Wine, weirdness, and accepting AI: A conversation with The Lennon Claypool Delirium

As well as making mind bendingly weird music and delicious wine, Les Claypool enjoys giving people nicknames. So, in 2015, when the Primus legend joined musical forces with Sean Lennon to form The Claypool Lennon Delirium, it wasn’t long before he’d rechristened his bandmate.

“He’s a clever critter that Shiner Lemon,” Les says now of Sean, the son of Beatle John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who now goes by the more abbreviated ‘Shiner’. The two men share an easy chemistry, born from informal jams, shared musical tastes and bottles of vino.

For his part, Sean calls Les ‘Colonel’, a moniker no doubt retained from one of his multitude of musical projects, Colonel Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade.

For Sean, this project remains something of a trip, completing his journey from Primus devotee (“It’s definitely music I was obsessed with”) to bona fide Les Claypool collaborator. Meanwhile, for Les, who recently oversaw the release of a new Primus EP, A Handful Of Nuggs, there can never be enough musical outlets if the magic is there, which, the moment he began jamming with Sean more than a decade ago, it most certainly was.

“I remember quickly thinking, ‘Whoa, interesting things are happening here!’” Les recalls of their early sessions. More than a decade on, the band are now three albums deep. Their latest, The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy, is a sprawling concept album concerned with purpose, empathy and paperclips. Much like its excellent predecessors, 2016’s Monolith Of Phobos (2016) and South Of Reality (2019) is an intoxicating amalgamation of psychedelia, prog rock and surreal songwriting that will delight fans of Primus and The Beatles alike.

Turns out a conversation between the band’s two architects is a similarly colourful, fun and educational experience…

Les Claypool and Sean Lennon coming together for a record is quite something. How did you first encounter each other?
Sean Lennon: “I was a big Primus fan from the beginning. I actually stumbled into a concert of yours in Italy when I was about 16. I was dating this girl who lived in Padova [northern Italy]. We were walking around this town, which was pretty sleepy, and heard all this noise coming out of this club. In those days, I would just go anywhere there was a loud sound, and it was you guys playing, and there were all these Italian punks with mohawks jumping off the banisters. And the music just blew my mind. And I actually bought a CD of [Primus’ 1990 debut album] Frizzle Fry, with the [cover] image of the head frying in the pan. And then when I got back to New York, your videos started coming out on MTV.”

Les Claypool: “And then, years later, your band Ghost Of A Saber Tooth Tiger with your partner Charlotte [Kemp Muhl] were opening for Primus. And there you were, looking like you’re on the back cover of Let It Be. You became good pals with my son right off the bat, because you’re both super science nerds and would just geek out. Then, one day on tour, I had my acoustic dobro bass and you had your acoustic guitar and we started strumming around backstage. Then we jammed together a few more times in the back of the bus, then said we’d get together in the studio to see what happened.”

Sean: “I remember you saying that instead of jamming, I would write parts. I’m not the most technical guitar player in the world, but I think I have this songwriting style of playing, where I’m always looking to turn something into a song.”

Les: “One thing I don’t think people realise is that you’re one hell of a guitar player! I think the thing that sets a lot of people back is the fear – and you have no fear. You just dive in, and some spectacular things have come out of you because of that.”

Sean: “For the first album [Monolith Of Phobos], we did the whole writing part in six days, which was crazy. Sometimes we were doing two songs in one day. For me, on other projects, the music comes really easily, but then the lyrics take a lot of work. But with you, I’d say you can write lyrics as fast as you jam music ideas, which inspired me to loosen up a bit. As did the wine. It definitely makes things more affordable to have the [Purple] Pachyderm [one of the many varieties of Les’ wine] packed in the bus and backstage.”

Les: “Our wines are spectacular. We make mainly Pinot Noir and they’re literally one of the best, if not the best, you can get in Northern California. I can say that because I don’t personally make it. Our winemaker is this mad genius, and the only reason we got him years ago is because he’s a bass player, otherwise we’d never have got him. He’s become a very good friend. Any of our Pinots would be spectacular while listening to the latest record, The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg Of Empathy, but I’d say go with the Donkey Balls.”

Sean: “A lot of people think we’re sitting around smoking pot and taking mushrooms or something, but we’re actually sitting around drinking Pinot Noir, which is a bit more sophisticated.”

Les: “We also bond over the fact we’re both drummers. When we first got together at my place, Rancho Relaxo, I encouraged you to get on the drum. Whenever I get on the drums, it sounds like a Claypool project because that’s my feel. Whereas when you get on the drums, you have this kind of loping feel that’s just perfect for what we're doing. Oftentimes we’ll share some of those duties, especially on the new record.”

Sean: “He always says he likes my loping style. I basically learned drums from listening to Ringo [Starr], so I do have a bit of a lope. I personally don’t feel like I’m the greatest drummer.”

So there was never any chance that Sean would have been considered when Primus were looking for a new drummer [after the departure of Tim ‘Herb’ Alexander in 2024]?
Sean: “I mean, that was never going to happen!”

Can we ask about a lyric from the song The Golden Egg Of Empathy, specifically: ‘When your daddy’s a rich man / The world is quick to think you a fool’? How mindful were you of those words considering the song features the son of John Lennon, who famously sang the song Baby, You’re A Rich Man, as well as Willow, the daughter of Will Smith?
Sean: “I noticed afterwards that some thought maybe it was me singing, so asked, ‘Are you talking about your dad?’ I’m not [the character] Hippard O Campus Jr and neither is Willow. These are songs that are sung by characters we invented. In the story, Hippard Jr’s father is a mogul, who has this paper clip company, and he’s the richest man in Cliptopia, a whole town made out of paper clips. But the son rejects the family business and wants to be an artist. Les wrote that line and those lyrics, so they just happened to turn out that way.”

Les: “There’s a little element of autobiography to everything I write, and I think most writers are like that. The storyline [of the album] is this kid who’s an artist, and his father’s an industrialist, and his father’s disappointed in him. When I wrote The Wake Up Call, you said, ‘Oh, well, the father’s mean’, but I said, ‘No, his father’s not mean – he’s just a concerned father, because he doesn’t see the value in his son being an artist’. That was how I grew up. I wanted to be a musician, and my whole family was like, ‘Oh my god, he’s going to be a loser and a drug addict on the streets’. My dad was always supportive, but encouraged me to learn a trade, because we're all auto mechanics in my family, and so that character I can identify with.”

Sean: “Willow and I have been friends for a while. I think she’s one of the coolest kids out there and one of the most talented humans I’ve ever met. We’d done a lot of recordings together before this. While we were working on the record, we had a couple of characters with songs we didn’t feel would be right for Les and I to sing on. One of them was [the character of] The Great Parrot-Ox, so we were thinking who could sing it and thought Willow would be perfect.”

Les: “It turned out she was a big Primus fan. She had posted this thing of her playing one of our songs from the Conspiranoid EP, so I sent her a little text saying, ‘Hey Fiery Lass’, which is what I call her, and she got right back to me. We wanted somebody to be the voice of the parrot, the mother of The Egg Of Empathy – and she was spectacular.”

Finally, given the theme of the record, we should ask: what’s your relationship with technology like?
Les: “Look, I’m an old man. I’m 62 years old. I’m pretty good for a 62-year-old man, but when all is said and done, most 12-year-olds can frickin' dance all around me in the technical world. AI is another tool, and you can utilise it in a way that suits you. There are always going to be pros and cons to new tools. It’s when the internet came along: ‘Oh my god, it's going to destroy us’. Or when television came along: ‘It’s going to destroy the film industry’. It’s here, we’ve got to deal with it.”

Sean: “I think I’m just like most people in the modern world. It’s a love-hate relationship, but it’s definitely got you by the throat at the same time. You can’t escape it and it’s sort of destroying you. But also it’s essential for everything you do. You know, every single aspect of my life, and every project I work on involves texting or emailing or Zooming with somebody. And then, because I don’t have a huge major label deal with millions of dollars of machinery behind me, I have to promote my stuff through Instagram and Twitter, and I can reach hundreds of thousands of people via my phone without having to hire these expensive PR companies to do it.”

Les: “And I want to point out, because people keep saying, ‘Oh, this record’s all about AI and the dangers of AI’. Well, it’s not really. Shiner was talking to me one day about AI and this whole paper clip conundrum – a theory that if you give AI a certain task without enough parameters, it’ll do that task to the point where it’ll use up all the resources in the world, if not the galaxy. So I said, ‘Well, that's a great premise for this storyline we're trying to come up with’. But when all is said and done, that’s just the conduit of the story. The story is actually about the vilification of empathy these days.”

The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy is out now via ATO. Primus headline ArcTanGent Festival, August 19 – 22.

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