something far more interesting<\/a>.<\/p>\nSign up for the Music newsletter to get the latest stories delivered to your inbox<\/p>\n
THANK YOU!<\/p>\n
You’re all set.<\/p>\n
CLOSE\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
One night, three worlds<\/p>\n
In a single evening, Claypool drags three wildly different corners of his catalog onto the same stage for the Claypool Gold Tour: the tightly wound mania of Primus, the psychedelic concept-building of the Claypool Lennon Delirium, and the loose, improvisational sprawl of Colonel Les Claypool\u2019s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade.<\/p>\n
The whole thing started, fittingly, as a problem to solve. Longtime Primus drummer Tim \u201cHerb\u201d Alexander left unexpectedly with a committed New Year\u2019s show on the books. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt was like, \u2018well, shit, what are we going to do?’\u201d Claypool recalls. His manager floated the obvious fix: \u201cJust put a few of your bands together.\u201d So they did. They called it Claypool Gold. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a hoot,\u201d Claypool says. \u201cIt was amazingly fun.\u201d <\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/2339_102418__Jay_Blakesburg-copy.jpeg\")
The Claypool Lennon Delirium \u2014 Sean Ono Lennon and Les Claypool \u2014 recently released their new album, \u2018The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy,\u2019 on May 1, 2026. <\/p>\n
For Claypool, the appeal is simple. It lets him travel with friends he calls monsters and dip into his entire body of work rather than live inside one project at a time. The alternative bores him stiff. <\/p>\n
\u201cJust to go out and try and sell the same pair of shoes over and over, it\u2019s just not what I want to do,\u201d he says. \u201cI think I would get bored easily. And I think that would translate into the audience not necessarily being as excited.\u201d<\/p>\n
His performance philosophy is almost suspiciously uncomplicated. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou want to go out and enjoy yourself,\u201d Claypool says. \u201cAnd if you\u2019re enjoying yourself, then theoretically that should spill over to the crowd.\u201d <\/p>\n
No mysticism. No manifesto. Just the radical idea that joy is contagious.<\/p>\n
The element of danger<\/p>\n
What separates Claypool Gold from a tidy nostalgia package is that it might all fall apart at any moment, and that\u2019s the point.<\/p>\n
Three sets with mountains of material and constant setlist shuffling. A keyboardist learning the Delirium catalog for the first time, a relatively new drummer playing catch-up on tunes the band rarely touches. <\/p>\n
\u201cNo matter how you slice it, one of us is fucking it up that evening,\u201d Claypool says. \u201cWhich I find kind of cool. Some of my favorite bits I\u2019ve ever seen are going to see bands and when they fall off the edge, seeing how they recover from that.\u201d <\/p>\n
That tightrope is the show. When someone drops the ball, there\u2019s \u201ca strong team behind it to pick up the ball and keep going.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Frog Brigade leans hardest into that looseness. So, how does he know when a jam has found its destination versus when it still wants to wander? <\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think you do,\u201d Claypool says. \u201cIt just kind of does its thing, and you feel it and you move with it.\u201d <\/p>\n
Of course, freedom has its referees. Curfews exist. Clocks tick. His stage manager points at a watch while the drummers stretch an encore toward a fine. There are always, as he put it, \u201csome hoops of fire to jump through.\u201d<\/p>\n
Paperclips and the erosion of empathy<\/p>\n
The newest piece of the puzzle is the Delirium\u2019s third album, \u201cThe Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy.\u201d The band wanted record No. 3 to feel special. They kicked around an animated film and a stage production, all of it expensive. Then Sean Ono Lennon \u2014 a self-described Neil deGrasse Tyson-type, always \u201cpontificating about elements of science\u201d \u2014 brought up the paperclip conundrum, the thought experiment about AI optimizing toward a goal until it consumes everything human in the process.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought, \u2018wow, that\u2019s a really interesting notion,’\u201d Claypool says. But he was quick to clarify the record\u2019s target. \u201cIt\u2019s not so much an indictment of AI as much as it is using the notion of AI as a conduit to point out the notion of eroding empathy that we\u2019ve been seeing for quite a while now.\u201d <\/p>\n
The robots are just a metaphor. The worry is us.<\/p>\n
Claypool thinks in pictures. Back when Primus signed to Interscope, he wanted a video for every single song, only to be handed half the budget and told to make magic anyway. He pulled it off more than once.<\/p>\n
His heroes aren\u2019t bassists; they\u2019re filmmakers \u2014 Frank Capra, Elia Kazan, Stanley Kubrick, Terry Gilliam. His tastes run gleefully off-center: Rush, the Residents, old Peter Gabriel, Public Image Ltd., Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart. But what unites them is a single reaction. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhenever I see something, I go, \u2018how the fuck did they think of that?’\u201d <\/p>\n
That question, he says, is what gets his juices flowing. The new Delirium project is so thoroughly storyboarded that it doubles as a blueprint for a film he could make if the money ever shows up.<\/p>\n
Beauty and barnacles<\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s Lennon, who appears in both the Delirium and the Frog Brigade and is, by Claypool\u2019s account, like a brother. In the studio they pull in opposite directions and somehow meet in the middle. Lennon wants layers, glockenspiels, endless polish, whereas Claypool wants to capture the moment and move on. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf it was him, the album would still not be finished,\u201d Claypool says. Their dynamic gets the perfect summary: \u201c[Lennon] brings the beauty, and I bring the barnacles.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Primus is opening a fresh chapter with drummer John Hoffman, a reminder that none of these projects are museum pieces. All three are still mutating in real time.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the real reason for the significance of this show in Irving. Not because Claypool will wax poetic about Texas \u2014 he won\u2019t, and he\u2019ll tell you so. It\u2019s because you\u2019ll watch an absurdist ringmaster who\u2019s dead serious about curiosity, momentum and surprise, daring himself to fall off the edge just to show you how he climbs back on.<\/p>\n
Claypool Gold will perform on Thursday, June 25, at the Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory in Irving (300 W Las Colinas Blvd.). Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the show kicks off at 8 p.m. Tickets start at $53.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ask Les Claypool what makes North Texas special, and you\u2019ll get the most disarming answer in rock \u2018n\u2019…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":337587,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[1467,102,104,103,64,3503,2174],"class_list":["post-337586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-concert-previews","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-events","tag-rock-music","tag-touring-artists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337586\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/337587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}