Les Claypool

Les Claypool was born on September 29, 1963, in Richmond, California, into a working-class family of car mechanics, and grew up in nearby El Sobrante. He took up the bass at 14. At De Anza High School he was friends with Kirk Hammett, and after school he worked for several years as a carpenter.

In 1984 he and the guitarist Todd Huth started a band called Primate, with a LinnDrum machine until they found a drummer. They became Primus after a member of a band called the Primates rang up pretending to be a lawyer and threatening to sue, as a joke. By January 1989 Larry LaLonde was on guitar and Tim “Herb” Alexander on drums. A month later Primus recorded its first album live at Berkeley Square, and pressed 1,000 copies of Suck on This with a loan from Claypool’s father.

Primus paid for their first studio album with the money from selling Suck on This, and recorded it in December 1989. Caroline Records got it on condition that it also reissued the live album. LaLonde plays many parts that Todd Huth had written before he left.

Robert Christgau summed it up as “Don Knotts Jr. joins the Minutemen.” Primus spent 1990 touring North America and Europe in support of bands such as the Pixies and Jane’s Addiction, and the major labels came calling.

Primus signed to Interscope in 1991. Claypool said the title came from knowing they were about to be “thrust into this world” of major-label hair bands, “the Poisons, and the Guns N’ Roses”, where they weren’t sure anyone thought they belonged.

“Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” and “Tommy the Cat” went on MTV, and the band turned up playing “Tommy the Cat” in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. The album went gold in 1993 and platinum in 2001.

Primus spent their advance on recording gear and made Pork Soda themselves, in their rehearsal space. After nearly two years on the road it came out darker, with songs about murder, suicide and alienation. Claypool said the title meant the band was “an acquired taste, like a meat-flavored soda would be”.

It debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard 200. Robert Christgau called Primus “quite possibly the strangest top-10 band ever, and good for them.” That year they headlined Lollapalooza.

In a lull between Primus records, Claypool got back together with the 1988 Primus, Todd Huth on guitar and Jay Lane on drums. They called the band Sausage, after the demo tape that line-up had made, and opened for Helmet and the Rollins Band on a short tour.

AllMusic heard a tighter, more accessible groove machine than Primus, and warned that Primus fans would miss the strange time signatures.

Tales from the Punchbowl reached No. 8 on the Billboard 200 and went gold within weeks. Its first single, “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver”, was nominated for a Grammy, and its video put the band in plastic cowboy suits.

It was the last Primus album with Tim Alexander for years. He left in 1996, and Claypool said “Herb’s departure was like a marriage that just slowly decayed to an end.”

Claypool’s first solo record was made at Rancho Relaxo, his home studio, named after a Simpsons reference. Besides bass and vocals he played most of the drums and some of the guitar himself.

Friends filled in the rest: Jay Lane on drums for four songs, Mirv Haggard on guitar and a bowed saw, Charlie Hunter on “Me and Chuck”, and Henry Rollins narrating “Delicate Tendrils”.

With Brain on drums, Primus were asked to write the theme for a new cartoon, South Park, and they have played it since its debut in 1997. Claypool appears in the opening titles. Brown Album followed in 1997, and Antipop in 1999, with guests including James Hetfield, Tom Morello, Stewart Copeland and South Park’s Matt Stone.

In 2000 Primus stopped. “The word that we used at the time was ‘hiatus’,” Claypool said, “but we had broken up.” He had always said he’d keep going until it wasn’t fun, “and it just wasn’t fun anymore on many different levels.”

In April 2000 Claypool was asked to put a band together for New Orleans Jazz Fest. He called Trey Anastasio of Phish, and they agreed on a shared hero, Stewart Copeland of the Police. Oysterhead was meant to be one show, at the Saenger Theatre on May 4, 2000; tickets were scalped for up to $2,000, and Francis Ford Coppola and Matt Groening were in the audience.

Surprised by the response, they made an album the next year, with nine new songs and four from that first night. It reached No. 41 on the Billboard 200.

Claypool put the Frog Brigade together in May 2000 for the Mountain Aire Festival in Angels Camp, California. He meant to call it the Thunder Brigade, but was told that sounded too heavy for the crowd; Angels Camp is home of the Calaveras County Frog Jump, so it became Colonel Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade. He called it his “mid-life crisis band”.

The Brigade played covers of Pink Floyd, King Crimson and the Beatles, and two live albums came first, one of them all of Pink Floyd’s Animals. Purple Onion was their first record of Claypool’s own songs.

At Bonnaroo in 2002, Buckethead, the Parliament-Funkadelic keyboardist Bernie Worrell and Brain were booked to play with Bill Laswell as Praxis. Laswell couldn’t make it, so Claypool invited them to jam, and the band was named after all four of them. Their shows were unrehearsed and unprepared; at one they made sandwiches on stage for the audience.

In 2004 they made their only studio album, half instrumental and half sung, and took it on an 18-state tour. Claypool described the tour as “a traveling, oversized sock-puppet show spawned by the characters of a Tobe Hooper film and scored by Danny Elfman on bad acid.”

In the years apart Claypool made solo records, including Of Whales and Woe (2006) with the theme to Robot Chicken; wrote a novel, South of the Pumphouse; directed a jam-band mockumentary, Electric Apricot; and started a winery. Primus came back to tour in 2003, but Alexander left again in 2010, and Jay Lane, who had quit in 1988 just before Primus made its first record, rejoined.

“He brought this huge ball of energy back into the room from the very second he started playing,” Claypool said, “and that’s the main reason we’re doing it again.” Green Naugahyde was Primus’s first album in twelve years, and the only one with Lane on drums.

Duo de Twang began as a one-off for San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in 2012: Claypool and the guitarist Bryan Kehoe, a friend since high school. Claypool kept it going after a camping trip with his son.

Their record has one new song and fourteen covers, in a style drawn from Django Reinhardt, Johnny Horton, Jerry Reed and the hillbilly music of the ’30s and ’40s. Some are other people’s, such as the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” and Alice in Chains’ “Man in the Box”; others are his own, from “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver” to “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver”.

Claypool met Sean Lennon in 2015, when Lennon’s band, the Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, toured with Primus. With Primus taking a year off, he invited Lennon to his guesthouse to drink wine and try out ideas for an old-school psychedelic, progressive record. In six weeks they wrote and recorded it, sharing the singing and playing almost everything; Lennon played most of the drums.

“Sean is a musical mutant after my own heart,” Claypool said. “It makes for a glorious freak stew.” Lennon called the sound “progadelic”.

Primus’s The Desaturating Seven (2017) is based on The Rainbow Goblins, a children’s book by Ul de Rico that Claypool used to read to his children. From 2021 the band toured A Tribute to Kings, playing Rush’s A Farewell to Kings in full every night, and in 2022 they released Conspiranoid, whose title song, at eleven and a half minutes, is the longest they have recorded.

In October 2024 Tim Alexander left for the third time, saying he had lost his passion for playing. Primus auditioned at least 6,200 drummers and, in February 2025, chose John Hoffman of Dirtfoot. In 2026 came a new Primus EP, A Handful of Nuggs, with a full album planned for 2027, and a third Delirium album, The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy.