Les Claypool has been talking to the Guardian about Primus, his unusual career and the new record he’s made with Sean Lennon, which he’s given the typically head-scratching title The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg Of Empathy.
Primus have been a going concern since 1984, but a couple of years later, after Cliff Burton’s passing, Claypool auditioned for the bass-playing vacancy in Metallica. “I didn’t know how popular they were,” he says and clearly wasn’t up to speed with what the thrash metallers required. “We played a song or two and I said, ‘Hey, you guys want to jam on some Isley Brothers?’ Nobody laughed.”
(Incidentally, according to James Hetfield in the Behind The Music documentary, it wasn’t the Isley Brothers suggestion that lost Claypool the Metallica gig. It was because “he was too good.”)
Article continues belowInstead, Claypool and Primus found fame as the jokers in the '90s alt-rock pack largely through singles like Jerry Was A Race Car Driver, the Grammy-nominated Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver and their surprisingly faithful cover of XTC’s Making Plans For Nigel.
“There was always this element of embracing our childhood to Primus,” Claypool says of that era. “Anytime we were near a Disneyland, me and Ler (LaLonde) had to go. Usually on some mind-altering substances!”
Outside of Primus, Claypool has indulged his more out-there musical tendencies in a succession of wackily-titled side projects. There was a funk rock band called Sausage, a ‘supergroup’ with Trey Anastasio of Phish and Stewart Copeland called Oysterhead, an experimental outfit named Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade, and an improvisational combo with Buckethead and ex-Funkadelic keyboardist Bernie Worrell, entitled Colonel Claypool’s Bucket Of Bernie Brains.
More recently, he’s collaborated with Sean Lennon as The Claypool Lennon Delirium on the new concept album about a robot that turns the world into paperclips (yes). Of working with Claypool, Lennon says that: “I can be funny in life, but it can be hard to be funny intentionally in music.
"Being in a band with Les brings out that side of me. There’s these deep layers of irony to everything he’s doing. He’s one of the best lyricists I’ve ever met.”
And the now 62-year-old Claypool certainly seems content with his picaresque passage through rock n’ roll: “If I was my 16-year-old self looking at me now, I’d be way more impressed by the roster of heroes I’ve gotten to meet, befriend and work with. That’s what it’s all about.”
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