How Les Claypool took Primus, Sean Lennon and Fearless Flying Frogs on tour

Les Claypool, founder of Primus and so many side projects it’s hard to keep track of them all, says he’s always loved those spontaneous moments of creative inspiration.

So when the band’s eighth drummer quit in November 2024, with Primus already booked for its traditional Bay Area New Year’s Eve shows, Claypool needed a last-minute plan.

“My manager said, ‘Well, why don’t you just do a few of your bands?’” Claypool says on a recent phone call from Columbus, Ohio, on his current tour. “We did, and we called it Claypool Gold. And promoters got wind of it and decided they wanted it.

“They booked it around the country, so here we are,” he says of the Claypool Gold Tour that features Primus as headliners, the Claypool Lennon Delirium, with Sean Lennon, and Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade.

The tour, which stops at the new F&M Bank Amphitheater in Long Beach on Friday, July 3, features players from all three bands in different combinations. Claypool is the best person to ask how to sort them all out.

“All three bands change it up every night,” Claypool says of the deep Primus catalog and growing number of releases under the other two bands’ names.

“Frog Brigade is basically just Claypool Band,” he says. “Just that band that evolved into the Fancy Band. It’s basically my solo project,” he continues. “A lot of that stuff is just me sitting around in my studio or bringing in friends and creating. So I bring in a different cast of characters to do that.

“Delirium is me and Sean writing together,” Claypool continues. “Oftentimes, he’ll bring in a few songs, I bring in a few songs, and we manipulate them together. We’re into a lot of old prog and a lot of old psychedelia. That’s what lends itself to that.

“So for me, it’s easy to distinguish.”

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Claypool talked about Claypool Lennon’s new concept album, “The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy,” why he’s more like John Lennon to Sean Lennon’s Paul McCartney, and how an old gold mine he bought in Northern California inspired a new single.

Q: Is it correct that you first met Sean when his band, the Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, was booked to open for Primus?

A: Yeah. Actually, my son and Sean hit it off right away because they’re kind of Poindexter-y science trivia guys. They still, to this day, tend to get together and throw random bits of scientific trivia around. Sean’s just very personable, affable; yeah, he’s just a lovable person.

One day we started jamming acoustic instruments backstage, and I was like, “Well, this is just kind of cool.” Went to the back of the bus, playing some stuff, it was like, “Wow, this is really interesting.” Then he would sit in with Primus on “Southbound Pachyderm,” and he would always do cool stuff.

So I said we should come out to my rancho [Rancho Relaxo is Claypool’s home and studio in Sonoma County] and we’ll see what happens. And we wrote the first record, “Monolith of Phobos,” in like a month or something.

Q: How does it work to combine your musical personalities? Do you each write songs? Write together?

A: I always joke that he brings the beauty, and I bring the barnacle. He writes songs with all these chord changes and lots of vocal harmonies and whatnot. And then I come in with my riffs. My songs tend to be riff-oriented; his are going to be a lot of chord changes.

Q: Let’s talk about the new record, “The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy.” Is it a concept album about AI and the loss of empathy?

A: It’s definitely a concept album. Basically, it was time for our third endeavor, and we really wanted to do something special. We had talked about trying to do an animated feature, trying to do a rock opera, some sort of stage production. And we had all these different ideas for them.

Shiner [in Claypool World, everyone gets a nickname, and this is Lennon’s] is science-Poindexter boy. So we’re talking about this bot experiment, the great AI Paperclip Conundrum. The whole notion that if you set AI on a task and tell it to do it as efficiently as possible that it could theoretically keep going until it uses all the resources in the universe.

And so I thought, “Well, that’s a pretty interesting concept.”

Q: There’s so much conversation about AI today.

A: Well, it’s funny, because people keep going, “Oh, this is an anti-AI record, blah, blah, blah.” It’s really not. It’s more the AI in this story, the paperclip conundrum, is used as a conduit to tell the tale. And the commentary we’re making, more than anything, is the erosion of empathy.

Q: I think there’s a song or two in there where I actually felt empathy for the AI, for the machine.

A: Yeah, at one point where the machine is reflecting how it has no feelings. “A.I think, therefore A.I am” [a lyric from the song “Heart of Chrome]. That was Shiner’s clever little wordplay.

Q: This record took a lot longer than a month or two.

A: I’ve tried to do concept albums before, and I’ve always gone, “You know, [bleep] this.” Because I tend to be spontaneous in the studio and with my writing. I find my best stuff just kind of comes off the cuff. And once you you have a narrative, you’ve got to follow that narrative and it makes it a lot harder.

It took us 3-and-1/2 years to make this record. We always joke that in the studio I’m more like his dad [Beatle John Lennon] and he’s more like Paul [McCartney]. Because I’m always, “Done, move on, OK, that’s good.” And he’s like, “No, we have to add more harmonies, and we need glockenspiel here. Colonel [of course, Claypool’s got a nickname], can we record this?”

So we’re always tugging at each other. He likes to really polish things and produce the hell out of things, and I’m a big capture-the-moment kind of guy. And it works out well because we compromise and pull each other in different directions.

Q: Can you give an example of a Sean song that’s got the polish and another one that’s more your spontaneous style?

A: Well, you can pretty much tell which songs are mine and which ones are Shiner’s. “Troll Bait” is mine. “Cliptopia” is mine, “Golden Egg of Empathy” is mine. Oftentimes, he’ll come in with a chord progression like for “WAP [What a Predicament”] or “Meat Machines” or whatever, and I’ll do my thing and try to be the best version of [legendary bassist] Carole Kaye meets Paul McCartney that I can.”

Then, every now and again, I’ll do something that he’ll go, “Colonel, can we change that because I really want a –” Nope! Because I like the warts and pimples. And every now and then, he’ll talk me into it, and we re-record the song, and it’s always better. He’s often right. He’s a clever fellow.

But, you know, I’ve done a lot of recording with Tom Waits, and it’s all just about capturing the moment. I love that. That’s the way I do things. In all my records, there’s tons of mistakes. You can hear dogs barking in the background, the phone ringing. I love that [bleep].

Q: You’re playing the newest Primus song, “The Ol’ Grizz,” every night. Is it true that has something to do with gold-mining?

A: I bought an old gold mine a couple of years ago up in the mountains, with an old miner’s shack. I like to go up there and poke around. And so one of the first times I went up there, just like the first line in the song, me and my buddy came around the corner and there’s a bear lying in the middle of the road.

It was a black bear, it wasn’t a grizz, but we were joking and called him the Grizz: “Oh, there goes the Grizz.” He was this big ol’ bear, and so it kind of became “The Ol’ Grizz.”

Q: Was it a mellow bear? Not too concerned about you and your friend?

A: He was a little less timid than I would have liked, but we chased him off.

Q: Find any leftover gold up there?

A: No. I’m always poking around, digging holes and whatnot.

Q: So Primus did get a new drummer, John Hoffman, after a contest last year.

A: The Interstellar Drum Derby.

Q: A total stranger from Louisiana. What’s that been like for you and Larry [LaLonde]?

A: I mean, he was kind of the underdog [in the competition]. We weren’t expecting him to get it. There were other hotshots that we auditioned all over the world. And it just was something about him. When I first met him, I was like, “Wow, this guy reminds me of my brother.” Just very soft-spoken, unassuming, very humble.

When he wrote a song with us – I had brought in a song called “Little Lord Fentanyl” – as soon as he started playing it, I was like, “Well, that’s the feel.” And he’s just been great.

We’re playing songs we haven’t played in years, and it’s infectious. Like, even if he [bleeps] something up, I’ll turn around on stage to look at him and he’s just smiling away, having a good time. It just puts me in a good mood.

Q: Your style of bass is so distinctive. Both funky and hard rock. Who were your influences as you were learning the bass as a teenager?

A: When I first started playing, guys like Geddy Lee [of Rush] and Chris Squire [of Yes] were my heroes. But then I got onto Stanley Clarke and Larry Graham, people like that. Tony Levin. When I was in my youth, I just wanted to seek out these monsters and try and do what they could do.

But I’m an old guy now. I just sort of developed from years and years of playing. When I was 19, I was in a bar band with these guys who were all 10 years older, and we were playing Hell’s Angels bars three to five nights a week. I was playing songs I never even heard of before.

I was playing Meters songs, and I don’t know who the Meters were. We were playing Booker T. and the MGs and Tower of Power and Spencer Davis Group. I was getting an amazing education.

Claypool Gold

What: Primus, the Claypool Lennon Delirium, and Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade

When: 8 p.m. Friday, July 3

Where: F&M Bank Amphitheater, 1051 Queens Highway, Long Beach

How much: $22 to $128

For more: See Lesclaypool.com or fmbamp.com