‘We made Disneyland because of mind-altering substances’: Primus lead singer Les Claypool on being rock’s greatest joker – and why Metallica rejected him | Pop and rock

WWhen Les Claypool wrote his first song for Primus in 1984, he faced a crisis of self-confidence. “I felt too embarrassed to sing in my apartment,” he said in a video call. “But my roommate at the time was dating the preacher’s daughter, and she had the keys to the church across the street.” In the dead of night, the crazed guitarist and singer took his recording equipment to the empty church, set up on the stage, and sang for the first time his anti-war song “Too Many Puppies,” which recasts soldiers as puppies: “Too many puppies being shot in the dark!”

It was the first strange creation of many: Primus’s rubbery fusion of prog, metal and funk made Claypool one of rock’s unlikely success stories. Albums like 1991’s Sailing the Seas of Cheese are cartoonish lands filled with colorful misfits, drawn largely from Claypool’s blue-collar California upbringing, and given sounds inspired by Mel Blanc’s work for Looney Tunes. Today, Claypool has two platinum records, a legacy of influencing giants like Deftones, and a global fan base including Rush and Tom Waits. But his silliness, coupled with his writing of the South Park theme and popularization of the fan slogan “Primus Sucks,” made it difficult to shake the class clown moniker. “There is an iron hand in this velvet glove,” he promised.

His upcoming album The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy, produced with Sean Ono Lennon as Claypool Lennon Delirium, is another eccentric invention. But behind its story about a robot that turns the world into a paperclip, it asks real questions about humanity in the age of artificial intelligence. Coinciding with a career-spanning tour and Primus’s first UK shows in nearly a decade, it led to a re-evaluation of Claypool, who – ever since that night in church – had always said serious things in not-so-serious ways.

He grew up in a family of mechanics, and when Claypool entered high school, “everyone wanted to be Eddie Van Halen.” Among the classmates was the future guitarist of Metallica Kirk Hammett. But inspired by Rush’s Geddy Lee and funk heroes like Larry Graham, Claypool reached for the four-string: “For me, the bass was a more exciting instrument, whereas the guitar sounded kind of weak.” He cut his teeth playing R&B music in Hells Angels bars, and started Primus (initially Primate), playing a drum machine. His strange style, full of slaps, clicks and chords, came from “holding down the root of the bass but also trying to play the rhythm guitar parts.”

Claypool began creating cartoon characters, using voices including a distinctive nasal tone. “You look like Mr. Magoo,” he proudly recalls Public Enemy’s Chuck D telling him. But his creations often had a dark side. “There was a lot of alcoholism and drug abuse in our family, but we just kind of laughed it off,” he says. This ability to find “humor through pain” gave him the characters Jerry Was a Race Car Driver, My Name Is Mud, and Harold of the Rocks: all funny, troubled outsiders who helped Claypool explore the violence, addiction, and other realities around him. “I know most of these characters.”

Primus began playing clubs, and in 1986 his amazing playing earned him an audition to replace Cliff Burton in Metallica. “I didn’t know how popular they were,” Claypool says, misreading the room. “We played a song or two and I said, ‘Hey, do you guys want to jam out to some Isley Brothers songs?’ No one laughed.” If Claypool suggested his eccentricities spoiled it, Metallica’s James Hetfield offered a different reason in the Behind the Music documentary: “He was very good.”

But Primus soon got his own chance in the big leagues, now in a classic lineup with guitarist Lear Lalonde and drummer Tim Alexander. The success of 1989’s Suck On This and 1990’s Frizzle Fry landed them a major deal with Interscope. “I said, ‘Well, we’re going to sail the seas of cowardice,'” Claypool recalls, meaning, “We’re going to be pushed into the main stream, and we’re going to sink or swim.” An alternative to 1991’s more serious rock albums like Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten, Sailing the Seas of Cheese went platinum, as did 1993’s Pork Soda. From then on, he had a mandate to be as eccentric as he liked.

Claypool Lennon’s new album Delirium The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy – A Technicolor psychological rock opera combined with a comic book – perhaps his strangest work yet. Over the phone, Lennon describes meeting Claypool when his band The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger supported Primus in 2015, and they bonded over “weird stuff” like King Crimson, and decided to collaborate. This third album is inspired by philosopher Nick Bostrom’s writings about the dawn of uncontrollable artificial intelligence. When asked to “do something so innocuous as efficiently make paperclips,” Lennon paraphrases, he might “eventually turn the whole world into paperclips.”

The album turns this into a story populated by Claypool’s bizarre characters, depicting the land of Cliptopia being transformed into confetti by the AI ​​Cliptron – thwarted by an art-loving young man, a sailor, a talking manatee, and a half-parrot, half-bull. Interestingly, she does not demonize technology so much as defend human empathy as its necessary partner. Claypool’s “funny bones,” as Lennon credits her, make her sing, and helped fuel Lennon’s own contributions. “I can be funny in life, but it can be difficult to be intentionally funny in music. Being in a band with Les brings out that side of me,” says Lennon, also noting that “there are deep layers of irony in everything he does. He’s one of the best songwriters I’ve ever met.”

The album showcases the power of empathy through the Golden Egg, shown in the comic book to soften Cliptron’s chrome heart after it hatches – revealing a baby bull parrot. “One of the biggest perspective changes anyone can go through is having a child,” says Claypool, a father of two. Fatherhood has also fueled his imagination, as he based Primus’s latest album The Desaturating Seven on a bedtime story he and his wife read to their children. However, “there was always an element of embracing our childhood to Primus,” including their side adventures on tour, he says. “Anytime we were near Disneyland, Lear and I had to go.” He leans forward, adopting Magu’s voice. “Usually on some mind-altering substance!”

This eccentric streak often meant he was sold short. He traces Primus’ “joke band” label back to 1995’s “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver” — a silly song that shot to the spotlight after it was picked up as a single by Interscope, earned a Grammy nomination, and garnered incorrect speculation that it was about Winona Ryder. “It was kind of a problem.” Today, the preconceived notion that Claypool is a goofy comedian bothers Claypool less: he likens his more socially conscious music to Dr. Strangelove, which “can tell a story and make a statement, but is funny and entertaining.”

While Primus’ UK shows will be his first in nine years, Claypool is fond of Britain. He visited Tower Records in London in the 1990s to buy tapes of British comedies including Blackadder and “Anything with Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson,” sampling The Young Ones On Los Bastardos for Primus. He also bought cannibals! The musical is here, created by the future creators of South Park. Hence, he knew their work, and accepted when asked to write the topic for the show.

He was thinking about his past as he prepared for his Claypool Gold US tour, which includes a stacked set of his works: Claypool Lennon’s Delirium, Primus and Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade. But for all the fictional characters in his career, he looks back fondly on the real people who filled it, from Lennon to stars-turned-fans like Tom Waits and Geddy Lee. Above all, “If I were looking at me now as a 16-year-old, I would be more impressed by the roster of heroes I’ve had the opportunity to meet, befriend and work with. That’s what it’s all about.”