psychedelic concept-building of the Claypool Lennon Delirium, and the loose, improvisational sprawl of Colonel Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade.
The whole thing started, fittingly, as a problem to solve. Longtime Primus drummer Tim “Herb” Alexander left unexpectedly with a committed New Year’s show on the books.
“It was like, ‘well, shit, what are we going to do?'” Claypool recalls. His manager floated the obvious fix: “Just put a few of your bands together.” So they did. They called it Claypool Gold.
“It was a hoot,” Claypool says. “It was amazingly fun.”
Jay Blakesberg
For Claypool, the appeal is simple. It lets him travel with friends he calls monsters and dip into his entire body of work rather than live inside one project at a time. The alternative bores him stiff.
“Just to go out and try and sell the same pair of shoes over and over, it’s just not what I want to do,” he says. “I think I would get bored easily. And I think that would translate into the audience not necessarily being as excited.”
His performance philosophy is almost suspiciously uncomplicated.
“You want to go out and enjoy yourself,” Claypool says. “And if you’re enjoying yourself, then theoretically that should spill over to the crowd.”
No mysticism. No manifesto. Just the radical idea that joy is contagious.
The element of danger
What separates Claypool Gold from a tidy nostalgia package is that it might all fall apart at any moment, and that’s the point.
Three sets with mountains of material and constant setlist shuffling. A keyboardist learning the Delirium catalog for the first time, a relatively new drummer playing catch-up on tunes the band rarely touches.
“No matter how you slice it, one of us is fucking it up that evening,” Claypool says. “Which I find kind of cool. Some of my favorite bits I’ve ever seen are going to see bands and when they fall off the edge, seeing how they recover from that.”
That tightrope is the show. When someone drops the ball, there’s “a strong team behind it to pick up the ball and keep going.”
The Frog Brigade leans hardest into that looseness. So, how does he know when a jam has found its destination versus when it still wants to wander?
“I don’t think you do,” Claypool says. “It just kind of does its thing, and you feel it and you move with it.”
Of course, freedom has its referees. Curfews exist. Clocks tick. His stage manager points at a watch while the drummers stretch an encore toward a fine. There are always, as he put it, “some hoops of fire to jump through.”
Paperclips and the erosion of empathy
The newest piece of the puzzle is the Delirium’s third album, “The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy.” The band wanted record No. 3 to feel special. They kicked around an animated film and a stage production, all of it expensive. Then Sean Ono Lennon — a self-described Neil deGrasse Tyson-type, always “pontificating about elements of science” — brought up the paperclip conundrum, the thought experiment about AI optimizing toward a goal until it consumes everything human in the process.
“I thought, ‘wow, that’s a really interesting notion,'” Claypool says. But he was quick to clarify the record’s target. “It’s not so much an indictment of AI as much as it is using the notion of AI as a conduit to point out the notion of eroding empathy that we’ve been seeing for quite a while now.”
The robots are just a metaphor. The worry is us.
Claypool thinks in pictures. Back when Primus signed to Interscope, he wanted a video for every single song, only to be handed half the budget and told to make magic anyway. He pulled it off more than once.
His heroes aren’t bassists; they’re filmmakers — Frank Capra, Elia Kazan, Stanley Kubrick, Terry Gilliam. His tastes run gleefully off-center: Rush, the Residents, old Peter Gabriel, Public Image Ltd., Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart. But what unites them is a single reaction.
“Whenever I see something, I go, ‘how the fuck did they think of that?'”
That question, he says, is what gets his juices flowing. The new Delirium project is so thoroughly storyboarded that it doubles as a blueprint for a film he could make if the money ever shows up.
Beauty and barnacles
Then there’s Lennon, who appears in both the Delirium and the Frog Brigade and is, by Claypool’s account, like a brother. In the studio they pull in opposite directions and somehow meet in the middle. Lennon wants layers, glockenspiels, endless polish, whereas Claypool wants to capture the moment and move on.
“If it was him, the album would still not be finished,” Claypool says. Their dynamic gets the perfect summary: “[Lennon] brings the beauty, and I bring the barnacles.”
Meanwhile, Primus is opening a fresh chapter with drummer John Hoffman, a reminder that none of these projects are museum pieces. All three are still mutating in real time.
That’s the real reason for the significance of this show in Irving. Not because Claypool will wax poetic about Texas — he won’t, and he’ll tell you so. It’s because you’ll watch an absurdist ringmaster who’s dead serious about curiosity, momentum and surprise, daring himself to fall off the edge just to show you how he climbs back on.
Claypool Gold will perform on Thursday, June 25, at the Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory in Irving (300 W Las Colinas Blvd.). Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the show kicks off at 8 p.m. Tickets start at $53.
