Renowned rock bassist Les Claypool is a busy man these days, even by music legend standards.
Not only does he run a wildly successful wine brand [Purple Pachyderm Pinot Noir by Claypool Cellars] and own his own bass guitar company for which he is also chief designer [Pachyderm Instruments], but he is currently taking pre-orders for his debut graphic novel/illustrated fable [Frizzle Fry: The Phantoms of Barrington Hall] that officially drops in October.
As if that were not enough, Claypool is also on the road celebrating several newly released recordings from three of his most active bands: The Claypool Lennon Delirium, Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade and the sensation Primus, all of which will be along for the ride when Claypool rolls into town for a special June 17 performance featuring three sets of music at Firefly Distillery.
Although Claypool is considered something of a rock god in some circles because of his prowess on the bass, he admits that he was initially led to his primary instrument in a roundabout way.
“I met this guy in high school who had a band who was kind of a ‘hot shot guitar player’ and they needed a bass player, because nobody wanted to play bass back then. So I bought a bass and was in his band,” he recalled in a recent interview with the Charleston City Paper.
“Like most guys where I grew up, we were listening to people like Rush, Led Zeppelin and whatnot. So, Geddy Lee , and John Paul Jones were my early influences on bass. Then Stanley Clarke [Return to Forever], Larry Graham [Sly and the Family Stone], and some people like that,” Claypool said.
Interestingly, Claypool was once rejected upon auditioning for another high school pal’s band, Metallica, in the days following the 1986 death of original bassist Cliff Burton. Still, he always trusted that he was on the right path. And, looking back now, Claypool actually cites Metallica, especially his longtime friend Kirk Hammett, as having had a big influence on the way his own breakout band, Primus, developed over the years.
While his role in Primus certainly put Claypool on the map, and brought him a fair amount of fame and comfort, he has never been content to rest on his laurels or stay focused on one musical project at a time. He continues to challenge himself and push boundaries with a disparate assortment of well-known collaborators such as Billy Strings, Stewart Copeland, Trey Anastasio, and most recently Sean Ono Lennon — with whom Claypool’s latest full-length studio album, The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy, was crafted under the Claypool Lennon Delirium moniker.
In fact, Claypool told the newspaper that the new album truly is a sign of the times “confronting issues like Artificial Intelligence, empathy, free will, mortality, environmental collapse and the dangers of optimization without human feeling,” as highlighted through the Claypool Lennon Delerium’s patented style of psychedelic conceptual storytelling.
According to Claypool, “One day ‘Shiner’ [Claypool’s nickname for Sean Ono Lennon] started talking about this ‘paper clip conundrum,’ which is an actual theory…it’s a ‘mind study,’ and I said, ‘That will be a great concept for this thing.’ So, we started going down the path of this paper clip theory, which is the notion that if you give AI a task and tell it to do this task most efficiently, it will do that task to the ‘nth degree,’ to the point where it will absorb all resources on the planet and eventually the universe. So, that was sort of the conduit for the story, whereas actually, the moral of the story has to do with the erosion of empathy we’re seeing on the planet.”
Two other new releases fueling Claypool’s summer tour involve an EP from Primus and a live album from Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade. Never one to fret about chart success or popular opinion, Claypool said he is just happy to be doing what he loves best, with the colleagues he loves most.
“It’s a pretty spectacular evening,” he said of the live show. “There’s a lot of cross-pollination across the three sets. And the greatest thing about it is that I’ve worked with all of these guys for quite a long time, and they’re all monster musicians, but beyond that, they’re all incredibly fun, talented, witty, intelligent people. It’s really been a hoot so far.”
IF YOU WANT TO GO: 7 p.m. June 17, Firefly Distillery, North Charleston. Tickets range from $78 to $243. More: FireflyDistillery.com.
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